Matlock CC - Club Profile
It's been a great year for British Cycling's membership department, with all-time record membership figures being recorded by late summer. Much of the rise in membership has been directly attributable to the work of the organisation's clubs, who embraced a ground-breaking membership offer with real enthusiasm. The offer meant that any new members they brought to British Cycling (i.e. people who had never previously been members of the organisation) qualified for an introductory free bronze membership, with under-sixteens receiving silver membership, including legal advice and third party insurance cover.
We thought we would pay tribute to the work of our clubs by focusing on the success of just one, Matlock CC, which during the year doubled its British Cycling membership to over eighty, many of them children. We called up club stalwart Harry Gould and he agreed to meet us at a round of the Notts and Derby League Cyclo-Cross.
Although Matlock CC currently has 381 members, as recently as 1997 membership was closer to one hundred. Harry traces the club's growth back to the late nineties, when a successful Awards for All grant application enabled them to purchase a laptop and printer: we set about improving communications with members by introducing a bi-weekly printed newsletter, which we still produce.
Activities for Everyone
During the last seven or eight years, the club has run the full range of British Cycling youth and club development programmes and they have consistently embraced new opportunities to bring the sport the young people.
The club clearly have a keen awareness of what works for younger members. Their decision to look for new club sponsors in the late nineties wasn't motivated purely by a need for funding and additional membership benefits. As Harry put it, it also enabled us to produce flashier club clothing, complete with sponsors' logos, which the younger members really appreciated.
So what else does the club do to market itself so successfully to young people? Well, it does some of the simple things very well. Every other Saturday, they run a skills and fun session at a local park, where even the youngest cyclists are guaranteed a warm welcome.
The club also builds much of its winter programme around the excellent Notts and Derby League Cyclo-Cross. Phil Smith, the club's Press and Social Secretary took a few minutes off from guiding his four-year-old daughter through her race to speak to us. Cyclo-Cross got me back in to racing, he said. It's such a family friendly sport. The younger family members can race in the under 10 and under 12 races, then there are youth classes, mixed with a Go-Race event for adult novices and then the seniors and juniors race.
In its search for new members, the club also visits local primary schools and after-school clubs, where cycling activities are very popular. Working closely with the local authority, Matlock CC also provides three weeks of summer holiday activities for school-children. All of this contributes to cycling having a high profile in the local community and an enviable status with the local authority.
Media Awareness
Of course, an excellent way to promote a club to potential members is through the local media. Phil Smith outlined the club's impressive relationship with the local newspaper. There's up to a page of cycling every week in the local Matlock paper. We write the content ourselves: club members email me with reports of their racing activities. I compile them and email them on to the paper.
Volunteers: A Critical Mass
With nearly four hundred members to draw upon, it's not surprising to hear Phil Smith identify the club's volunteers as a real asset. However, he made a really telling point when he said I think we've got above the critical mass of volunteers which makes things easier for everyone. We have a very good team of people and they are doing a lot of work. But the burden on any one of them is not too great. The temptation for us is always to do more whereas, I think, in some smaller clubs, the workload falls on a small number of people and it quickly becomes a chore for them."
Child Protection
One thing we were keen to hear about was the club's practical experiences of Child Protection. The club already has British Cycling Go-Ride status and is working hard towards gaining Sport England's Clubmark accreditation, something which only ten cycling clubs have so far achieved. The club's volunteers include three club coaches and a welfare officer, all of whom have received compulsory CRB checks and child protection training through British Cycling's Go-Ride scheme.
We spoke to one of the club's coaches Dawn Watson and her husband Richard Thoday, on the subject. Dawn was supportive of the policy: As a parent I fully understand why we are CRB checked. Richard added It's good to have the training and be aware of the issues. We believe that everyone on the committee should have training and be CRB checked. It protects us as well as the children."
Bronze, Silver & Gold
Of course, one of the reasons we visited Matlock CC, was to hear about the success they have enjoyed with the promotional bronze membership scheme, which British Cycling launched through its clubs, back in the spring of 2005. Although new adult members were restricted to bronze memberships, under-sixteens qualified for free silver memberships. The club found they were able to market their batch of memberships very effectively to the parents of children they came into contact with during their local authority summer holiday activities.
It's Your Club - You Decide!
Perhaps the most telling comment we heard during my meeting with the club came from Richard Thoday. He believes that one of the reasons for the club's success is that it doesn't focus on providing things it believes its members want to do. Instead it focuses on helping members to enjoy what they want to do. It's a subtle, but perhaps significant point, which Harry Gould echoed: he told us that a recent arrival in the area had phoned to enquire about the club's activities and asked if they did a long Sunday road ride of perhaps a hundred miles. The club's answer was that no, they didn't, but that if that's what she wanted, then she should join the club and they would support her in organising it and finding other riders to go with her.
On a similar note, a recent addition to the club's activities, in response to demand, is a women's only ride. Dawn Watson spelled out the rules of the ride, which have made it very popular: there's a compulsory stop for coffee and cakes; there's a rule that what's said on the ride stays on the ride; and we also climb hills at a pace where conversation is possible."
Top Marks to Matlock
So there you have it Matlock CC is a club which does all the simple things extremely well: it misses no opportunities to promote itself; it communicates clearly and regularly; it uses a range of strategies to recruit new blood; it provides what its members want; and it values and invests in its volunteers.
With an under-18 representative on the club committee and over sixty-fives still enjoying their racing, it has managed to achieve the delicate balancing act of providing fulfilment and enjoyment for all its members. Lucky are the cyclists of Matlock!
