National Development Officer, Dave Gunn, Points the Way
Seven north west croquet clubs were represented (sometimes by more than one member) at a Club Development Workshop on 12 January 2019, led by the CA National Development Officer, Dave Gunn. The event was hosted by Bury Croquet Club at their Whitehead Park clubhouse.
The main object of the workshop was the use of a new on-line tool prepared by Sport England which can be downloaded here:
https://www.sportenglandclubmatters.com/club-improvement-tool/
The idea of the tool is that it asks questions about many existing aspects of your club, together with your aspirations. At the end the tool summarises your answers, provides a plan of action and produces further links to other tools and media for you to consider using.
It was extremely worthwhile and thought provoking. Many clubs seemed to get ideas from it.
One criticism is the tool is designed for any Sports club and available nationally, so is trying to be one size and fit all. It becomes quite obvious some questions are irrelevant to your particular club but these can be skipped with a N/A button. Even having seven Croquet clubs in the same room highlighted this problem. Each club having their different number of members, strength, resources, etc.
There were early, and sometime heated, debates between the attendees. Time ran a bit short, this probably would not happen in the usual one club workshop format.
Bury provided a wonderful lunch, and there was much to talk about during that time.
Thanks must be given to Dave for presenting it, Bury CC for hosting it and the Federation for the idea of holding it.
Further Information:
1 You can download the Presentation slides from the workshop here:- Croquet Matters Workshop Presentation
2 The link to his section on the CA website is https://www.croquet.org.uk/?p=clubs/croquetmatters. If you then click through to Marketing section, there are details re the club website template offering (including example clubs and also the online helpdesk where you can register interest or ask questions) and also a link to download the ‘How to get your club on to Facebook’ guide.
3 You can download the Blank Club Improvement Plan Questions here.
4 You can download The Guide to ‘Croquet Matters’ here – this is for use by FDOs and other Fed Committee Members when supporting clubs…but can also be very useful for clubs themselves following them having experienced their own dedicated workshop or, possibly, having seen the ‘general taster’ at the workshop & then decide to plough on themselves.
5 The link for the lead contact at each club to register as an individual on the Club Matters website is https://learn.sportenglandclubmatters.com/login/index.php. They can then add their club as ‘a new club’.
6 Any other club committee members and even general members can register using the same link and then search for their club on the system and ‘join it’ This will then allow all registered club members to see the various club development plans etc produced over time….