Promoting Sailing Clubs

Sorry, forgot to add my main point. The last couple of years I have taken a couple of Optibats to the village fete. The kids just muck around with them on dry land, but it raises awareness of the club and gets a lot of interest from parents.

Originally posted by turnturtle With a soft play centre in the shape of a pirate ship and quinoa salad?

Precisely!   

I don't accept this, the RYA have run courses regionally and at the Dinghy Show spelling out where to go and what to do to get Inspired Facility and Small (£10k) grants.  There is also a network of RYA reps who will visit your club and talk you through the process, in our case they looked over the application forms after we had filled them out and advised on how to present our case better.  I don't know what grants may still be available, but two or three years ago when we went down this route we were not part of an inner circle, we just asked.

Originally posted by Time Lord Contrary to Peaky's experience, locally we find that we regularly gain members from a large club some 12-15 miles away as people find them very unfriendly, impersonal and rule happy. We run two Open days each year (one on May bank holiday and the other late August/early September) and usually acquire 6-8 new members from each. As well as noticeboard posters in libraries and villages, roadside signs bring in most of the visitors.

It might not go down too well here but sometimes we might just be a little too conscious/concerned about elitism and inclusivity when the bigger issue is accessibility.  Those little clubs are often both geographically accessible and also 'approachably' so.  Certainly as a youngster starting Open sailing in a Grad in the late 80s the welcome in those little clubs was very accessible to me.