RYA Cymru Wales blog – club planning for success

Now that the clocks have turned back it’s the perfect time for reviewing the season while planning ahead at your club for success in 2025 and beyond.

The colder and shorter days of winter when it’s less busy on the water are an opportunity to stop and take notice of successes while framing our goals for the future.

Evaluating the health of your club and reviewing its ambitions will enable you to assess what actions are needed for the short, medium and long term vitality of your club.

You might want to work through a grant application for a project, or survey what your members want along with the time and skills they are able to bring to volunteering. Or identify what maintenance is needed with an inspection of your equipment, boat park or clubhouse. Work parties are a practical, productive and sociable way to keep in touch with members over winter!

We’re all under an awful lot of pressure these days and supporting your members to give whatever time they are able to spare – whether that’s a couple of hours or a day – may encourage them to fit in volunteering around busy home and work lives.

Development plan

It’s important to stay on top of our game if we want to be a serious contender in the competitive field of gaining and retaining participation.

Please do make time over this quieter period to create a Club Development Plan or review your existing one. There are lots of resources!

Explore the RYA Club & Centre Support hub for topics ranging from promoting volunteering to sustainability ideas for creating for a green and efficient venue. Within this section you can also access Club Zone, including useful information for Club Development.

I would also recommend visiting the excellent Sport Wales – Club Development Planning hub.

As Sport Wales sums up: “A development plan can help focus activity. It’s easy in the busy day-to-day running of a club to lose track of the bigger picture. It can help communicate your future plans to the wider membership and gain their support. They are often required as part of larger grant applications too.”

Finding funding

Winter is the perfect time to think about applying for grants to support your activities or improve facilities, even if only for small projects like an accessible ramp. Sometimes it’s the little improvements that can have the biggest impact in making our sport welcoming and accessible for all.

The Sport Wales Be Active Wales Fund reopened at the start of November and there is also a crowdfunding initiative - A Place for Sport - for projects that the community can get behind.

Take a look and see how your club might benefit!

Join me for a chat

I’ll be running an online lunchtime get together to cover all things club development, planning and funding at 1pm on Thursday 12 December 2024.

Please do join me in conversation on Teams, I’m looking forward to hearing about your experiences and finding out how we can best help you.

Stay connected

To keep up with all the latest updates and each other, join our 'Together on our Waters' WhatsApp community if you haven’t already, as this includes:

• Club Development for the latest opportunities and insights
• Post It, Share It to let everyone know about your activities, successes and events
• Groups for RYA Trainers, Chief Instructors/RTC Principals and Race Officials

Join our virtual groups to stay connected and feel supported.

And finally…

As well as staying in touch with our wider Welsh sailing and boating community, have a think about how you can stay engaged with your members over winter.

Do you have a schedule of events planned for on and/or off the water? It all counts, whether it’s a traditional pursuit race, work party, evening talk or a land cruise - aka ramble!

It’s a case of reaching out to people during the period when there are fewer opportunities in our sport to connect, and keeping your membership involved as well as informed about what’s happening behind the scenes in terms of club development planning.

We all like to be involved and in the know!

Until next time, Hester.