Commodores Gathered Together
Harry Hermon brought over 50 commodores and management together for an end-of-year Round Up of the successes, challenges of 2021 and looked forward to the future initiatives for 2022.
The commodores shared the pressures a committee of volunteers can find themselves under at times and we discussed ideas on how clubs can overcome and share the workload.
Challenges with Volunteer burnout
General consensus from numerous clubs that the increasing administrative burden is making it difficult to find willing volunteers to fulfil the various roles adequately. Some suggested solutions included:
- succession planning
- smaller core committee and delegation of specific roles
- commit the youth to roles within the club
- on-line storing of documents
- shadowing or mentoring people into new roles
- introduce parents to volunteering by rostering them as beachmasters during courses
- a shared professional resource to take the admin load away from the volunteers
- generic templates for policies and procedures
There was a good outlook as membership increases can be seen across the country and we shared ideas for promotions going into the new year.
Increasing Membership & Promotion for 2022
Suggestion for a concerted and coordinated effort to relaunch the Try Sailing programme early next summer with a promotional campaign to encourage membership.
Does Irish Sailing have any marketing plans for 2022? We are currently drafting our communications strategy for implementation in 2022 which includes a suite of videos, social media campaigns, and general content that will be shared.
The idea of creating support and advice on good governance for clubs was discussed ...
Governance of Clubs
There was general appreciation given around Irish Sailing’s guidelines for managing covid which helped clubs justify the measures they put in place for implementation.
There was a suggestion that this might be extended for more general guidance on governance issues that Clubs could refer to when challenged by their membership. Irish Sailing will look into this.
Links to a number of useful resources were shared in the chat and presentation, so here are a few below that were of particular interest during the talks ...
Links to resources
A number of links were given out on the Zoom ‘chat’ functionality and we were asked to send them out with meeting notes See below....