For our second hosting in 2018, we supported community and sports clubs to open their facilities along the route and invite the community in.
This enabled us to build numerous ‘mini fan zones’ to watch the race on tv, and live as it passed by, and also helped organisations reach new audiences.
Many of them are still hosting coffee mornings to bring the elderly together in their community as a result of the original event.
Key things to consider
Getting involved however, does not happen overnight and you will need to plan and prepare well before the event to maximise the impact.
Try making this as seamless as possible and remove what we call ‘sludge’.
Sludge is anything that makes accessing your club or activities hard, or is a potential barrier for people to take part.
This can be as simple as contact numbers not being updated on your website, or promotional material using very technical language that is difficult to understand.
Organisations will also need to be prepared for the anticipated influx of new members, and this will require you to plan months ahead.
Many of these large events are planned for years in advance, so get involved in discussions early as you will need to replicate this.
Think about:
- training and developing volunteers ahead of the event
- how you organise introductory sessions – think about giving free tasters
- having a welcoming face to meet and greet new participants and members.
The hardest step for someone coming to an activity for the first time is the first step, and you need to make this as easy as possible.
As council officers, we need to consider our role in this process, plan alongside our community clubs and groups and, where possible, fund the training of volunteers and release other resources to help grassroots organisations.
For example, in Doncaster we developed a very simple micro grants scheme that enabled us to support 33 groups (11,000 people), many of which were previously not engaged, and help them engage in TDY and UCI Road World Championships.
To help clubs, professionals, and event organisers, Get Doncaster Moving are just about to launch the GAMEPLAN book, which brings all our learnings into one easy-to-use guide.
