Need to build your audience? Take a look at how Mount Pleasant Golf Club and teamBEDS&LUTON are working together to promote offers and opportunities to be active.

Capturing new members or users of your club can be very hard. In this day in age, promotion and advertising to the right audience is crucial to boost membership or increase the number of participants attending sessions. This is made more challenging as some clubs and organisations are managed by volunteers with either limited resources or time constraints. Even for those clubs not ran by volunteers, the everyday running of a club can take over.

We work with clubs across Bedfordshire to assist with funding applications, governance support, training opportunities as well as support to reach new audiences. We have been working with Mount Pleasant Golf Club to support and promote their junior and ladies offers.

What do we mean by new audiences?

The world of sports clubs, leisure centres and fitness classes is an ever changing one. With so much choice and information available at the click of a finger, it is becoming harder to win over potential new members or participants using your facilities. New audiences can be anyone from someone trying an activity for the first time, or someone returning to a sport.

In our work we put significant amount of effort into targeting inactive people. This is because there are so many people who can benefit from increasing the amount of exercise they do per week. However this comes with huge challenges. This audience is new to activity, so we need to design the physical activity offer to suit their needs.

How can project design help reach new audiences?

Project design does not start and stop at a session plan or booking an instructor. To influence new audiences and their behaviours towards activity, time should be spent on project design from the planning stage. Understanding the audience you are designing a project for is essential, recognising what will encourage them to come for the first time, then keep coming back takes time and planning.

All the elements of planning work together when designing a project for a specific audience. For example, promoting to a group of inactive young people will not be effective if the material designed suits an active adult. Imagine the same group have turned up for the first session and the instructor is ready to deliver uniformed drills and intense competition. The participants are unlikely to return and the hard work of getting them to the session has been undone.

Making the most of the promotion tools available

Be it social media, posters or word of mouth, each have an effective impact when marketed to the correct audience. We have spent time with clubs and organisations discussing how they could attract new audiences through simple changes to marketing material or even just making the most out of the local tools that are accessible to all.

We have an ongoing relationship with Mount Pleasant Golf Club who have targeted junior participants and they ladies academy. We sat down and discussed funding opportunities, social media trends and audiences, as well as maximising their reach to new people. Since this the club now have a presence on our social media channels, they are making the most of our activity finder and hopefully in time this will contribute to an increase in participants.

Throughout the year we run workshops, meet with clubs, charities and organisations to discuss how best to appeal to new audiences. For funding advice, marketing pointers, or to find out how to promote through us, please do not hesitate to contact the team.

What did Mount Pleasant Golf Club say?

"Mount Pleasant Golf Club is open to the public all year round and plan golf events for all ages & abilities. We have joined forces with Team Beds & Luton to help us reach a new target audience in the region to promote Junior Golf through our passport to golf programme, run by our resident PGA Professional Laurie Rosewell and the Ladies Golf Academy events, run by Alison Perkins our visiting PGA Professional.

After meeting Tom Harwood, relationship manager from Team Beds & Luton we quickly understood the reach working with an organisation like TB&L has in all sports and the importance for a population to have an active lifestyle. The health & social benefits of playing golf are as great as any other activity and the traditional impressions people have of golf are changing.

TB&L are a useful supportive mechanism to guide you to external platforms to promote and access your target users, in our current case children from the age of 6 and women of all ages to encourage them to try Golf. A 3rd resource available to us are equipment in the region that we can access to upsell events and make them attractive, which TB&L have contributed to providing the region, such as the Inflatable Golf Net capable of being set up at outside events, enhancing our capability of reaching out to people by bringing Golf to them.

I look forward to a long future of working closely with TB&L on existing & future initiatives and campaigns.

Scott Morley
General Manager
Mount Pleasant Golf Club
gm@mountpleasantgolfclub.co.uk"