Discussion: GVOC hits 500 members for 2011

!

nice

Wow! Is that the biggest in Canada? (this is the first time i've ever seen membership numbers for a Canadian O-club.)

It would be interesting to see a breakdown: individuals, families, juniors...
Maybe even an average age...

awesome!

Wow, that is a really impressive number, considerably more than what we have south of the border at Cascade!

What's interesting to me is that GVOC has ~500 members, but looking at the last few results, you're getting about 50 starts per event.

At Cascade, we've got around ~220 memberships, but our last local event had 364 starts. (Though, this time of the year, the numbers are skewed because 214 of those starts were juniors, a majority of whom are not club members.)

I think it would be fun to start up an annual Cascadia Cup race between our two clubs. Sumas Mountain is just a 2.5 hour drive from downtown Seattle, and three of our better venues (Lord Hill, Fort Ebey, and Fire Mountain) are within 2.5 hours of downtown Vancouver. Fire Mountain is by far our closest, just outside of Mt. Vernon, which is under a 2-hour drive. It's also the site of our upcoming Winter Series Champs on February 18th.

I'm assuming that pretty much everyone who shows up at an event becomes a "member"? Hard to be sure from the GVOC webpage if it's required, but the fee is minimal in any case. So for comparisons with other clubs you might want to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.

Lots of info on the GVOC site, and events every Wednesday evening, year round.

Also happened to be looking at the North Texas OA site. According to the info for an event today, had 329 pre-registered. Pre-registration highly encouraged, not required.

Interesting what different clubs are doing.

Yes, we are keeping a very low membership fee and making sure to sign every single person up who comes to an event or training. There is no on-the-day membership or anything like that. The COF fees are entirely based on participation numbers (starts in events), so no particular reason to maintain high membership fees.

Oh, I forgot to mention that you guys did a great job with the website upgrade!

Out of curiosity what are GVOC's approx. participation numbers in a year?

Great news GVOC! The COF is just starting to work with Canadian orienteering clubs to get Project 5000 underway. Sport Canada is changing their eligibility criteria so that instead of having at least 3000 members, a sport will need to have at least 5000 members in order to be eligible for funding in 2013 and beyond. We're looking forward to working with all the Canadian clubs to reach that goal. For some clubs it means shifting their membership structure so that existing participants become members. For all the clubs it's a matter of exploring ways to bring new members to the sport. It's an exciting project that'll have lots of useful outcomes.

Roughly 1200 starts in our WETs in 2011 (weekly free of charge training with pinflags) and roughly 600 starts in our WhyJustRuns (monthly B-meet type event with SI and 4 courses).

The COF fees are entirely based on participation numbers (starts in events), so no particular reason to maintain high membership fees.

With 2/3 of your participation consisting of weekly, free-of-charge training (awesome!), I'm surprised that you don't need to cover this with membership fees. I'm sure you keep costs down but at minimum, you need maps each week. Do you charge a little more for your WhyJustRuns to cover the costs of weekly member training?

With the internets, you can outsource the cost of map printing to the users. Make the map available ahead of time, and people can print before they come. Since it's just a training event, there's no point in keeping the course a secret.

This is what we do for the 'Hood Hunts, which are free. It makes it a lot easier to organize an event, since we never need to figure out how many people are going to attend. Plus, since the maps are online, those who can't make it on event day came print the map and come later, so in effect, it's also a permanent course, too.

For some clubs it means shifting their membership structure so that existing participants become members. So this will make a difference to Canada's sportiness? And the worthy administrators who work on the project will maintain their participation, coaching, mapping, course planning?

Good suggestion, Pink Socks. Maybe the training nights really do have zero costs but around here, there could be park fees or other costs to be covered, so I'm curious. Also, there are fixed costs to running a club, e.g. website, flags, membership in provincial association, etc. If every event participant - even a one-time orienteer - is charged a small fee to be an annual member, I guess it becomes easier to cover costs.

Yeah, costs for WET are kept at a minimum (i.e. map printing). Expenses are covered from income from WhyJustRuns and the occasional Canada Cup (the new name for A-meets (if you forgot ;)).

gruver - Sport Canada is a government agency that provides funding for a limited number of sports. COF has recently "made the cut" and will soon start recieving federal government funding which is a tremendous accomplishment. Now Sport Canada is modifying its eligibility - so the COF must react to maintain eligibility. Will increasing membership counts improve sportiness? Hard to say that it will have a direct impact, but if the outcome is ongoing funding for the COF then I've got to think orienteering will benefit. And to be fair to Sport Canada - I think they are doing a lot of really good things, for example developing a Long Term Athlete Develop program is a requirement for Sport Canada funding - and the COF's LTAD, developed in large part to meet this requirement, is a really fantastic project that will unquestionably improve orienteering in Canada. So we have to jump through a few hoops - that's unfortunate. But in general I don't have a big beef with it since often those jumps have some really positive outcomes in more ways than one.

Regarding having everyone print their own map, this does reduce costs for the organizer, but definitely increases total overhead and likely reduces print quality. Printing is one thing that really makes sense to do en masse.

It is interesting to compare Vancouver to Toronto (Toronto numbers from 2010)

Vancouver (GVOC) ~500 members, 1200 training starts, 600 weekend starts
Toronto (TOC) ~100 members, 850 training starts, 500 weekend starts

Yes I would be worried bout the quality of home-printed maps but the idea of decentralising the printing is tantalising. One less thing for the planner to do. What would make this feasible would be laser printers common at home. Could we spread some rumours about the cost/environmental impact of inkjet inks?

As an ex-GVOC member this is great to see as the club struggled for numbers when we lived in Vancouver.

In Australia the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) also looks at participation numbers and does not care too much for formal memberships so all Australian states now have a form of Casual membership to capture all the attendees at orienteering events. Some very regular attendees do not see any need to become Full Members but they are now recorded and presented to the government bodies to support thier grants Orienteering. The use of the ASC funding is in large part focussed on growing participation

I wonder what the corresponding numbers would be in the USA under a similar scheme to what GVOC and the ASC are doing (and I'm assuming the rest of the Canadian clubs will be doing). We don't have any carrot that I know of for government funding based on number of participants, although perhaps there is some funding in the JROTC system that depends on that number.

For our federation for financial purposes, the number that matters is number of starts (the basis for the levy), though obviously getting more participants should lead to more starts (as well as getting existing participants to orienteer more often). But I doubt that many clubs make any effort to measure the number of participants over the course of a year.

As far as overall starts in a year, I think the number in the USA is roughly 60K. I saw this article talking about the positive impact on starts in Sweden from all the publicity after their medals at WOC this summer, and saying that their annual starts are 295K. I wonder what that number is in other countries.

I'd suspect Finland is over 300K. I would have thought Sweden too - Oringen alone is 50K - but maybe not.

In Ontario a few years ago, the prospect of funding (much smaller and less probable than the Sport Canada funding) led to a decision to force every participant in any O event - even small children - to buy a $5 basic annual membership or a full club membership ($20-30). We tried to work within that system for about two years.

Clubs were encouraged to absorb the unpopular fee, e.g. offer a $5 discount to first-time orienteers. Other than longtime regulars, few people chose full memberships due to the price differential. (When the mandatory system went away, a number of people upgraded to full memberships.)

Mandatory memberships didn't increase participation. What did change was the unpleasantness and complexity of the registrar role. People don't like being forced to buy annual memberships and most of them don't remember whether they are paid-up members in the current year. Good, integrated membership/event registration computer applications are essential. We didn't have fully integrated systems so there was only partial compliance since it added a painful layer of volunteer effort. Unlike the current situation, the potential funding in that case just wasn't worth it.

The mandatory membership policy also introduced a subtle barrier to participation. For example, I'd be interested in trying skateboarding. But if I was told that I had to buy an annual membership in Skateboard Canada (giving my personal information to them, fearing that they'd add me to a mailing list, etc.) in order to try it once, I'd probably decide that I'm not *that* interested in skateboarding, no matter how cheap the annual membership is.

Unfortunately, we have to play the game since government funding agencies choose membership numbers as their metric even though it is largely meaningless as Hammer's GVOC/TOC numbers show. Most participants in the Boston Marathon don't belong to running clubs but that doesn't make the sport of running any less popular or less worthy of government funding.

~300k sounds like the correct number of unique participants for FIN/SWE in a given year, but I highly doubt that's the number of starts—starts should be over 1M I'd think.

Agree--

If the correct measurement of US starts is 60K, a similiar methodology would have to yield an estimate for SWE/FIN of greater than 5X.

The definition of "starts" probably differs. In the US some clubs hold informal events that would probably just be regular club training in Scandinavia.

There is some information in SOFT's annual report, the latest being for 2010.

597 clubs, which had 92K members of which 52K were "active" members (I'm assuming this is because lots of clubs do more sports then orienteering, like CSU).

Competition statistics:
581 sanctioned events.
Total registered participants for these events was 327K, of which O-Ringen accounted for 64K. (This doesn't quite agree with the 295K number above, but it's in the same ballpark.) If you set aside O-Ringen, the average for a sanctioned event is about 450 people.

There are no statistics given for non-sanctioned club events.

Bshields: Regarding having everyone print their own map, this does reduce costs for the organizer, but definitely increases total overhead and likely reduces print quality. Printing is one thing that really makes sense to do en masse.

Gruver: I would be worried bout the quality of home-printed maps but the idea of decentralising the printing is tantalising. One less thing for the planner to do.

Quickly, just to finish this train of thought... for the 'Hood Hunts, we chose to push the responsibility of map printing to the users for four reasons:

1) We don't know how many people will show up. If it hails, we get 3. If it's nice, then we get 30+. We publicize by word-of-mouth through Facebook and community blogs, and since we don't have pre-registration, you just never know how many people will show, and thus, how many maps to print.

2) By providing maps online, people can come participate whenever they want, not just when we have our "official" meetup. There are some 'Hood Hunt regulars that we've never seen at an event, because weeknights aren't convenient for them.

3) Less work for the volunteer hosts. Most of our hosts have never set an orienteering course before or directed an event, so we wanted to make it super easy for them.

4) On the organizing side, we want to keep the events free. There's no permitting, no insurance, no sanctioning, etc. Publicity is free. So it makes sense to keep the maps free.

It's not a perfect system. Maps, especially those with satellite images, can look great on my printer, but not-so-great on others. Some people run with black-and-white maps. Heck, others just open the .PDF on their smartphones and skip the printing altogether.

I wouldn't recommend this approach for a standard orienteering meet. But for a free training event, it could become an option.

...no insurance...

Not to be a wet blanket but... Do you have legal advice that confirms there is no way you can be held liable for these events? If so, it works differently where you are - and I sure would prefer it! Every orienteering course has some risk that someone could twist into a lawsuit that will cost time and money to fight even if you win. Because many orienteering clubs aren't incorporated, this could turn into personal liability.

We have to be a lot more careful in Ontario. No one should get a course map here unless they sign a waiver (event-specific or annual membership waiver) or unless they're explicitly covered by another form of insurance (Scouts, conservation area), even if they're going to do a course on their own time. Maybe you have built a waiver into your map download system? Even a waiver doesn't cover you in the event of negligence though, and I'm told that U.S. waivers don't hold as much legal weight as Canadian ones.

Congrats to GVOC, some big numbers. Are the the largest club in Canada? I think Edmonton had that title for a while.

Regardless of how clubs define their memberships, one of the top questions that I always get about Orienteering is "Just how many people do this cool/strange sport?"

People in Vancouver now have a pretty good answer for that. Also great for going after club sponsors in Vancouver. (Important local things: coffee, sushi, umbrellas, Gortex, riot gear, coffee).

Do you have legal advice that confirms there is no way you can be held liable for these events?

I did some basic legal research on three similar things: geocaching, flashmobs, and pickup sports games, and I didn't find anything significant in terms of liability or requiring signed waivers. We're basically a pickup urban orienteering event using completely public spaces.

I guess if I need to pull the plug, then I'll pull the plug.

Hope you don't have to - just worryin' about you!

To give you an example... I was associated with a university-based outdoors club that maintains XC ski trails on public land (mostly) and publishes a map. Although they didn't want mountain bikers on their trails, it wasn't their land, so it wasn't their choice. In fact, the municipality promoted the area for mountain biking in a tourism brochure. Trail maintenance for skiing differs from trail maintenance for biking. The ski club maintained them for skiing only.

A young lawyer went over his handlebars in a groundhog hole and cracked a vertebra. The subsequent lawsuit kept a lot of people busy and spending money over the next couple of years. (He sued the ski club, the municipality and anyone else around.)

Unfortunately, there was never a final decision because he dropped his lawsuit for family reasons, but a couple of key findings were:
- The judge felt his case had merit, i.e. it made it past the preliminary stage.
- There was nothing to inform the biker of the types of risks he might face, e.g. a sign describing the obstacles he might encounter on the trail or the limitations to the trail maintenance. In orienteering, we handle this through a waiver.

He'd gone biking in an area with no facilities, no organized event, no fee and multiple trail access locations. There is no obvious place to put such a sign. Yet his case made it well into the legal process.

Liability will work differently where you are but maybe someone in your area has some insights as to whether you should include waiver text with a "click here to accept" before you let people download a map - or some fine print at the bottom of the map, or something simple like that. It sounds like a great program and deserves to keep operating!

It is interesting to compare Vancouver to Toronto (Toronto numbers from 2010)

Vancouver (GVOC) ~500 members, 1200 training starts, 600 weekend starts
Toronto (TOC) ~100 members, 850 training starts, 500 weekend starts

For comparison, though it's hardly apples to apples given our near total lack of a snowy season and other differences in circumstances, QOC's 2010-2011 season featured ~200 memberships/~300 members by the conventional OUSA counting method (individual membership=1, family membership=2), ~2800 starts by ~600 individuals in our regular events roughly equivalent to GVOC's WhyJustRuns (similar numbers for training events harder to come by but those wouldn't add up to very much).

For comparison here are approx 2011 numbers (training starts based on 2010 data) for GHO...

Hamilton (GHO) ~300 members, 1800 training starts, 1200 weekend starts

@jtorranc: Haven't you had over 500 participants in your last two events alone?

Not sure how many members DVOA has, but I would estimate that we have had right around 3,000 "maps" this past year. Frequently, on beginner courses, multiple people go out on one map. I'd estimate a scaling factor 1.2 or more to get participants.

I don't know how many unique participants there were, but we have that data somewhere.

Southern Ontario weekend starts in 2010 were 2300.

GHO 1474
TOC 541
Stars 109
Other clubs 176

DVOA had 165 people ranked this year, which means 165 individuals attending at least 4 events that counted towards rankings. We probably had 4 or 5 events that did not count towards rankings.

We currently have 251 individual memberships and 272 family memberships.

Our website is listing 3746 total participants in 38 events but I'm not sure if the 3746 is participants or starts. We track both, but I'm not sure which total this is reporting.

One thing that may be different in southern Ontario is that the majority of attendees at weekend events are not members of the host club. So we only have a minor correlation between club membership and weekend starts. There have been six clubs operating within a 90 minute drive (soon to be five).

@j-man: not quite, except possibly if you counted human bodies rather than start groups and disregarded whether any of the same bodies showed up at our last event as at our second last event. Though the ~600 was only named individuals and wouldn't include start list entries such as "Smith Family" or "BSA Troop 1833". I'd have to double check how things like "John Doe and friends" were treated in compiling that list.

Also, the numbers I gave were based on Sep 2010 through June 2011. We're tracking slightly higher on starts this season compared to fall 2010 so probably the other numbers are slightly up as well.

Another unique feature of southern Ontario is the heavy influence of the weekly Adventure Running Kids program on membership numbers and training starts.

@Bash - regarding mandatory membership. We (GVOC) have very few people who are reluctant to sign up for membership. We explain to them that it's only $5, it covers our insurance and meet costs, and they get free training sessions throughout the year. We do require specific information, such as birth date and postal code, for Sport BC but email address is not required. We do find that those who are only out for 1 time don't put down their email, and we don't push for that.

You're selling more for $5 than we were. In Ontario, the $5 basic membership gave people the right to enter orienteering events and not much else. There were a few other minor benefits like being added to the club e-mail list. To get significant benefits like free training sessions, I think all clubs insisted on full memberships ($20-30) to cover costs. Amongst other things, this provided a reason to buy a full membership.

If GVOC is sending participant birthdates to Sport BC, it sounds like you're getting provincial government funding - great!

IMO, the days in which people will happily pay $20-$30 to be part of a "club" are long gone. The perceived value isn't very high ... the common question being "What do I get for my $20-$30?". Clubs should charge for what people value ... events. They shouldn't charge for what people don't value ... membership.

I think GVOC has got it absolutely right. Charge for the events ... and sign up every single participant as a "club member". If I understand correctly, what is lost in membership fees is more than made up for by grants that can be obtained by having larger membership numbers.

Somewhere (and I think its on AP) there was a discussion supported by some plausible-looking data about members, starts, and population served. If its up to date, this might give a better basis for the current discussion.

Bmay, what are XC ski clubs typically doing now wrt memberships? The average skier seems to value the coaching and training provided by the clubs more than is done in orienteering.

GVOC covers expenses with event fees from our weekend Why Just Runs. We have had some grants, but they're usually earmarked for mapping or, more recently, junior development.

Charge for the events ... and sign up every single participant as a "club member".

Until the sport becomes wildly popular, that will likely become the paradigm to satisfy government funding requirements.

Is it the best approach for every club? It would be nice to have the freedom to explore other paradigms. I enjoy a lot of sports and this is the only one where I belong to a club, even though clubs are available and I know those club members get additional benefits that I've chosen not to receive.

I'm a member of two O clubs - a big one (GHO) and a smaller one (soon to fold for non-financial reasons) that has focused on local member training and only has the resources to put on one public event a year. Event revenues can't fund membership expenses in the small club, and a $5 membership would not cover the free member training sessions. In a market with six O clubs, things are very different from the near-captive market that many North American O clubs operate in. No southern Ontario club can put on revenue-generating public meets as often as GVOC. It's been nice for each club to have the flexibility to adapt to its unique situation.

What is the meaning of "annual club member" if the term applies equally to a 40-year veteran and to someone who tried orienteering once and didn't like it? If we discard the concept of full membership (and I'm not saying that we will), we'll need to wrap our minds around that in places where membership has had a different meaning. E.g. On Sunday, GHO provided a Christmas and awards luncheon to its members, many of whom had devoted long volunteer hours through the year. That was smart since the club bonding experience will help bring those volunteers out again and will inspire less-involved attendees to give back to their club.

Event revenues only come in because people are inspired to volunteer. Club membership and its associated privileges have been our way of bringing that group of people together. If orienteers were comfortable with paying the fees that runners pay for 10K road races, the need to cultivate a large pool of volunteers would be less urgent. Needless to say, GHO's Christmas party could not happen in its current form if the club had 800 $5 members.

Our vision of full membership has been a real, ongoing, two-way relationship throughout the year - the same way our local ski and bike clubs operate. (Which is why I haven't joined those clubs - I don't have the same ongoing commitment to them.) Ours is not the only model, and other models may work better elsewhere. But there is no black/white, right/wrong that works for everyone.

Hammer, Despite the fact that ski clubs sell "club memberships", I don't think people really buy them in order to be "part of the club". People pay for things that are more tangible ... access to trails, participation in programs, etc. Our club sells club memberships ... which basically amounts to buying a trail pass. We also charge for participation in programs (e.g., Jackrabbits, Race Team, etc.).

Brian, yup, that is what I expected. XC 'clubs' are better at placing a true value on those participation programs as well. In orienteering it has almost been accepted that those 'programs' are free.

When GHO developed ARK we took the XC club approach used in Jackrabbits. Kids join ARK for the program not to be 'part of the club' - yet ARK tripled GHO membership numbers and thats a good thing for COF's Project 5000.

A family membership in Foothills Nordic in Calgary costs $110 and doesn't give access to any trails, though you do get a discount on a ski pass for the Canmore Nordic Centre. However, you do need to be a member to participate, and pay for, programs. And then, to participate at the bigger races, you need a CCC licence, or you can get a day licence. Part of this is for insurance.