Club Sustainability

Obviously for your club to continue to be successful after it’s first few sessions, effort need to be made to ensure sustainability. Quite often new clubs start up enthusiastically but if the club does not cater for diversity of its club members, they quickly become board or fell pushed out and loose all the great enthusiasm your first created. Naturally some club members will drop out or not attend as often due to other after school activates, exam season or other commitments. By making the following efforts, hopefully this will help to reduce the “drop out rate” to a minimum and help you to keep all club members happy and wanting to come along week in week out.

• If you have a small number of girls in your club, try to encourage them by setting their own activaties or challenges that may appeal more to them separate to the boys in the club. For example Making a bath bomb activity or creating an all girl Royal Navy team.
• Speak to your club members and show them all the activities and challenges available. Ask them which they’d like to do rather than you choosing. Don’t be afraid to have a number of activates all running at once, as you can always request help and support from either ambassadors, SEA’s or from the LEP fieldworkers.
• Keep a register of your club session so you can monitor attendance. If you notice a decline in numbers, refresh for advertising and recruitment methods or chase up students to find out why they’ve stopped attend and see if you can make any improvements or alternatively contact your LEP fieldworkers. Particularly monitor the girl drop out rate and see how you could decrease it.
• Celebrate your clubs achievements whenever and wherever possible. This gives the club members a sense of achievement and makes them feel proud to be involved in the club. For example if your event a competition and do well, mention it and give out the awards/certificates in front of the schools assembly, or hold a showcase of your clubs activities to show off what you’ve been working on. This will also act as an advertisement for your club and students not involved can see what others are doing and may want to get involved.
• Enter one or a few of the larger competitions, like the Royal Navy challenge or BAA challenge for example so your club members have an ongoing project to work on rather than a one off activity. This gives the students a sense of ownership and also promotes team work and project management. If the club members know they have a deadline to meet and can see there project improving each session until its completed, hopefully it should encourage them to attend the club session each week.
• Keep your enthusiasm. It is very important that you keep the momentum of the club going, try to avoid constantly rearranging the club session day or cancelling the session all together. This will mean a number of weeks will go by without a club session and the students (and you) will loose the momentum. If you know your going to be unable to run your club session on its normal day, try to rearrange it for another day in the same week or maybe hold it on the lunch time instead.
• Try to enforce the feeling that your club members are privileged to be in the club and once they have committed to becoming a club member they should not duck in and out of sessions, they are expected to attend each week regularly.
• HAVE FUN! As the club is run out of normal school hour try and make the club session as fun as possible with a fun and relaxed atmosphere. Try not to make it feel like the students are just in another school lesson. Hopefully you and all your club members will really enjoy attending the club sessions and look forward to each meet up.