TidyClub Musings

Sports and recreational clubs at all levels from local to state to national are still cautioustly adotpting technology, members are still online and offline, and the community still views sports clubs from a one dimensional perspective. But the world is evolving past that…quickly and while sports just start to catch up with 2.0 we’re moving to 3.0. So what is 3.0 and how will it change your sports club or administration.

The above table obviously refers to Teachers and education. But you can see how we would tailor it to sports. Through utilising an administration backbone that would allow pluggable User Interfaces (UI) and in turn User Experiences (UX) an entirely new view on funding, resources, volunteers and overall administration starts to take place.

Do you agree with the descriptions in this table? What is being left out of the web 3.0 discussion right now? How long will it take to reach this new level of supposed understanding? Will we ever actually make it?

Being a President of a sporting club is a very different role. Still the visionary and champion of culture, they are the ultimate leader. Yes a team captain is a leader, but this type of leadership is not the same thing. What works as a captain and to lead by example, has the opposite effect when you are the President. Leading not by doing, but by inspiring, enabling, and holding people accountable.

Everyone has a slightly different definition, but the real secret to success is going to be delegating as much as possible to free up your time for thinking and driving new opportunities. This is even more important in a not-for-profit group.

Isaak was recently interviewed by Evan Cunningham-Dunlop from eGroup, an industry group for the web industry.  The talk discusses where TidyClub came from and where it is headed plus a few other things…

When dealing with Australian Sporting Associations it is noticeable that they could be doing much, much more with the funding they receive from State or National governments. It could be getting directed to specific regions and clubs based on insightful, grassroots data rather than gut instinct.

But data isn’t being collected because the systems in place are woefully inadequate or built for national bodies rather than local bodies where the data gets fed in from.

Data should do three things:

• Confirm or disprove what sporting associations are already thinking.
• Make the sporting bodies ask the right questions.
• Cause the sporting bodies to act on what is discovered.

Whilst the federal government continues to provide blanket funding to sporting bodies who don’t have appropriate data and governance systems suitable for all levels of sport it will continue to be wasted.

One size does not fit all. Pluggable APIs, pluggable UIs, pluggable UXs are all required. Australian Sports needs to get smarter with the data they’re not collecting. It will help the competitors, the high-performance athletes, the volunteers, the supporters and other stakeholders at all levels.

This is big picture thinking that is simply not being done, and not even being discussed which is sadly to everyone’s detriment.

- Club Lessons

Work out your clubs objectives and then work backwards. Most clubs work on a week to week, month to month basis. Step back and get everyone on the same long term agenda.

-Club Lessons

-Club Lessons

This talk by Dan Pallotta has a whole lot of relevance to all not-for-profit groups including sporting clubs.

The way a club is usually managed is that the committee shoots from the hip talking about what is required. It may be further discussed and could perhaps be recorded in some meeting minutes but rarely followed up formally.

Create a Task list. Delegate committee members and have a date to have items completed by. Create a date for it to be completed by, make it achievable but stick with it.

Knowing what is actually required to get done. Allowing everyone at the club to see what is required to make the wheels go ‘round will make for better governance, and will get more things done.

It’s a new way of managing the club…but it shouldn’t be.

P.S. …and Yes TidyClub does this all for you… including sending automatic reminders :)

Yesterday I met someone from a club who held a committee meeting that went 4.5 hours… the only reason they finished was because it was midnight and people were falling asleep…but they still hadn’t finished the meeting.

Let’s get serious about this. You will never attract or retain committee members if their commitment is 4.5 hour meetings and equally time sapping tasks.

If you’re using TidyClub you’re in luck as we have allowed for these types of things with our meetings. Here is how you will solve it.

• Print out list of outstanding tasks.
• Ensure Meeting Agenda and outstanding tasks has been circulated before hand - so people can prepare.
• Ensure Minute Taker is following our Meetings format where things can only be one of the following. This ensures that an action item has been achieved for each discussion point. Move on as soon as it has been described.

1. Task Item
2. To-Do Item
3. General Information
4. A Decision

• Schedule 5 minutes for each item. If items go beyond 4x this (this should be a rare occurrence) schedule a time for another discussion outside of the meeting.
• Delegate a time-keeper. They are responsible for ensuring that time limits are not broken. They need to be bold, brash and unforgiving of abuse of time.
• A meeting goes for as long as it has to… do not publish an end time on a meeting.
• Minute Taker can instantly send well formatted minutes to all participants and apologies at the conclusion of the meeting.
• Don’t invite everyone on the committee if everyone on the committee isn’t required.

Your committee will be happier as they know why they are there, they can see the progress skip along quickly and they are more likely to attend again as they know if people are prepared they don’t get bogged down on issues.

We ran across this image today by @gapingvoid (you can buy it here) but made us think about clubs and how the interact with their tribe (community). Most clubs seem to react to their members and supporters rather than getting pro-active and seeing some hug upside.

Clubs already have a massive advantage of having the tribe based on what they do. They’re not like a business who has to work hard to build a tribe. A clubs group of like-minded people is sitting waiting for you.

So give them a hug, send them an SMS, tell them you are looking forward to seeing them, interacting with them and more.

Good things happen when communities and tribes start talking more.

Yesterday I attended a workshop run by our clubs parent association. In truth it wasn’t so much of a workshop but a briefing as to what added administration clubs will have to undertake over the coming 12 months.

With ever increasing administration comes more pressure on volunteers, making for a more unattractive proposition to present to potential volunteers and as a result the less likely volunteers are to carry on with these further burdens on them.

With this in mind execution of these administrative tasks becomes critical. Of course leadership and peoples kindness will mean that things will get eventually get done, but with the revolution of the web, with everyone having a smart phone in their pocket means that the way you approach your volunteers, the way you structure and frequency of your communication, and the model of your organisation needs to change.

Running your club with the wrong strategy, the strategy focused on the 5 committee members will put you in an uphill battle. The alternative is to think hard about your structure, your resources and the benefits your club could gain from having less pressure on more people through resources and platforms like TIdyClub.com.

Your committee should stretch from 5 to 18. The roles and responsibilities of these people should be well articulated and defined. Through increased transparency everyone know what needs to get done and why they are doing it.

However talking to clubs at the workshop presented what I feel is the predominant issue in clubs. Through clubs not changing their strategy merely because they’re used to the one they have been relying on for the last 20 years is lousy strategy, and must change.