Newsletter and improved website for better communication
Screenshot of useful info on our new website
I’ve already touched on the subject of improving communication within the ladies’ section at Brighton & Hove Golf Club, particularly through my email newsletter. It’s proved very efficient to disseminate information. Members who spend weeks away from the club have also told me that they appreciate being able to keep in touch with what’s going on. I’ve also been involved in the development of our new website, so I added communication tools like a diary and links to our newsletter. Feedback has been good so far. Because we used WordPress, a very simple and highly customisable platform, I can easily change it to suit our section’s needs.
WhatsApp group to organise rounds
The other very useful tool I used is a WhatsApp group to organise rounds outside our regular Wednesday competitions. We have tee times booked on Saturdays for members who can’t do Wednesdays, but the arrangement is looser and numbers vary. Established members normally have their habits when it comes to playing golf, but it’s more complicated for new members. Within a club, relationships take a while to form, so I wanted to help them find playing partners. My other goal, after all, is to encourage people to play more golf! I chose WhatsApp because it’s widely used and efficient. You simply create a group (see link above), et voilà! People can have a group conversation to find out who’s available to play. It’s also very easy to mute a group if it’s too “noisy”, so nobody needs to be inconvenienced.
Other tool to manage bigger groups
Screenshot of the “I’m in” interface
I’m looking into an app called I’m in for my football team at the moment. I wondered whether it could be useful for my Saturday golf crowd. My football friends and I have been getting together to play every Wednesday for the last 20 years or so, and during the winter, attendance can be variable. Every Wednesday, there’s a flurry of communication to work out whether we have enough for a game. We do have a WhatsApp group, but it’s not always easy to scroll through the messages and work out how many are going. I’m in allows you to create a recurrent event, then it sends an email to everyone in a group. All they have to do is press a Yes or a No, then a list of people gets built on your event page. This might be overkill for us, as our section is small and we have at most eight people playing on a Saturday. However, it could be useful for ladies’ sections needing to manage bigger numbers on an ad hoc basis.
Other ideas?
I’ve thought about setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts dedicated to the section, but I don’t think we need them. We are all overloaded with information as it is. Plus, so far, a combination of email newsletter, website news and text messaging via WhatsApp seems to work for us. I still remain on the lookout for other ways of sharing information, though! How do you manage communication within your section?