Folks,

This needs you to make a contribution. Chairman Dave and I would like to
start exploiting "Social Media" to get our events and activities out
into the wider world of younger people. As a starter, we want to be more
proactive about using the Club's Facebook page ... now called
"www.facebook.com/ManchesterOrienteers" ... to advertise our events to
potential targets.

Some London clubs have achieved serious levels of increased
participation and membership by doing this. Many of us may not have much
idea how to go about it, but we really need to make the effort.

1) If you haven't yet got a Facebook account, consider getting one.

2) For those on Facebook, you need to do the following simple things:
a) "Like" the club page
b) Create a Custom List of your friends ... "MDOC Interest", say
c) when we post something on the club page, if you have Liked the page
you will get this post. Don't just ignore it.
d) when you get a post about an event, "share" it with your "MDOC
Interest" list and/or "invite" them to it
e) "share" and/or "invite" everyone else you think might be appropriate
- for example, if you are a member of running clubs/groups.
This way we can easily cascade info (typically 10 days before an event,
we think) to a reasonable network of people who might be interested.

3) For every event, we need to think of specific Facebook groups and
pages to target.  eg.  Friends of the Park;  local running clubs; local
Parkruns.  It would be very helpful if people could have a think about
this and make lots of helpful suggestions.  Organisers, planners,
controllers, mappers, postwatchers ... you may have a better idea than
most.  This way we can potentially reach hundreds of people we've never
managed to contact before.  So we can see how it goes, I am willing to
do the bulk of the initial legwork - ie. I'll maintain upcoming events
on the facebook page; give me ideas and I'll try to follow them up; I
will keep a log of what words we've used and what shares/posts we've
done so they can be easily improved and repeated.

John