Volunteer Welcome Night

If your club needs more volunteers an idea could be to host a volunteer welcome night (VWN).

A VWN is an opportunity to try and engage people from your local mountain biking community who may be interested in helping out at clubs and creating more riders but are not sure how or when to get involved or what is expected of them if they want to get involved.

More volunteers will bring more members as people will have a circle of friends to spread the word about your club. Word of mouth is often the most effective marketing tool there is – people follow people!

Things to do before your evening:

• -Decide within the club what roles you would ideally need filled within the club. For example is it mountain bike leaders & coaches or do you struggle to find someone to design posters. However it is worth noting most people will be motivated to give something back to mountain biking by leading or coaching children and young people – this may be the best starting point to attract volunteers.

• Create a poster for the evening. We have an adaptable poster available to download which is free to use - download from the 'orange tabs' located on the banner. The poster is a very large file (18MB) please ensure you have adequate broadband download capacity for this file. 

• Ensure the poster is distributed to local bike shops, adult groups and local schools.

• Create a press release, we have a sample press release from a VWN in Dundee available to download , and send to local media and ourselves – info@dmbins.com and if your club is affiliated to Scottish Cycling we will arrange for the press release to be posted on the SC website.

• Post an invitation on popular mountain biking forum such as trailscotland.co.uk/forum and singletrackworld.com/forum

• Have an email ready to send to all who pre-register. Please download a sample email from the 'orange tabs' on the banner above.

On the Evening

• Have a form ready to take all the new volunteers contact and availability details.

• Have some club bikes ready and take the group for a ride.

• Discuss what would be expected of them as volunteers.

• If the club works with children and young people let them know that the club has a child protection policy and all volunteers will need to go through a Disclosure Scotland process before starting to volunteer with the club.

• Let them know the timelines involved in this process.

• Are you able to offer incentives such as paying for leadership or coaching awards? There is likely to be funding available to pay for this.

• Have fun and make sure the volunteers feel welcome and clear in their future role within the club.

After the Evening

• Follow up with an email explaining the process going forward. Download an example from the 'orange tabs' located on the banner. You can edit to suit your club.

• Ensure you have the time to meet volunteers to go through the Disclosure process and keep them informed of what is happening at the club and when they are likely to start their volunteering.

Bike Shops

Local bike shops tend to be run by dedicated cyclists who have a passion for increasing the number of people riding and improving bikes, this also has an added benefit of helping their business.

Your club should give information on how volunteers can get involved to the owner of the bike shop and they can help you recruit your volunteers for you.

Tutors

Tutors are in all of the regions in Scotland . They run all the MBLA and GO MTB courses in your local area.

If your club is in contact with them they could be selling the volunteering opportunities at your club whilst they are delivering their courses.

Schools

With Active Schools Co-ordinators (ASC) actively recruiting a variety of volunteers to work within schools they may actually have too many volunteers to manage or their volunteers may be interested in also helping out at the club.

It is in the remit of ASC’s job descriptions to be actively setting up links between schools and clubs and volunteers are a key ingredient in making this transition work effectively.

You are likely to find the contact for your local school on your local authorities website.

Colleges

Many colleges will run mountain biking sessions as part of sport modules. There may be keen students who are interested in expanding their practical skills and developing their CV.

If you are able to offer the incentive of paying for leadership/coaching courses this may be especially appealing to students who are looking to add to their existing qualifications.

Working In Partnership

We recommend reading the Working in Partnership section of this website to give you practical tools and resources to develop effective local partnerships.