News
Contents:
Change to Meeting Programme
ECCT Donation
Anniversary Dinner Venue
The club library
Getting tramping out of the wilderness
GPS Training
Tell everybody u TRAMP!
Change to Meeting Programme
The speaker on August 26 is Tony Wrightson, talking on Afghanistan. His original date in November has been swapped with Sue Martin.
Eastern and Central Community Trust donation
We are pleased to have been awarded a $2000 donation towards the purchase of safety equipment and marketing costs of the club. We are very grateful for the contribution.
Anniversary Dinner Venue
This year’s dinner will be held at Ocean’s Restaurant, Napier, the Cosmopolitan Club restaurant.
The club library
John Dobbs has recently taken charge of the library and encourages everyone to make use of the excellent resources we have.
There is a new alphabetical database of titles and authors with a printed copy in the black folder, which will be updated with additions and deletions. The new loans book records your take-outs and you have three months to return items. John will be on your case to chase up any outstandings!
Broadly speaking, books fall into these categories :
• Tramping resources (handbooks on parks, manuals, etc)
• Good yarns (great reads here, from NZ to overseas and many historic)
• Nature and conservation (many manuals on trees, plants, birds, fungi, and passionate accounts of conservation issues, campaigns and more)
• Hawke’s Bay (lots of useful stuff, we even have three copies of H.B. for the happy wanderer)
• Climbing, mountaineering and polar (fascinating stories and stunning pictures in some books)
• Biographical (not many titles e.g. Ed Hillary, etc)
In addition, we receive the Wilderness magazine each month, along with magazines from a few clubs.
These items will be held for just 12 months.
Older magazines and any other items will periodically be put out as give-aways to members.
The committee has approved the purchase of three books as reviewed in the June edition of the FMC Bulletin.
• South Island Weekend Tramps by Nick Groves
• Castles in the Sand, What’s Happening to the NZ Coast? by Raewyn Peart
• A Wee Walk in the Wilderness by Rex Hendry
Please use the library – you are bound to find something of interest. This is a free member service and we would love to see a bit more take-up.
If there are any books or magazines you would like to see added to our resources, let John know.
Getting tramping clubs out of the wilderness
Kelvin Shaw has written this article, which will appear in an upcoming edition of FMC’s magazine
When it comes to recruitment, the challenge for tramping clubs is how to achieve exposure. While you can easily get the wrong kind of exposure on top of a mountain, the wilderness is no place to raise public awareness of the joys and freedom that come with tramping.
The FMC magazine’s June 2009 focus on clubs and membership struck a chord at Napier Tramping Club, worried by a slow decline in members (and a steady rise in their average age). The club has a robust financial position and a hard core of keen trampers. While tramping and walking may be more popular than ever, and tramping remains in the top 10 recreations, we wondered how to increase and rejuvenate the membership of our club.
Doing nothing was not an option, so we formed a small sub-committee to look into the problem. It soon became clear that few in the community knew our club existed. We needed to raise our profile and move closer to potential members.
The first big idea? An instantly recognisable logo. The club ran a competition to design a bumper sticker and it attracted 50 entries – not bad, considering the current membership of 55.
The winning creation was a bright yellow and black ‘i TRAMP’ motif, with the club website address underneath.
The logo now also appears on the club’s “business” cards (which trampers hand out to others along the track and leave in huts) and many members go public, wearing their i-TRAMP T-shirts. The club is also getting up closer and more personal with the wider community. Members sporting club T-shirts recently trotted along to two local charity half-marathons.
Children are our future. But how to drag them – and their parents – away from the Great Indoors, the telly, or their PCs, Facebook and Twitter? One answer: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – with a website. The upcoming generation is also i-savvy, and a bad-looking website is an instant turn-off. The club spent a mere couple of hundred dollars on the design of a really good-looking website. So far, it has attracted more than 27,000 hits.
How many clubs send out a penny-dreadful newsletter – black and white, and full of badly written reports of trudges that sound like drudges and (remarkably) lack pictures of the wonderful views you can only experience while tramping? Napier Tramping Club ditched its tired old newsletter and now produces a professional-looking, quarterly Bushbasher magazine, packed with colour pictures and humour. Circulation is no longer limited to members: These days, The Bushbasher is found at local schools and colleges, “outdoor” retailers, libraries and information centres.
But you must always try to think outside the box. Could that blurry picture you took in the pouring rain interest the editor of your newspaper? It might, and often does. We’re increasing our efforts to get unusual articles or pictures into the local rags.
There is still much to do.
Club meetings often feature speakers whose subjects are of interest extending far beyond the membership. Advertising is too expensive. Perhaps a press release to the free newspaper or getting to know someone at the local radio station might help to increase exposure and audience?
“Take a kid fishing” is a tried and proven idea. But it gets a bit more complicated with “Take a kid tramping” and may – like fishing – be more suited to interested families than established tramping clubs.
Making contact with local youth organisations such as Venturer Scouts and cadet groups might not be productive in the short term, given the widening generation gap between youth groups and many tramping clubs, unless such organisations (and tramping clubs) can put sufficient resources into organising joint ventures into the outdoors.
We love our i-TRAMP logo so much that we we’re offering it to every tramping club in the land. Napier Tramping Club owns copyright to the design, but any tramping club is free to use it for non-commercial purposes, featuring your website at the bottom. To get the original artwork, just email trans@ction.co.nz
A year after the FMC article kick-started our sub-committee into action, there are signs of progress in Hawke’s Bay. Today, we’re better known and we have attracted new members.
Much of what has been achieved would have been impossible without the involvement of volunteers with expertise (some of whom do not tramp) and the invaluable financial support of Hawke’s Bay’s local community trust.
GPS Training
The club has two Garmin Etrex GPS receivers. These will be carried on each tramp, and whenever appropriate (snack breaks, lunch-times) we will do some training in their use.
The first stage will be understanding the units and the functions of each of their pages, followed by how to read the location information and place yourself on the map.
Tell everybody uTRAMP!
Are you displaying the new iTramp bumper sticker? The motif doesn’t replace the logo created in 1974, but is intended to promote the club. Stickers are available from Julia Mackie, and business cards from John Dobbs. Let’s show ourselves off to the world!
Our new bumper sticker