Winter 2002 - National Rifle Association

Activities of the local borough council. We found thatnot only were we listed on the central library computersystem, but we had also recently been listed on theLondon Borough of Sutton’s web site. My Secretaryoften jokes that we are between a man who plays spoonsand a lady who does funny things with snakes, well Ihope he’s joking! A lesson here for all clubs: checkwhether you have a mention on the Internet; it will notcost a penny if you go about things correctly. TheInternet can be a terrific source for not only advertisingyour club but also for getting information to enable aclub to be run correctly. The Metropolitan Police site isa fine example of what information can be found. In thesite’s Firearms section is a wealth of information, suchas how to apply for a firearms certificate. How manyinstances have you heard of people complaining thattheir application/variation has taken ages to beprocessed. In a lot of cases it is their own fault, thoughthey will not admit it. The police have, over the years,had more and more paperwork thrown at them and anyincorrectly filled-in form is likely to be placed at thebottom of the pile.Getting back to our listings. We noticed that our contactdetails took the form of a PO Box number - this wasaltered to a name and telephone number. The use of POBox numbers to contact club officials no longer servesany purpose, the days are long gone when clubs neededto keep a low profile. The various politically correctgroups have put all country and target sports in thespotlight so let’s take advantage of this and make it easierfor people to contact us. Too many clubs have adoptedthis secret attitude which will deter rather than attractpotential new members. Officials of other clubs I havespoken to on this matter say they use the Box system toprevent receiving abusive telephone calls. It is true tosay this can happen; my Secretary has received a fewcalls of this nature but these calls have been simply dealtwith by dialling 1471 to get the last caller’s phone numberand reporting the incident to the local Firearms Officer.What these abusive callers do not realise is that they arecommitting an offence by making a threatening orabusive call to a club secretary, who is responsible tothe Home Office for firearms matters relating to his orher club.The next item dealt with was to ensure that the club waslisted with all the National Associations and club finderlists of the various sports magazines. It was no surpriseto us to find that a lot of clubs only provided scantinformation on their whereabouts, even at national level.It is no good complaining that our national officials donot inform them of what is going on if you refuse orinadvertently fail to provide the necessary contactinformation.One final thing only needed to be done to cover localsources of information. We visited the only two targetsports retailers with shops in our catchment area andprovided them with our details to pass on to any of theircustomers who made enquiries about club whereaboutsin the surrounding area. This action has proved verybeneficial to us in the long term. To date we have hadover 40 enquiries from their customers, with roughly 50per cent being turned into applications for membership.One suggestion from a retailer was for us to considerintroducing Sport Crossbow into the club. I must confessI’d never heard of this activity, but we decided toinvestigate further if this form of target shooting wouldbe viable for the club to introduce as one of its activities.We now felt confident enough to embark on anadvertising campaign with the local Press and variousmagazines. In the Greater London area, there has beena glut of so-called free newspapers appearing over thelast few years and we decided that this was a mediumworth exploiting. Just putting a display advert in themain advertising section serves no purpose, advertisinghas to take a different form. You will find that newsand sports editors are desperate for items and relymainly on outside sources to fill space. Even on nationaltitles this practice goes on. The days of the staff reporterare long gone; news gathering is more and more beingdone by free-lancers or agencies. In my professional lifeas a Media Consultant, I have witnessed this at first hand.The complete naivety of some of the young journalists,fresh out of college clutching their media studies degree,is amazing. They are completely ignorant of what goeson outside their little world and will accept anythingpeople, especially ones with an official looking title, tellthem. The GCN and other anti-sport groups haveexploited this to the full, which may go some way toexplain why so much anti-gun coverage has appearedover the years.We decided that any sporting achievement the clubmade would be publicised. We have been successful inour aim and have had a feature published including anappropriate picture taken by the paper’s photographer.Our contact details were included in the article. Theresponse we received was very encouraging. Enquirieswere received from people as diverse as youngsterswanting to include shooting in the Duke of EdinburghAward Scheme, Girl Guides and Boy Scouts seekinginstruction for their marksman badges, not so youngpeople wanting something to do in retirement, andmothers, wanting to get their sons and daughters to dosomething other than watch TV all the time.Attracting people such as these into the sport can havemany advantages, some may not be obvious at first. Itdawned on us that, maybe, we would be seen ascontributing something to the local community and thatlocal community leaders and councillors would look atus more favourably. Over the last few years, we havebeen proved correct in our assumption. Council welfareofficers and local support groups have asked us foradvice and help in their work, and just recently we heardthat the Mayor of the London Borough of Sutton hadpraised us for putting a team in the Inter BoroughCompetition. As for parents of youngsters, if a club canpresent itself as responsible enough to look after theiroffspring, you can be sure of getting word of mouthadvertising via school gate chat and parents associations.79