Greetings and welcome to our most recent column. As the season officially starts, the weeks and games seem to go by quickly. We’ve had yet another incredibly busy month as we push to engage youth with the club. For each home league game, we have a variety of mascot packages and free tickets available.
It is a challenge for all clubs to engage younger supporters in the quest for improved communication and operational procedures. While the idea is not devoid of passion, it does have an unsettling hint of bureaucracy.
We must figure out how to pique the interest of our younger followers and give them the impression that they are just as important as the rest of us.
We declared earlier this month that we needed the assistance of our younger fans to form a Young People’s Board to assist and counsel our main committee.
From our perspective, this initiative requires a “bottom up” approach, in which the committee receives proposals from the young people involved for the work they would like to do, instead of the other way around.
If you are between the ages of 16 and 30, and this sounds interesting to you, you can find out more by sending an email to listening@blackpoolsupporterstrust.com.
The club, as well as us, place equal importance on the task of assisting in the growth of the Blackpool fan base, particularly among younger fans.
We’ll search for areas where we can collaborate or work in complementary ways with one another.
We aim to include as many members of the larger Blackpool community as we can and will keep you updated on these initiatives as they progress.
We are no different from most organizations in that the degree of our success—or lack thereof—is directly related to how effectively we communicate. Right now, we’re revamping and updating our website. We have big plans to enhance its content, make it a more useful tool for us, and encourage as many people as possible to interact with us because it is our public face.
We are investigating methods to make our work easier to understand, providing opportunities for volunteer work to those with a stronger sense of community, producing more content for groups in exile, making game travel easier, and eventually allowing fans to produce their own content.
In order to launch the new site in November, we are consulting with a variety of our members. Though many of our plans do require us to make money, our ambitions for furthering the interests of the club, supporters, and community are unbounded. Our primary method for doing this is through the 1953 Sweepstake, which anyone can enter and which costs just £5 per month. October has seen fruitful meetings with the club and our Community Trust, which has won numerous awards.
Since it is internally managed, there are no overhead deductions. Forty percent of the funds raised are donated to charitable organizations, and the remaining forty percent is given out as monthly prizes.
