Page 4 - DLNapr2017-1017
P. 4
· How the members who are doing road racing and sportives at
present – and doing club rides too – could be letting the rest of the
Club know what they are up to, in particular telling the DLN and the
website, and our twitter and facebook pages too. If we were using
social media a whole lot better, we could be reaching a lot more people.
We looked at the age profiles and geographic profiles of our current
membership, which showed more strength in numbers among our longest-
serving members aged in their 70s and 80s, a group which has also largely
moved away from our South London stomping ground. All but two of our
members under 50 were actively riding bikes, and were still South Londoners.
We recognised the need to increase our appeal to riders in their 20s and 30s.
SO adopting Herne Hill Velodrome as our base would be a key move for De
Laune. This expands our focus to other cycling disciplines besides TT and
gives us the visibility we need, to a large community of new cyclists.
Our Club banners at the Velodrome are being redesigned by George Lewis as
part of a new public push – this is partly aimed at reaching new people and
partly to help existing ones to reconnect with each other, to do their cycling
in a more co-ordinated way. This means ways of making it easier to let each
other know about upcoming club rides, trips to sportives, road races and
other events – when they are taking place, and how to get involved. It’s all
key to making a modern cycling club work, and good communication is the
principle reason why other new clubs are expanding rapidly while ours isn’t –
Yet!
Showing our support of our younger brother the Velodrome with a grand
donation, (we are two years older, as the Velodrome opened in 1891) will help
get this exciting new chapter in its history started. We’ve had really strong
links throughout both our histories, with our own Ken Hill being the ‘Mr Herne
Hill’ for decades – riding, promoting, officiating. A piece of the original wooden
track, presented to Ken, will be on proud display in the clubroom.
The large donation we are proposing at our AGM next month would show the
strength of that relationship over all that time, and into the future too, with
4