Part 4
Be Active
in Your Community
Many fencing clubs hold their classes under the auspices of local parks and recreation districts, or provide after-school programs through public or private schools. But there are plenty of other ways to present fencing throughout your community, some of which even offer a bit of income.
Youth Organizations
For the past several years, the Sacramento Fencing Club has provided introductory fencing sessions for Girl Scout groups through the local Girl Scout council’s event calendar. The club’s “En Garde” fencing class, offered half a dozen times a year, is a two-hour session of footwork, glove games, and basic fencing moves taught by a coach and two or three junior or cadet fencers, and participating girls earn a council-designed patch. Enrollment is handled entirely through the Girl Scout council office, which pays a nominal fee per enrolled girl. The program is popular enough that there is nearly always a waiting list for enrollment, and a few troops who are unable to sign up through the council sessions arrange for private sessions similar to the club’s birthday party program.
Such council event calendars are usually put together each spring for the following school year. Check with your local Girl Scout council to see about arranging a program in your area, and look into other groups—Boy Scouts, Camp Fire, 4-H, etc.—for similar opportunities.
Community Education Classes
In any good-sized city, you see the catalogs in restaurants and supermarkets, libraries and bookstores—Learning Annex, Learning Co-op, Learning Exchange: catalogs of classes on everything from using computers to making jewelry to public speaking to jazz dance to aromatherapy to getting a real estate license. Does that catalog in your community include a fencing class?
If not, it’s easy enough to set one up. Send the company a class proposal with a course description suitable for the catalog, an outline of what’s to be covered, summary of your qualifications to teach the course, and a short explanation of who the class would be likely to appeal to. You can even set the dates as the same as your regular introductory fencing class, so you wouldn’t even need to hold separate class sessions. Exact arrangements vary from one company to the next, but generally, the instructor and the company agree on a fee for the class and how it will be split. In most cases, the company will take much the larger portion of the fee, so you may not make a profit or even break even on the students who enroll in your classes. But those catalogs have the potential to let several hundred thousand readers know that there is fencing available in your community.
Networking & Service Groups
If you’re running a fencing club, you are a small businessperson and should consider getting involved with local service or networking groups such as chambers of commerce, JayCees, Rotary, or Kiwanis. You’ll not only have an opportunity to promote fencing, but you may find resources for helping you, such as volunteers to help with larger tournaments, such as Regional Youth Circuit events.
Even if you choose not to join such organizations, look into their speaker programs—such groups are often on the lookout for speakers for weekly luncheon meetings.
Don’t ignore cyberspace, either. Consider creating a Facebook page for your club or tournament. Use Facebook’s status updates and other messaging tools to keep people aware of what’s happening with your fencing activities.
Fairs, Conferences & Trade Shows
Any event which attracts families is worth looking into for the possibility of running a booth or presenting a short class or demonstration. State and county fairs, Renaissance fairs or other appropriate historical re-enactions, and sports and fitness shows are all worth checking out for the cost of a booth or the possibility of making your club part of the entertainment offered.
If you learn of a conference soon enough, and it’s the type that offers workshops on various topics, you can send a resume describing a potential workshop, along with your qualifications for presenting it. The organizers may decide your topic is of sufficient interest to include in their schedule.
Even events for which booths are too expensive might be within reach. While show organizers obviously prefer to sell all their booth space, they may sometimes offer unsold booths at low or no cost to local nonprofit organizations to avoid having ugly gaps in their exhibit halls. This may take some nagging on your part, and you have to be willing and able to put a booth together at the last minute, but it could be worth the trouble.
• Get your members signed up to work in shifts, preferably at least two or three people at a time. You may want to work together with other area clubs to spread out the work and expense. If possible, have fencers bouting or doing footwork or other practice throughout the day, and have gear available for visitors to look at or try out (under supervision, of course).
• Try to have at least one person at your booth the entire time the exhibit hall or show is open, and don’t just sit there while passers-by simply pass on by. If you hand out flyers or greet passers-by, they are more likely to stop, ask questions, and start conversations, which will make your booth look more interesting and attract even more people.
• Your handout doesn’t need to be anything fancy or complex. A single sheet with basic fencing information on one side and club contact information on the other might be plenty. Even a half-sheet handout could have enough information to be useful and would be easy to quickly make more copies of if you run out.
This is one place where you can effectively use all those violently bright colored papers. People who are busily stuffing those nifty vendor bags with all the literature they pick up from every booth they pass will be more likely to find your information among all those other flyers if they remember it was on “that really ugly fluorescent chartreuse paper.”
• Don’t forget a sign-up sheet for more information (especially if your “staff” has to leave your booth), or provide 3 x 5 cards for visitors to provide their addresses on in exchange for a chance at a prize—hold a drawing for a club t-shirt or a free introductory class or lesson.
• Try to keep track of how many handouts you use (and how many end up on the exhibit hall floor), how many people you talk to, and how many inquiries or new memberships you get as a result of the show. Give yourself a way to evaluate the success of your booth and decide whether the effort was worth the trouble.
Public Tournaments & Demonstrations
Look into opportunities for hosting tournaments at a shopping mall. Knights of Siena (NC) has held several tournaments at a local Westfield shopping mall. (Pictures and a description can be viewed at their website at http://www.knightsofsiena.com/west1.html.)
Another option to consider is a stand-alone public fencing demonstration. In September 2008, the New Jersey Fencing Alliance and the Maplewood Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs held a community fencing event as part of the Ten Thousand Fencers project. Tim Morehouse, Jeff Bukantz, and Akhi Spencer-El participated, and NJFA’s raffle, bake sale, and t-shirt sale proceeds went to support a local school fencing program. Nearly 400 people showed up for the event, of whom at least 60 suited up and tried fencing for themselves. (A press release for this event is included in Appendix 2.)
