Thank you to everyone who attended the club’s planning workshop and also to those who couldn’t make it but contributed by responding to the pre-workshop survey or in other ways.

The pre-workshop survey was key to this process and the results, quite clearly, identified four main themes on which we can focus our efforts going forward. These themes are: Grow the Club; Quality Facilities; Development (Players/Coaches/Administrators/Systems); One Club, Our Club, Our Community.

After going through the survey responses at the workshop, the group reviewed our current values, purpose and BHAG, along with our definition of what we do, what we promise to do and what our customers’ needs are.

 

What we’re happy with

The general consensus is we’re comfortable with the following:

Core Values: we play hard; we play smart; we play together (along with how these are defined).

Core Purpose: the beating heart of our community.

What do we (want to) do: provide the best sporting experience in our community.

What do we (want to) promise: you will enjoy the best sporting experience in our community (slight change here – we replaced ‘Matamata’ with ‘our community’).

What are our customers’ needs: our community wants a football club it is proud to call their own. Community members expect first class facilities and top class service from skilled and talented people in a friendly and successful environment.

The important thing with all of these is that we actually have to start living, promoting and acting on these things. That hasn’t been happening particularly well to date. We’ll roll out some initiatives in 2015 to assist with this.

 

What needs more work

Everyone at the workshop agreed our current, and out of date, BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is not suitable. We will look to survey our club’s membership for feedback on what they believe would be an inspiring overall goal for the club, then the management committee will refine and determine the actual wording.

This will take place over the first part of next year. The survey responses indicate that ‘One Club, Our Club, Our Community’ would be a very good place to start.

For the record, our current BHAG is: to be the leading country football club in New Zealand by the end of 2013. So yeah, not easily measurable and well out of date.

We also need to set our key 3-5 year strategic moves. Again, we’ll finalise these in early 2015 as they feed off the BHAG, but the themes in the survey responses identify the key areas. These being:

Grow the club.
Quality facilities.
Development across all areas.
A fourth, financial sustainability, underpins all of this.

 

Summary

Our frame of reference for this process is all football in our community – juniors, youth, seniors, men, women, college, players, coaches, administrators, supporters, sponsors, other stakeholders.

The ‘One Club, Our Club, Our Community’ message came through load and clear, both from the survey, the workshop’s discussion and other anecdotal feedback. That will be our key guiding statement as we take this forward towards refining the club to the sort of organisation we all want to be part of.

Again, thanks for everyone’s help, support and contribution to this process. We’ve made a good start.