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The Rough-Stuff Fellowship Limited, Annual Report, 2004

 

Review of the Year

The Fellowship secured a new journal editor in 2004 who has returned to producing six journals per year, and is producing it on a timely basis. Despite these changes, our membership decline has further accelerated. The recruitment of new members has recently been low, while the loss of existing members has continued at its normal rate. The Fellowship has increased its publicity efforts in the later part of 2004, and this has had initial success in increasing recruitment towards the year end.

Our Easter Meet was at Baskerville Hall, Clyro, near Hay-on-Wyre, where we enjoyed relatively benign weather in comparison with past meets in Wales. It was agreed that we should ensure that the Meet location for 2005 would be capable of accommodating a larger than usual number for our 50th Anniversary. This will be at Brough in east Cumbria.

 

Membership

Our membership stands at 625 (529 full members) at the year end, a decline of 62 (10%) during the year. The rapid membership loss became a source of  considerable concern to the Directors during the year. We observed the rate of loss of existing members was no higher than usual, but the rate of recruiting new members had fallen to third of the level needed to maintain membership numbers. Publicity was increased (see below) and membership has been more stable in the later part of the year. During 2005 an usually large number of 5-year memberships will come up for renewal, being about 13% of the full membership. So both membership retention and new member recruitment will be particularly important to us during the coming year.

 

The Rough-Stuff Journal

Norman Hodghton was elected editor in 2004, and is pleased to continue for the foreseeable future. He has reverted to six journals per year and has produced them in timely fashion. The journal contains some colour pages, and the editor has responded to the demand for large print size. He has expanded the journal to 28 pages following his first issues at 24 pages. His production methods have contained the cost of the journal, and the editor is exploring weather the number of pages could be further expanded, subject to members providing material to publish.

 

Publicity

Steve Griffith was co-opted to the vacant Public Relations Officer position during the year. With poor recruitment rate of new members, despite the ever growing traffic on our website www.rsf.org.uk run by John Brewer, we have revised our print advertising strategy. We are now advertising in a range of magazines through the use of regular low-cost adverts. This has initially proved effective, and at end of the year membership recruitment had increased to about the desired rate, althrough some subsequent falling-off would be unsurprising. We are yet to see a recovery in attendance on organised runs.

 

Signed: Norman R Hodghton, Simon Preston, Ivan Viehoff