Dear All
This year we celebrate 10 years of the National Indoor Climbing Awards Schemes. In the past 10 years, with your help, we’ve helped over 130,000 kids learn to climb. Some of those young climbers are now adults, going on to represent GB, coaching the next generation of climbers or just remaining active participants at walls like yours.
In recent years we’ve hit a bit of a plateau with the number of new participants into the schemes; this currently stands at around 13,000 per year but we want to break that plateau and grow to 20,000 per year by the end of 2020.
In order to do this we need to work with you to understand what is working with the schemes at your wall, what we could do more of to help you, and what we could do less. We believe our NICAS schemes are great products capable of driving increased numbers of young climbers to your wall, but we need your help to make this next step possible.
We’ve already started to make changes to meet this target and I understand everyone is now getting used to the tahdah database. This should enable us to improve the service to you as well as improving our accuracy of reporting and make the process more efficient for everyone.
Other changes are that after 10 years with the scheme our long-term Technical Officer, Iain McKenzie, has moved on and opened the door to us to have Tim Miller from Boulder Shack involved. Tim will have spoken to a number of you already regarding the scheme. In a short time, Tim is already having a great impact and bringing new ideas to the table. Tim will also have oversight of our newly introduced Coach Development Team who are preparing to support walls locally and deliver inductions as required.
We have also recognised the need for more customer service support within our team and will be recruiting to fill this need shortly.
So what next?
Our next step is to get further input from you. We’ve already made some positive changes but we want to get further insights from the public, existing candidates, parents, and importantly from climbing walls owners and those that deliver NICAS and NIBAS.
We want to know how you are finding the schemes and we want to hear from you directly. Between me, the Interim Chair and the Trustees, we plan to be in touch with many of you soon both in person and through an online survey - in which we want you to provide honest feedback.
The survey will cover topics including inductions, resources, materials and the administration process.
We will use this information to do more detailed follow ups. We can start to really focus on where we need to do more in order to continue to grow, and to help you get lots of participants through your doors and onto the Schemes.
Personally, I also apologise if our communication has been a little limited recently. I spent this year fighting cancer, but I have the all-clear now. I wanted to kick-start my return by getting in touch to tell you about these changes and about some of the exciting opportunities coming up.
I look forward to catching up and hearing from you soon.
Yours faithfully,
Martin Chester
Executive Officer
National Indoor Climbing Award Schemes (NICAS)
www.nicas.co.uk
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