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Big Christmas Thank you

Thank you to all of our readers for making bowls-central such a popular site among bowlers and bowling club managers.

We wish all of our readers a very peaceful festive and relaxing Christmas holiday and the best ever bowling New Year.

For the duration of the holiday period we have slashed the prices of all bowls-central publications including Performance Bowling Greens, Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and Bowling Club Membership, Retention and Growth.

Please make sure you take advantage of these bargains while they last.

The bowls-central site will be open for business as usual throughout the holiday period.

Regards

John

Bowls Digest

With all of this snow I’ve been looking for excuses to sit close to the fire, but I was feeling guilty about not producing any benefit for my readers, so here is a short selection of resources and information I’ve found useful and interesting lately

Bowls World Blog

Although not brimming with content and not updated very regularly this blog has a couple of in depth articles that might be of interest; including a look at the bowls manufacturing process and some guidance on learning to bowl and improving your game. http://bowlsworldblog.blogspot.com/

Bowls World

The main site relating to the above blog has a wealth of products of interest to the bowler. http://www.bowlsworld.co.uk/

World Bowler

Good site with a quite a lively forum with bowlers contributing form all corners of the globe. http://www.worldbowler.com/

Julian Haines

A popular site with a very active forum with lots of interesting debate and opinion on all things bowls; check out the greenkeepers corner section. http://www.julianhainesbowls.co.uk/forum/

Bowls Club Info

This site claims to be the biggest list of lawn bowls links on the internet.
You’ll find links to bowls web sites from around the globe – from the smallest English country green to the largest aussie mega-club!
The site owner’s aims are to help promote all bowls club web sites by offering free inclusion in the links lists and to provide low-cost but professional looking web page hosting for bowls clubs. http://www.bowlsclub.info/

Statistical Analysis; to give you the Bowls Green Maintenance answers you need

Don’t worry, we’re not going all mathematical on you.

Over the past 2 years the traffic to this site has steadily grown and now provides help and advice to a big proportion of the UK Bowling Club Scene.

I know this, because like every website; in the background we have what are known as Web Stats or statistics.

The web stats provide a lot of good information and allow us to mould the content of the site to provide the kind of advice we think you want.

One of the really great parts of these web stats is the section that allows us to see what terms people type into search engines before being directed to the site.

For this month alone, the list extends to over 4 full A4 pages of search topics, many of them in the form of questions like for example “will too much water harm our green?” or “what are the favourable conditions for fusarium?”

So what I thought I’d do is start to answer some of these questions at the rate of perhaps 1 a day and see how we get on with that.

Keep your eyes peeled for our new “web search” Tag

Speak to you soon John

Bowls Club Success Manifesto

Speaking to club officials as I go around the countryside, it’s never long before the conversation turns to the difficulties in retaining members, keeping the club afloat and general club survival issues.

Of course, the time of year makes it all the worse, as clubs going into the winter with financial difficulties are obviously in a delicate condition. It’s never clear how many members will pay their subs again and want to come back next year.

For many clubs it doesn’t look great this year; the combination of the already prevalent factors related to the state of the game with the very strange series of weather events (very cold and prolonged winter, followed by a very cold and very dry spring, followed by a very hot and dry spell of weather for many of us in June and July) has left a lot of clubs with worries about their survival.

This has led me to change around my plans recently and prioritise my work to make sure you have access to the right kind of information at the right time.

So, although we said that our new eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround would be available at the end of August, we have delayed this until the 25th September, so that we could bring forward the release of our new Manifesto for Bowling Club Success.

I know, I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think “manifesto” describes this new guide most accurately as it provides clubs with a document that can be adopted and then adapted into a declaration of your intention to work on a plan to rejuvenate your club’s fortunes.

Our Manifesto for Bowling Club Success includes 4 main sections as follows:

Part 1. Accepting the New Order of the Game

Part 2. Club Turnaround

Part 3. Long Term Strategic Planning

Part 4. How to Imbed Best Practice

It is available FREE now. Just click here to access your copy; and please let us know what you think and how you plan to use it in your club.

Bowls Green Maintenance and Club Survival

The link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival has never been more obvious…has it?

Later this week we will be releasing our new publication Bowling Club Survival and in it the process of Green Maintenance is shown to be critical in several different ways.

The most obvious link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival is of course that the club with a better green should be able to attract more members and tournaments, thus giving that club a better chance of surviving.

Secondly of course there is another obvious link; and that is that if we reduce expenditure on green maintenance then we will save costs and therefore give our club a better chance of survival.

Between these two clear survival strategies lies a quandary that many clubs have found themselves in for decades now:

“if we spend more money on Bowling Green Maintenance the green will be better; so if a better green would give us a better chance at Club Survival, we shouldn’t be cutting expenditure on Green Maintenance”

In Bowling Club Survival we will discuss why the answer to this argument isn’t as obvious as it seems and leave you with a clear strategy to make progress on this issue fast; but that’s only the beginning because this new guide will tackle 7 distinct strategies that must be mastered in order to give clubs the best chance of surviving the current challenges in both the economy and the game of bowls itself.

Please complete the form below to register your interest and we will ensure that you are among the first to be alerted when the guide is launched.