What can I do?

If you are involved in helping to run events for your club or even just want to help out, check that the information being uploaded to the British Orienteering website includes all the necessary details that someone who doesn’t orienteer would need to book. The more information the better but as a minimum, all your events should have the following registered directly on the website:

• Location, it’s important to use both grid reference and nearest postcode. Postcode will be used by many people as a navigation point as well as by activity promoters to put your event on their map
• Times, it is important to give a clear indication of when the event will be taking place
• Entry fees, clarity on cost for potential participants is important
• Contact details, this is one of the most important details for those who want to understand how they can access orienteering and should preferably include both email and phone number
• The event website, make it easy to find additional details on the club website not just direct to the homepage

We also know that we have a large number of IT professionals and innovators across the membership who may want to use this freely available data to provide better services specifically for orienteering. If you want to know more about the Open Active initiative click here and you can find the British Orienteering open data here.

2019 is expected to be the year where Open Data in the sport and physical activity sector makes a big jump and there are a huge number of opportunities that will be open to orienteering because we have made this data open (remember, open data isn’t personal data or your customer's data - just information about your upcoming sessions!) but only if the data we provide is of a good standard. This is other organisations doing your promotion for you!