Blackpool Supporters' Trust column: Looking to engage Blackpool's younger fans

Another very busy month has seen us continue our drive to get young people involved with the club.

We have offered a mixture of mascot packages and complimentary tickets for every home league game.

All clubs face a challenge in getting younger fans involved in the drive for better dialogue and ways of working.

There is no lack of passion but the concept has a whiff of bureaucracy about it that can be off-putting.

We need to find ways to make this more interesting for our younger fans and make them feel that they can be as influential as anyone else.

Earlier this month, we announced we were looking for help from younger fans to set up a Young People’s Board to support and advise our main committee.

In our view, this initiative needs a ‘bottom up’ approach, whereby the young people involved put their proposals for the work they want to do to the committee, rather than the other way round.

We have people coming forward to be involved so, if this sounds interesting and you are aged 16-30, you can find out more by emailing [email protected]

The task of helping the Blackpool fanbase to grow, especially at the younger end, is just as important to the club as it is to us.

We’ve had productive meetings in October with both the club and with our award-winning Community Trust.

We will look for areas in which we can either work together, or in ways which complement each other.

We will tell you more about these initiatives as they develop and hope to draw in as much of the wider Blackpool community as possible.

Most organisations can link the extent of their success – or otherwise – to how well they communicate – and we are no different.

We are currently updating and refreshing our website. It is our public face and we have ambitious plans to improve its content, make it a better tool for us to use and give as wide a range of people a reason to engage with us.

We are looking at ways of explaining what we do more clearly, offering voluntary job opportunities to the more community-minded, creating more content aimed at exile groups, facilitating travel to games and, in due course, giving fans the chance to generate content.

We are consulting a range of our members with a view to launching the new site in November.

Our ambitions for promoting the interests of club, fans and community are boundless but many of the plans we have do need us to generate money.

Our main way of doing this is via the 1953 Sweepstake, which costs just £5 per month on entry and can be joined by anyone.

It is run in-house, so there are no deductions for overheads with 60 per cent of cash raised funding good causes and the other 40 per cent paid out in monthly prizes.

Details can be found at https://www.blackpoolsupporterstrust.com/copy-of-fundraising-landing-page

Finally, BST’s annual elections and AGM will both be held on December 9.

Next month’s column will contain details of the time, the venue and the agenda for discussion.