There are many paddling clubs in the United States. There are clubs for socializing, advocacy, raising awareness, etc. While the variety of clubs is nearly infinite, there is some commonality among clubs as to how to best create them and run them. Many clubs ideas never get started or never truly get off the ground because some common mistakes are made - mistakes made literally millions of times. While no two clubs are the same, below are listed many of the best tips and tricks in starting a club - so you can learn from the backs of others in forming your own successful club.

Realize the time commitment is always more than you think. The excitement and fun of the idea of starting a club is always closely followed by the reality of the effort it will take to make it succeed. Just as in business or in any other venture, a great idea works as long as it can be executed well. Who wants to create a failed club no matter how great the idea? In nearly every club, the leaders, organizers and key participants need to "donate" their own spare time and effort to make the club carry out its mission. Limited time, limited resources, the overwhelming drag of inertia of making people take action are just some of the big reasons why clubs end up failing. Of course, clubs are often started because of a strong interest, and so you need to leverage the strong interest level into successful action for the group.

Most eyes roll when they hear they need to create a mission statement. Many have been involved in a corporate exercise in creating a mission statement where you often end up with a bunch of vacuous words that have no real meaning and everyone forgets about. Often people "feel" they know what the mission is but when they try to articulate it, they can't. That's not to say a group can't be successful without a mission statement - however, in coming up with the goals you can help clarify in your mind what the long term goal is and help communicate that to others. Your mission may be to raise environmental awareness, or it might simply be to socialize and organize paddling trips - it may be all of those things -- whatever it is, the more clearly articulated the vision, the more that you direct your efforts towards reaching that vision.

Create The Structure You Need

Some groups are so well organized that they institute officers, create a constitution, even create processes for amending the constitution and nominating, electing and removing officers. These types of processes are useful, even critical when a group scales - otherwise anarchy ensues. However, most groups starting out don't necessarily need a mini-government in place. Many groups just start with a few lighter weight processes:

Officers: usually there's a president (the leader), vice president (2nd in command and often leader of several important initiatives), treasurer (who handles the funds), secretary (who takes care of meeting minutes, next steps, etc.). Depending upon your group's need, you may also institute a publicity officer, webmaster, historian, etc. It is very helpful to define the roles as well, especially who has the right to decide what. For instance, some groups will require the treasurer to co-sign any checks with the president. In this way there is a check and balance within the group on the money.

If you are fairly serious, you may consider incorporating oftentimes as a nonprofit. Incorporating has many benefits such as limiting liability of members from debts and responsibilities. Incorporation also provides increased levels of "permanency", and it may help you with funding.

Meetings: usually a periodic meeting or event helps to keep things going in the group and to increase activity. It's also a great way for group members to help participate in events and to get to know each other better and share information. If you are holding meetings, pay particular attention to how meetings are run which leads to the next section.

Run Effective Meetings

Poorly run meetings reflect poorly on the leaders and are a big waste of time for the participants. While there are whole books written on having successful meetings, here are a couple of tips to make sure you are getting the most out of any meeting you host.

First, define and publish an agenda. The meeting needs to have a purpose and participants may need to prepare in advance. Very few meetings require a surprise to be effective. An agenda also helps prevent you from straying off course. Many groups have individuals who want to express their opinions - leading everyone down the proverbial "rathole". An agenda helps you enforce whether that meeting is the appropriate place to address those issues or if you need to "table it" to another meeting. Always have a desired outcome for the meeting (e.g. get agreement on a particular initiative, or brainstorm and come up with 3 ideas for next year's events). You'll be often surprised at how better prepared you make a meeting by simply thinking through what type of decision or outcome you want from the meeting. Understand who needs to be there and what the roles are for the participants. Start the meeting on-time.

Many groups have a designated secretary who is tracking the "minutes" of the meeting - what was discussed and in particular, any conclusions that were made and any items to be tabled for a future discussion. This can be published so that there is a historical archive so that members can always go back and track what happened.

When you finish the meeting make sure you capture what the "action items" are. What is the next step - who does what, and by when and who is responsible for following up. Oftentimes, spending a few minutes to plan the next meeting is useful to do.

Many groups start off with a kick-off meeting to discuss the club and how it will operate. This should be your first meeting.

Funding and Budget

Most clubs need to spend money in order to perform activities, print flyers, host a lecture, etc. In order to spend money the club needs to get money and there are a variety of ways to fund the club's activities. Funding can be accomplished from the members themselves through membership dues, activity fees, donations. Funding can be also obtained through a variety of fundraising activities such as a bake sale, garage sale, car wash.

Many corporations and government institutions also fund and sponsor groups. Grant applications can be filled out to see if you qualify for this type of funding. Not all funding needs to be cash. Some companies for instance might provide equipment, or a place to hold an event or practice. They may ask for some form of sponsorship, for instance, a banner displayed at an event.

In addition, you may wish to connect with national, state and regional chapters of similar interest groups. They can be good sources of funding themselves or provide you with valuable insights on how to improving the effectiveness of your club.

Every club has a basic set of operations that help it operate more efficiently. There's nothing more frustrating for leaders and members to be in a poorly run group. Membership, and more importantly, participation will begin to sag as a result. Here are a couple of basics:

• Have a roster. It's important for you to know who is in the group, how you reach them and what roles they play, what their membership status is, etc. There are several electronic and web tools to help you, such as spreadsheets, word processing documents etc.

• Get an email list group created. Communicating with the group is important and doing so easily without having to type in 50 emails each time will save you a lot of time. Getting a self-managed email group list will save you countless hours.

• Create a website. A website is important for messaging not only to the group but also to the broader community. It's a great way to let people know what's going on (future events, how to get involved, etc.), what the accomplishments are of the group so that you can strengthen the binds within the group and also to recruit more members. Again, try to stay away from solutions that require a webmaster to make any change. You may not have a webmaster in the group and plus, you don't want to bottleneck all of your activities through one person. Was it Worth It? Being a part of clubs is an important part of everyday life. Forming clubs does take effort but the payoff is clear. As an organizer, you might think it is a thankless job, but keep in mind, people wouldn't join and participate if they didn't see value in it.

Getting Started

Below is a list of steps to help you along. It's fairly thorough, but isn't set in stone.

• Start talking with friends and see who's interested. It's best to gather a variety of people who will bring to the club a variety of interests, experiences, and perspectives. Once you find a few interested friends, let them invite a few of their own friends. Aim to form a club with roughly 10 to 15 members, give or take a few. Anything from 6 to about 20 is probably workable. Too few and you may have trouble organizing trips or reaching your goals. Too many and you'll have trouble having quality trips and finding a place to meet.

• Don't assume that you're doomed if your group is composed only of utter novices. That can be a very good thing. Sometimes, if you mix in some experienced paddlers with novices, they can get bored or frustrated, and the novices can get intimidated. Don't doubt that a bunch of novices can tackle learning everything together.

• Distribute information about your paddling club to anyone who has expressed interest. Perhaps print up informational material. You want people to learn what your paddling club is all about and think about whether they're really interested.

• Gather all interested parties for a preliminary meeting. Meet to discuss (A) whether you have enough in common, (B) how you'll be organized and run, and (C) whether people are still seriously interested in forming a club. The following items are things that you should try to agree on. It might be good to go around the room and get everyone's thoughts on each of these issues.

• Make sure that you all have similar or compatible goals to the degree that you can, agree on some common ground regarding a general  philosophy and approach.

• Agree on a regular meeting time, place, length, and format. One reason to try and keep a club size to no more than about 15 people is that it permits meetings to be held in living rooms. Another possibility is to seek out some other space, like a local library or church. A coffeehouse or local watering hole might also work. Perhaps a member has an available meeting room at their workplace. Decide when you'll meet, and how often. Most clubs meet once a month. For the format, outline the various items of business you plan to cover at each meeting and allocate an amount of time for each. This will help you keep meetings running efficiently and prevent someone's report from going on for an hour and dragging things out too long. Most meetings will probably last between one and two hours.

• Agree on snacks. Snacks can be a very important part of any meeting. In unfortunate situations, it might even be what meeting attendees look forward to most. Your club can choose to bypass snacks -- or you can decide to take turns bringing donuts or cookies.

• You'll need a name for the club. You can be straightforward and name the club after something like your geographical region, or you can be creative.

• Below are more (yes, more) things to settle as you set up your club.

  • Agree on how you'll be organized both legally and operationally. Don't neglect this paperwork issue. For your club to be recognized as a legal entity, there are forms to fill out.

  • Determine how your club will be organized. Agree on what responsibilities there are, and what kinds of officers you'll need to elect to take on these responsibilities. Clarify what the responsibilities of the officers, as well as club members, will be. (Remember that even regular, non-officer members have responsibilities.) Elect your officers in one of the first meetings. Typical clubs have:

    • A president/presiding partner, who sets meetings, presides over them, and plans activities.

    • A vice president/assistant presiding partner, who fills in when needed and might also run the education program.

    • A treasurer, who deals keeping records and paying bills

    • A secretary, who keeps minutes of each meeting, reminds members of meetings when necessary, and possibly mails out minutes to members who miss a meeting.

    • Some clubs have a separate education officer, responsible for planning (with the input of the group) an educational program, which might include presentations, paddling trips, and guest speakers.

• Decide on an educational agenda. This will naturally change a bit over time, as you become a more experienced club. But it's important to start out with some kind of plan. Perhaps you want to take the first few months to learn basic paddling skills. If you're already comfortable with that, you might want to work on more advanced skills or padding certifications.

• Make a list of member interests and expertise.

Finally, agree to have fun and to keep your meetings friendly and cooperative