Rotorua World Mountain Bike Champs – Taking an Event into the Community
Good practice
Keeping momentum beyond the major event
- Ongoing events have encouraged continued interest in biking at recreational and sporting levels
- Council has supported private events organisers, and continues to find opportunities to invest in events
- Recreational events, not just competitive events, are crucial in engaging a wider audience (90% of registrations at recreational events in the Bike Festival were not competitive).
Diversify
- If a community or a council chooses to hone in on a particular sport, there is a danger of putting all the eggs in one basket. It is safer to have a multifaceted events strategy.
Local people are key to success
- It’s important to have people working on a project for a big event who have a co-operative approach
- You need to be able to work with and capture the best from volunteers – people who have the time and energy to be involved in a long planning process, running into years
- Recognising the contributions people make to the organising group will help keep the team together and functioning well.
Project documentation
- Continuity of staff is often a problem with projects that run over a long time frame. The basic strategies for managing this problem include strong project planning and documentation of planning and operations.
Community self-belief
- The community benefits from events on various levels, but especially in the matter of self-belief i.e. “we can do this”.
Preparation – do a test run. The Lions Tour example.
The Lions tour was an event that RDC had a strong vision for, and it functioned as a test run for the WMBC.
The plan again was to bring the event out of the box, into the community. This was achieved by creating links between the visitors, the locals and the media. Hence, there was a Lions Tour Festival.
Some of the best lessons were around what did not work. In retrospect, the team thought they needed to invest more into the Lions Festival to get the full benefits. They fell short of engaging non-rugby people, and lacked an arts focus. A lot of what happened with the Lions Festival was fun, but it was not necessarily about participation i.e. the programme lacked the events that said “bring your running shoes, or get on your bike”. By contrast, the World Mountain Bike Championships and the accompanying Bike Festival really helped Rotorua to become a mountain biking city.
Updated | 09 May 2008.
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