We hope you had a wonderful festive season and a happy New Year! 2017 was again a busy year for our small team…

• We further developed Wimblecomm and improved the website – now listing 65 venues from 31 venue operators across Wimbledon/Merton.
• We looked at our site activity to help continue these improvements.
• We undertook a strategy review to see how we are doing and how we can help our users.
• We are implementing our new marketing plan (digital & traditional/print) over the coming 12 months.
• We have launched our social media presence (on Twitter and Facebook).
• We developed a new membership policy, carried out a community & venue operator survey, and engaged in a number of events and community initiatives.

The above has been managed within an annual budget of £23,000 (raised entirely from dividends, i.e. we currently run Wimblecomm without the need for fund raising, advertising or membership fees). This means our service remains absolutely free for Merton based non-profit venue operators and user groups that hire these venues regularly!

Key Challenges for 2018

We’ve made progress, but need to be sure Wimblecomm is delivering added value to you! You may have heard me say – the WCA is YOUR organisation, the Trustees are only caretakers and our success depends largely on positive and creative engagement with our communities.

In the coming months we will focus on:

• Increasing awareness of the WCA and Wimblecomm to ensure more people turn to Wimblecomm to help them find the venue or event they are looking for.
• Maximising listings of space for hire and events/activities on our Wimblecomm directory and events calendar.
• Creating more community relevant content on Wimblecomm and further developing our social media presence.
• Optimising the technology which underpins our service, to ensure that everyone who uses Wimblecomm has a positive experience and will visit the site again.
• Creating opportunities for networking and best practice sharing amongst our members.

We welcome any additional help you could offer. Please get in touch with us to discuss how you can get involved.  Please see our Trustee role specification.

AGM and Community Survey

Our last AGM took place on Wednesday, 6th December at the Mansel Road Centre in Wimbledon. Thank you to all who came despite the cold weather and busy pre-Christmas season.

The draft minutes, draft accounts, annual report and key findings of our community survey can all be found here.

A big thank you to all who have completed our recent community survey. It was great to hear your views whilst increasing awareness of the WCA and Wimblecomm.

We took away a number of key messages, but overall it was very clear that most respondents who have used Wimblecomm find it a useful tool and would use it again – however, we need to raise more awareness of Wimblecomm across our communities as well as engage with many more venue providers and user groups!

Access the survey finding here.

Survey Prize Draw

We ran a prize draw alongside the survey which members of the public could enter if they left their contact details. Congratulations to the following winners who were drawn at the AGM, from a total of 32 individuals who entered the prize draw:

1x £100 Ely’s gift voucher – Councillor David Simpson
2x £50 Ely’s gift voucher – Miss Amy Tilby and Mrs R Farooq

The above winners have been notified.

Please Get/Stay in Touch

We look forward to another busy and productive year. Please do get in touch with any feedback, suggestions, or indeed if you would like to get more involved with the WCA and our work.

Yours, David (and the team at WCA)