Team building exercises may not be something that you’d expect to happen in a nonprofit organization but they can be just as vital for a booster club as they can be in a much larger corporation. Not only do booster club team building exercises increase volunteer coordination, but they make a positive impact on a club’s bottom line.
What is team building?
Team building is a group effort or activity meant to serve a purpose through team engagement. While the activities often change, they’re usually designed to help build towards a more specific goal. For example, team building can be for the purpose of motivating the group, developing bonds, improving communication, and help to make the group more encouraging towards one another.
For this article, we’re discussing ways to improve the participation through easy booster club team building exercises. For a nonprofit organization like booster clubs, participation is one of the most important things because without it fundraisers, meetings and everything else would fall apart and cause a booster club to crumble.
Team building activities for nonprofit organizations
While every group would no doubt love to engage in a getaway vacation designed for team building, that’s not always the best idea for a booster club. In fact, there are a lot of simple booster club team building exercises that can be accomplished at a regular meeting.
Having these exercises at your meetings makes sense because you’ll already have quite a bit of your booster club volunteers in attendance. Not to mention it’s probably easier to pull them off because you’ll have everyone focused, and if not these booster club team building exercises can help engage the booster club volunteers.
Examples of booster club team building exercises you can try
If your booster club has been around for a while then the booster club supporters should have a few shared memories and be able to participate in booster club team building exercises that focus around the memories of the booster club members.
Two great memory related activities to engage booster club supports include The Memory Wall and The Commonplace Book.
The Memory Wall
The memory wall is a physical activity where booster club members can draw and write up different memories that they have of the booster club events and activities and then put them up on a wall to share them with everyone.
Looking at everyone’s favorite memories of being with the booster club can help to grow participation in conversations. It can help find the events and things that everyone enjoyed most. Together everyone can form common bonds, share their own stories and views on the events too.
It helps to create a visual wall that reaffirms positive relationships and can offer fun and laughter with one another. Celebrating booster club wins or putting a positive spin on fails because sometimes even the events that aren’t successful can still provide great memories to share and look back on.
The Commonplace Book
The commonplace book is a team building exercise that starts and never ends. It’s a little here and there over the span of the booster club’s life and is one that is easy to do in just a few minutes.
We all know that getting handed a book of instructions is helpful for booster club management when it comes from past leaders that have held that role and title. But, it’s also incredibly helpful for the booster club to keep a book on hand that’s full of similar details.
Booster clubs have tons of events and fundraisers every year and a constant flow of volunteers coming and going as the years pass by. Being able to recollect things from years past can become difficult as older members are phased out. And of course, you want to keep information about helpful fundraisers handy- that’s just great sense and foresight.
So to do this booster club team building exercise, after the booster club completes an event, have a form filled out stating what the event was, what costs were, what it needed, how it did, and other helpful information. Then put it into a 3 ring binder for the group so that members can look through it at their leisure and gather great ideas during a brainstorming session.
Magazine Story
Promoting your booster club is one of the best ways to get more volunteers and have successful fundraisers but sometimes coming up with promotional ideas can be a bit of a challenge. It’s sort of like getting put on the spot and your mind goes blank.
Obviously you can repeat your mission statement a few times but after that, you’ll want new material to distribute and show off your booster club, so why not turn it into a booster club team building exercise?
Divide your booster club into small groups of people and have everyone focused around the idea of making a booster club promotional magazine story. Something that you could envision being in a magazine.
If your booster club was being featured, what would you want to tell the world? What would your cover story look like? By giving each group the same set of questions and having them all work together to create a cover story you’d find that while everything is promotional and great, they’d all be a little different.
Not only that, but because you can use the magazine stories (or a variation of them) as actual promotional items for the booster club, giving them to have many purposes that help the group in different ways.
Building Block Ideas
Another great idea is to simply come up with a problem, real or fictional and have everyone try to discover different ways to solve it. For example, building school participation, improving the promotion for events, or gaining new booster club volunteers. Have groups work together to come up with a great way to beat these problems and you may just find a way to solve real problems that your booster club is facing.
Booster club team building exercises can be beneficial in many different ways. Not only to help get the booster club participation up and building relationships between the members but also helping to promote and grow the booster club outside of the meeting room- which builds participation in those ways too.
With so many good things coming from a few minutes of group activities, why haven’t you started your booster club team building exercises yet?
