Hyde Park Harriers Communications Review 2026

In September 2025, the HPH committee made the decision to create a WhatsApp community and to use this as a primary communication channel for the club. One year later, it’s a good time to reflect on what’s working and what could be improved, both in terms of our use of WhatsApp and our communications generally.

WHATSAPP ANNOUNCEMENTS

  • Overall, we think the WhatsApp community has worked well – awareness of club matters is better when compared to the use of Facebook, which has seen a decline in engagement over the last couple of years.
  • The weekly announcements, provided each Thursday via the “broadcast-only” Announcements channel, are used to notify the club of upcoming events and calls-to-action. These announcements are “forward-facing”, brief and focussed on key issues – if you read nothing but the weekly WhatsApp announcements, you will have a good idea of what’s coming up in the near future.

WHATSAPP CHATS

  • Specific chats, which are set up for events or particular themes (e.g. buy and sell, group leading etc), work well. Our members and friends are free to join these as they see fit and information shared in them is specific and relevant to their purpose.
  • The General chat is, by its nature, very general and sometimes chaotic. With more than 300 people in this chat, this is unavoidable. We do not want to overly-police the General chat and good-natured conversation is encouraged. There are, however, some key points to note regarding participation and use of this chat:
    • There is no need or expectation that any individual member of the club should read or engage with any or all messages in the General chat. Anything considered of key importance or requiring action will be shared via the Announcements channel and club emails rather than the General chat.
    • Keep conversation on topic and relevant to the wider club – if you’re talking to one or two specific people about a specific issue, take it out of the General chat to avoid spamming everyone else.
    • If a conversation gets longwinded, have it in person rather than the General chat. Nobody wants to open the General chat to see 50+ unread messages…
    • Please don’t ask the General chat for information you can find yourself (e.g. race routes or start times, which will be available on the relevant event website).
    • Requests for fundraising, sponsorships, research participants, help or information, etc are permitted in the General chat but please do not post any such request more than once without getting prior approval from the club committee.
    • Try to avoid cross-chats (i.e. where different groups are talking about different things at the same time). Unless your topic is urgent, try to let existing conversations conclude before starting a new topic.
    • Most importantly, be polite and respectful to each other – the committee will remove posts (and participants) that are unkind or deliberately antagonistic, even if intended as jokes.

EMAILS

  • We continue to use the weekly round-up email – this contains similar information as the weekly WhatsApp announcements, as well as news and reports of recent club activities. Engagement with the round-up is mixed, but we believe it serves a useful purpose and should continue to be sent on a weekly basis.
  • We intend to make more use of “one-off” emails to announce certain matters (e.g. limited production runs of HPH vests, the HPH Christmas party). We don’t want to spam our members, but we believe that infrequent but specific emails on key issues for a club are a useful communication method, particularly for members who don’t wish to engage with the WhatsApp community.

IN-PERSON

  • The announcements provided before the club’s group runs each Tuesday evening mirror the information provided in the weekly round-up email and WhatsApp announcements. Obviously these announcements are only received by participants in those in-person sessions.
  • We rely on our members and friends to share useful information, achievements, etc by word of mouth – if you’re a proud Hyde Park Harrier, let people know! Please also let us know (via email, in person or the WhatsApp chats) what you’ve been up to so we can share with the wider club!

WEBSITE

  • The club’s website continues to be a useful source of long-term information (e.g. details of our sessions, how to become a member, club records, etc).
  • We use blogs to share longer form updates and information (e.g. the very blog you’re reading now). We’d encourage our members to write blogs on anything that may be of interest to HPH!

SOCIAL MEDIA

  • The club continues to maintain a presence on Facebook – the weekly WhatsApp announcements are copied onto the club’s private members and friends page. This page gets little engagement, but we do know some people still use it, so it will continue to be used as a “mirror” to the WhatsApp channel.
  • The club also has an Instagram page (which is directly linked to our public-facing Facebook page). This is primarily used to share information and activities to the general public – please do tag the club’s account (@hydeparkharriers) and we’ll always try to re-post and share!

As ever, Hyde Park Harriers works best when the club works together, so if you’ve got any thoughts, suggestions, queries or comments on how we communicate and how it could be improved, we’d love to hear from you!