Best Practice Guides

Running Society Activities

There are many aspects to ‘running a society’, and it is this diversity that makes it very difficult to provide a ‘catch-all’ guidance! There are also many different kinds of society within the Model Engineering fraternity to add yet another dimension to this! We use the term ‘society’ or ‘club’ to generalise, but even here there are variations that cause differences in how certain matters need to be approached.

To give some examples:

Structure and establishment of a society:

  • Legal status (association/limited company and others)
  • Constitution and governance
  • Finances and taxation
  • Member management

Activities undertaken:

  • Member to member support
  • Society projects
  • Social events and similar
  • Exhibitions, both for other societies/model engineers and to the public
  • Public participation events (eg passenger carrying)

Operational management:

  • Health and Safety
  • Equipment use and proficiency
  • Training/learning
  • Technical development, design and problem solving
  • Maintenance
  • Boiler testing procedures

We wish to explore the practices on the above topics adopted by societies to endeavour to provide a means of communicating and assisting all societies to become aware of how others may have approached such issues.

We will endeavour to address the above topics in due course. If any club member wishes to assist FMES to develop this service, please contact us.