Seen 9.4 Million Times

We're a 136-year-old Cornish football club, and we've quietly built something we're proud of. We are nowhere near finished. Here's the story, and how you can be part of what comes next.

By Alex Hayward, Head of Marketing & Strategy

That post on your feed this morning came from the club. So did the highlights video on our website, and the season ticket you bought for the summer. None of it came off a shelf or from an agency. It was us.

We have been going for 136 years, run by volunteers, and we are a charity. We play at Step 5, the highest level in our history, in front of several hundred people on a Saturday. You would not expect what goes on behind the scenes to look the way it does.

The part I am most excited about is the media work, and we take it as seriously as anything else here. Over the past year we have built a campaign around the idea that the club is one of the ways Newquay shows who it is. We plan it properly, write our own copy, and work with photographers who shoot to a brief, while a designer brought in for the 26/27 season takes the lead on how the club looks, from matchday graphics and signing announcements to the signage and print around the ground itself.

The work goes further than posting about the club. A good part of it is building relationships across the town, with charities, the town council and local businesses, so the club shows up where the town shows up.

We rolled Canva out across the teams, so a volunteer running the Ladies or the Vets can make something that belongs in the same family as everything else. When a post is ready it goes out through Buffer, scheduled across the right channels instead of someone posting in a rush at full time. And we use AI where it earns its place, including in developing the stack itself.

We pay attention to how modern sports media works, and to the methods the best clubs and organisations use to grow their support, then bring that thinking here at our own scale. We measure what we do closely and hold it against the targets we set ourselves, from reach and engagement to how many people come through the gate. Last year our posts were seen 9.4 million times. On Facebook alone, nearly three quarters of the people we reach don't follow us yet. For a non-league club run by volunteers, that is a long way ahead of where you would expect us to be, and we mean to stay there.

All of that sits on top of systems we built ourselves. The website is custom built and runs on the kind of foundations you would find behind plenty of businesses. Ticketing, memberships and the sponsor side all run on it. Last year, season tickets went online through an outside platform. We have since brought ticketing in-house, so supporters can now buy a season ticket and pre-buy extras like 50/50 tickets and merchandise bundles in the same place. Anyone who signs up still gets a real digital membership card rather than a slip of paper.

More than eighty local businesses sponsor the club. Keeping that going used to mean chasing paper around. Now a sponsor can fill in an order online and their agreement comes together at the other end without anyone keying the same details in three times over. That frees up the volunteers who would have been doing the admin to spend the time talking to sponsors instead, which is the part that matters.

Underneath it all is a registration system that joins the dots. When someone signs up, their details flow to the right places, the membership card is issued and the payment goes through, with nothing copied across by hand. For a club running five senior teams, that saved time adds up quickly.

For supporters who can't get up to Mount Wise, our cameras send the game to our own live page, and a proper newsletter is on its way. Across all of it the aim is the same. We want following the club to feel like we are paying attention.

None of this would be possible on a non-league budget alone. Because we are a charity, companies like Canva, Google and Ticket Tailor support us with the tools we rely on every day, and that backing is a big part of why we can build the way we do.

Here is the real reason I wanted to write this down. Everything you have read is the work of people who give their time, and none of them started out as experts. They had a go, they learned, and the club is better for it. We are still building it, and we have no plans to stop. Bringing in a designer for the new season is a sign of how serious we are, and the work on offer is the kind that shapes how the whole club is seen. If you work in tech, design, writing, video, media or social, or you just fancy picking it up, there is a place for you here to do something that matters. We want Newquay AFC to be known as a club worth paying attention to, on the pitch and off it.

If that sounds like you, email us at [email protected]: [email protected]

Or have a look at the volunteer page, and come and be part of it: newquayafc.com/get-involved/volunteer