Lockdown 2.0 – Retention Ideas
Lockdown is here again in England, as as a Martial Arts school you will be once again limited to online training.
But you can do a lot online, and you are not necessarily limited to your usual training – here are some ideas of things you can do over the next 4 weeks to keep your students entertained, engaged and invested in training at you club:
Ideas from the NEST team:
Live Quiz Night
Host a ‘pub quiz’ style quiz LIVE on your Facebook – you can download quiz packs on myMA with all the questions and answers, so all you need to do is host
Mindfulness Talk
Help student deal with the stress with an introduction to mindfulness or even a guided meditation. If you’re well-versed in this topic you can deliver it yourself, or reach out to a guest speaker
Online seminars for Students on nutrition/sleep/anxiety etc
Again, you can get a guest to present this talk if you are not an expert.
Story Time
Read a story to your students, something that relates back to the core principles of training
Arts Day
Show your students how to make a craft- something like a toy sword
Live Drawing Class
Again you could reach out to a guest professional to run this class
Share videos of kids talking about how MA helped them over lockdown
A lot of NEST clients did this as part of a marketing campaign near the end of the previous lockdown. Start the conversation on your community.
2 week theme e.g. Ninja Warrior training programme
Think outside your usual training and offer something unique to lockdown
Hold an online grading module during that period
Lots of instructors have moved their grading online
Run competition for a student that shows most dedication over lockdown
You could award points for students who attend class, interact with your social posts and go above and beyond. Award a prize at the end of lockdown
Here are some ideas from NEST instructors on what they have done over the last few months to keep their students:
“I ran a sports day seems how the kids missed their summer one. It went down a treat! 100+ kids all on zoom at the same time competing in a virtual sports day. It was ace! I split them into 4 teams and then used staff as teams captains, we got involved too. Games included typical school sports day games, egg and spoon race, throw balls into hoops or buckets etc. Even put a few martial arts games in there.
We also had kids quizzes and picture bingo’s. And ran a social event for adults every Friday, usually a quiz or virtual race evening.”
We did a general fitness zoom class as an extra which students and other family members enjoyed taking part in
Students earned points for attendance and used against merchandise on return for the first 30 days
• Non-MA day classes Arts & Crafts, Origami, Spanish, Story Time
• Lots of weekly homework for Show n Tell the following week .. Poster Drawing, Help at home with jobs etc
Everything we did we had parents posting pics of their activities non-stop on social media .. we also posted non stop showing the community what we were doing
Keep active and stay a leader in the field in your town”
Super Hero Friday, everyone dressed up. The kids loved it!
Last Lockdown I did a virtual warrior 8 week challenge
We have a welcome 5 minutes so friends can see who’s in. We have some fun sessions, pure syllabus so they know what we are covering in each session and we had a party which was a great success. Hope this helps
We have done a lockdown pack and gotten medals and certs ready for return, each person has a minimum set of moves, a run/ walk log and activities inside, also a weekly zoom form challenge, they have to attend the online classes to learn the new form and it’s a different set form every week, an activity pack is then sent to the winner.
We ran few different things. Online competitions, weekly challenges(tik tok challenge/kick bottle lid/kick toilet roll/ create best origami piece etc), Held fortnite games days, regular quizzes and even a walking fundraiser challenge to help get people out spend more family time together also, guest instructors (shared classes changing each week with all clubs joining in), we are also lucky to be part of an association that has been very active at headquarters in japan, weekly(sometimes more than once) class with top Japanese instructors. If go back into lockdown/circuit breaker we have few more things planned
I kept the same timetable without missing a lesson and set a challenge to everyone that we would be the best performing Academy in our assocation when we came out of Lockdown – worked very well as everyone had an overall goal. I zoomed in other guest instructors nationally and internationally, ran a Kata super Saturday and a splits challenge
