Plan Your Summer Events Now

Evaluate Your Community’s Needs

Chat with your customers to gauge interest and determine what kind of events you should offer. Hand out a survey at your register and encourage customers to provide feedback on the kinds of programs they’d like to see at your shop. Give them options like leagues, date night, cosmic archery, 3D archery and youth archery, but also ask them to make suggestions. Place the survey on your website as well to include customers that are doing web searches for local programs. They could be waiting for the right event to try archery in a group setting, and they’d likely welcome the chance to provide input.

The ATA’s Explore Bowhunting and Explore Bowfishing programs and USA Archery’s Explore Archery program offer sample outlines for experiences like a weeklong summer camp. During these camps, archers meet every day for a week. Retailers can choose to offer the program during the day or evening, whichever works best for their participants.

Review the ATA’s Event Planning Guide for additional ideas and tips on how to get your programs up and running. If people in your community are looking to learn more about how they can use bowhunting to source local wild game for their dinner table, Field to Fork classes are a great option during the summer. Partner with your local state wildlife department to organize one of these events to help prepare aspiring bowhunters for the upcoming hunting season.