We're Increasing Our Office Presence To Help Clubs Get Through Coronavirus - British Martial Arts & Boxing Association (BMABA) For Clubs & Instructors

We recently announced the launch of our Coronavirus Recovery Toolkit to help thousands of clubs get back to teaching as effectively and safely as possible. This included a free Covid-Aware martial arts instructor training course.

Throughout the entire Coronavirus pandemic we have been immensely busy dealing with thousands of emails, calls and communications. This has been not just from our members but also external clubs interested in joining or in desperate need of help where their own association has been unable or unwilling to assist.

As we continue to provide substantial subsidies to help UK martial arts clubs recover and unveil the constantly growing Covid-19 Recovery Toolkit we have been absolutely inundated with emails, phone calls, messenger conversations and other communications. Our strategy team recently held discussions about how best to proceed and we have concluded that in light of the obvious demand for further help and guidance from clubs across the UK, it would be irresponsible of us to reduce capacity.

With this in mind, we are doing more than ever to help our clubs keep in touch and to ensure we can safely and effectively communicate with new interested instructors.

With immediate effect;

We’re introducing an overflow reception team to our phone lines, to ensure we can always answer calls Monday to Friday 08:30am to 06:00pm. Even if a specific member of our senior management team or operations staff isn’t available, a trained member of our team will be able to take a message and get the right person to call you back the same working day.
Recognising we have a number of key workers whom teach, alongside many other coaches and senseis who work full time during the week, we’re opening our phone lines every Saturday between 09:00am and 05:00pm.
We’re increasing capacity on Facebook Messenger for live chat across all of our websites and throughout the Facebook platform
We intend to respond to every messenger message within an average of 15 minutes of receipt, and hope to meet this by the end of June 2020.
We’re increasing capacity in e-mails by bringing in additional admin support in our West Sussex office, with the possibility of increasing our permanent Operations Team too.
We’ve already introduced and host dozens of Zoom calls throughout the week for clubs interested in ‘meeting us’, enabling everyone to safely interact ‘face to face’ with our senior management team without having to travel to our offices.

This is just some of the many measures we’re taking to ensure we are here to support our clubs and members post-Covid. These communication channels will be complimented by Whatsapp and SMS support in July, and all services will remain permanently available going forward.

We know our ability to increase resources will be beyond the scope and ability of many other associations. This forms part of our Groups’ wider response to Covid-19 and it’s devastating impact on the UK martial arts sector. Our association has been declined any help or financial assistance from Sport England despite consistent applications, so this – like everything else we provide to our members – remains a self-funded effort to do the next right thing to guide our clubs out of lockdown.

To see all of our communication channels, please contact us here.