Presenting your club's year at the AGM, in five numbers
The accounts get ten minutes at the AGM. The riding year gets no slide.
It goes the same way at almost every annual general meeting. The treasurer gets ten minutes and a spreadsheet, the rides committee gets a round of applause and a thank you, and then it is time for any other business. The question the room is actually waiting for never makes it onto a slide: did we have a good year on the bike? That is not a financial question, but it is the reason those people are members.
You can answer it with five numbers, and your club already has all of them. Below is which five, what they say about your club, and where to get them out of Cyql. Bear in mind that the first time is the most work, because after that you know where everything is.
Number 1: the rides that actually went ahead
Do not start with the number of rides that were on the calendar, but with the number that were ridden. That gap is the first thing a committee learns about its own year. A club that planned 60 rides and rode 42 has a different conversation ahead of it than a club that let everything go ahead, rain included.
In Cyql you count them in the ride calendar, most easily month by month. Put the twelve months under each other and you have not just the annual total but the shape of the season as well: where the calendar filled up, and which months had little on. Leave cancelled rides out of the number, but mention them separately if there were many.
Number 2: the average turnout per ride
Forty rides with six riders is a different club from twelve rides with thirty. The number of rides on its own says little, and the average turnout finishes the picture. Divide the total number of participants by the number of rides ridden and you have it.
It gets more interesting when you break it down, and you can, because the participants are recorded per ride. Split by ride type or by group and you see which rides carry the club and which have been setting off with four people for two seasons now.
Number 3: the kilometres you rode together
This is the number that stays with the room. Take the distance of each ride, multiply it by the number of participants and add it all up. A club with 42 rides, an average of 18 participants and an average of 70 kilometres per ride comes out at well over 50,000 kilometres ridden together.
Cyql has no button for this, so it is adding up in a spreadsheet. Two things make it shorter. If a Challenge ran across the whole year scoring on kilometres, most of it is already gathered in one place, including the rides members let count through Strava. And if it does not have to be right to the kilometre, work with the average per ride and say that it is an approximation.
Number 4: the members who rode at least once
This is the most honest of the five, and the one most committees have never seen. Not how many members you have, but how many members turned up for at least one ride this year. A club with 140 members of whom 60 ever rode is a club of 60 cyclists with a membership list of 140.
There are three ways to get at it. You can go through the year's participant lists and remove the duplicate names, which is work but not difficult. You can use the standings of a year-long Challenge, because they show who rode. And you can connect Claude or ChatGPT to Cyql and simply ask, through a connection that is read-only and reaches only your own club's data. Which route you take does not matter, as long as you say how you counted.
Number 5: the members who joined and who left
Every committee mentions the number of new members anyway, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is just that every year sounds like a good year as long as you quote that figure on its own. So put it next to the number of members who left, and next to number 4, because someone who signs up and never appears on a ride is not yet a gain. Twenty-five new members and 18 cancellations is net growth of seven, and that is the figure you want to be able to compare again next year.
Both sides are in the member administration. If you know, add how many of those new members actually rode in their first months, because that is what makes the case for a beginners' group or better guidance.
The five on one slide
Five numbers, last year beside them, and one sentence each. That is the whole slide, and that one sentence matters more than the figure, because a figure without explanation mostly raises questions. So with turnout, do not only say that it was 18, but also that the Tuesday evening ride was full all spring and that the long Sunday ride tailed off after October.
Do not fill the slide with everything you found. The charts and the breakdowns belong in an appendix or in the rides committee's report, and five numbers with five sentences fit into five minutes.
What you steer the winter's work with
The five numbers are not a look back, they are the grounding for what you decide in that same meeting. At most annual meetings in November and December the agenda moves on to group structure, the winter programme and the training camp, and those are exactly the decisions these numbers are needed for. A group that set off with four people all year is one you merge or wind up, and that proposal sells itself once the figure has been on the screen. It works the other way too: if it turns out that 80 of your 140 members did not ride once, then an extra beginners' group in March is no longer a committee idea but an answer to what the room has seen for itself.
To close
The AGM is the one evening in the year when the whole club is sitting and listening, and that evening deserves more than the cash position. Five numbers about the riding are enough to turn the conversation to what the club is for.
Cyql has no button that prints an annual report, so you make the slide yourself. What you no longer have to do is reconstruct a whole season out of group chats, old emails and the memory of the rides committee. The rides are in the ride calendar, the participants are attached to the rides, and the members are in the member administration.