Conservation Award: Ipswich Golf Club

There is good golf course work going on at Ipswich Golf Club, nestled near the east coast of England. The club is closer geographically to European capitals like Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, but it’s far closer spiritually to the Home of Golf — St Andrews is about eight hours to the north by car.

Established in 1895 and moved to its current location in 1926, the James Braid design includes the 18-hole Purdis Heath course and the 9-hole Bixley course, and covers about 220 acres — one-fifth of which is part of a significant and long-term heathland restoration. “Heathland is quite a rare habitat globally,” ecology greenkeeper Neil Sherman says, “and our site is a link between two other nature reserve heathland sites. We’re like a wildlife corridor between those two and we’re trying to do a lot of work to get more of our heather heathland back.”

Sherman has worked at the club for 24 years, all of them alongside course manager Graham Brumpton, who started there in 1991. Both of them handle different social media accounts for the club, with Sherman responsible for the club’s ecology Twitter account, where he highlights projects and wildlife sightings.

The club has twice won BIGGA’s Golf Environment Award and added a Conservation Greenkeeper of the year award in 2020. Now they’ve added the Super Social Media Award for Conservation to their ecology shelf.

Sherman and the rest of the Ipswich Golf Club team will be honored at the 12th annual Golf Course Industry TweetUp — #GCITweetUp23 — scheduled for 3 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 8 at Aquatrols Booth #2373 at the GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in Orlando — along with all other 2023, 2022 and 2021 Super Social Media Award winners.

In advance of #GCITweetUp23, we talked with Sherman about ecology and social media.

How do you use social media for work?

On the ecology account, I post projects and wildlife sightings. On the greenkeepers page, the guys keep people up to date with the work that’s going on on the course, the work we’ve been doing in the past week, why we’re doing various things. We’re trying to get that information out there so people will understand why we’re shutting an area off or why we’re working in an area. You could be out doing the work and have people coming up to you, stopping you from working because they want to know what’s going on — and there’s no problem with them doing that, but if you’re trying to get on with a job, you’d rather just get on with it to get it finished. Having social media there saves that time.

We all like putting the word out, saying what we’re doing. We like to show off the spectacular views, like the aerial photography. We’ve got a drone that helps show areas of work we’re working on as well. All really good tools you can use. It’s all helping promote what we’re doing.

What do you hope others learn from your social media usage?

The main thing to get across is that it’s really easy to do, and others can quickly pick up and do it. Say what you’re doing, promote what you’re doing to your members and others. It’s so easy. Just do it.

What do you learn from your industry peers on social media?

In the U.K., I like to see what other places are doing, to see if they’re doing similar projects to us — because sometimes problems can occur in what you’re doing and someone out there has come up with a different answer to a problem you might have, so it’s quite good for picking up that sort of thing. And it’s also quite nice to look around the rest of the world. It’s interesting to see this ecology thread is spreading all over the place now. There are golf courses all over the world that are taking it on. Obviously, I can’t probably use something from Australia on my own golf course because it’s a totally different climate with different wildlife, but it’s still interesting to see how people are doing their bit in their backyards.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.