New Member Orientation Is Not Enough

New member orientation has become an essential part of the membership marketing process. New member parties, how-to presentations, and introductions to department heads are necessary, but they’re often mundane and certainly expected by the new member. As consumers, we expect some form of orientation with everything we purchase. Access to how-to videos, a walk-through when […]
Benefits of Video

Discovering New Benefits of Video If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the video is a picture on steroids. In fact, according to many sources, video is processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text. Most clubs understand there are benefits of video but are you aware of the not-so-common uses your […]
Industry Trends: The Change From Obsolete to Relevant

Industry Trends Looking at club trending today is a bit trickier than you think. Why, because today’s clubs are in various levels of pain or gain. Some clubs have zero initiation fees or discounting marketing plans, and scrambling season to season looking for the “deal of the day”. While other clubs never felt a tremor from […]
Membership Retention & Relations

One of the most interesting realities of the private club industry is that we spend far more time and energy in matriculating new members than we do keeping the ones that we have. From my perspective, we need to spend equal time and energy on membership retention as we do with membership recruitment. Obviously, there […]
Increase Club Value Today With This Simple Step

How often have we heard from members of the board, “Let’s get as many members in the door paying dues,” “All we need are more bodies,” “We’re in the dues business,”? These all too familiar phrases continue to drive the reactive marketing plan at private clubs. While most boards focus on the number of new […]
Mastering Member Engagement

Private club industry professionals continue to search for answers to the million-dollar question, “How can we improve member engagement?” Whether it’s increasing a la carte expenditure at the club, attending more social events or, the all-important, referring and sponsoring friends and family into the club, you know that motivating members to act can be a challenge, […]
Membership Green

It’s crazy how compartmentalized and specialized clubs have become. Going Green! For sure it’s a great concept and long overdue. It’s also one that requires science, commitment, investment, and teamwork. Every department is touched in one way or another. In California, Governor Brown announced a mandatory 25% reduction in water usage more or less forcing […]
Making Your Private Club Relevant

One endeavor all private clubs embark on is the continuous goal of making the private club relevant to their members. By definition, relevancy means pertinent, germane, appropriate, significant and/or important and having social significance. We continue to hear the word more today as clubs begin to relate relevance to the programming we offer to our members. Clubs […]
Youth: Driver of the Private Club Industry

“Because I’m in charge,” was the explanation my daughter exclaimed when I asked why I had to wear the tiara. Without argument (and because I was behind closed doors), I placed Cinderella’s crown on my head and sat cross-legged allowing her to continue using me as a prop in her fantasy. I quickly realized how […]