When asked to name their club’s greatest asset, most club members will without hesitation say “the green”.
As a green maintenance company you wouldn’t expect us to put up much of an argument against that now would you?
Well, of course the green is of major importance to all clubs, but when your club starts to take a more business focused view on management as described in Read more
Being able to discern your club’s position with regards to its member loyalty ratio can appear rather tricky if not virtually impossible sometimes. When your member or customer base is made up of disparate groups with differing interests and priorities, which of course it should be, it can be difficult to keep track of how well you are doing overall.
This, unfortunately puts a lot of clubs off trying to find out how they are doing in the eyes of their customers and they only realise things aren’t going well when its too late to do anything about it.
However, thankfully there are some tried and tested methods that can be used to achieve this goal.
Working it out
Being able to retain a loyal member base has obvious benefits and understanding member sentiment is pivotal to achieving this loyalty factor.
Taking the time to focus on understanding the level of each member’s loyalty is both prudent and beneficial to the long term health of your club. Once you have a feel for this, the club management can then take the necessary action to try to prevent potentially loyal customers from just being casual visitors.
Here are the top 4 things to seriously consider in trying to understand the club’s position within the mindset of the various member and user groups:
This article is an extract from Bowling Club Membership Retention and Growth, which builds upon the concepts of the customer or club user as discussed in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.
Tomorrow I will introduce the concept of “a target audience”, maybe not something that comes naturally to most clubs.
Since announcing the club website offer yesterday, I’ve had 2 enquiries related to advertising on your new club website.
The first question was:
Q1. Will our website be covered with adverts for bowls-central?
A1. No.
Second question was:
Q2. Can we have sponsors ads on our website?
A2. Of course, you can display any amount of sponsor ads on your site to raise money for your club funds. We are happy to help with adding these and of course there are many other ways that you can raise money through your site such as Google ads, and an increasing number of programs you can join and promote on your site to raise money for the club.
So not only do you get a professionally designed, built and hosted site, you also potentially get a new revenue stream or multiple revenue streams for your club into the bargain!
You can see the club website offer here.
In less than a week my new book, Performance Bowling Greens will be launched on this site; 15th of February to be precise. In the lead up to the launch we have been looking into some of the obstacles that stand in the way of the average bowling club achieving the performance they desire from their green. Today I want to look at one of those obstacles more closely and that is the obstacle that Tradition puts in our way. The trouble is that many of these “traditions” are really not that old. One of the most damaging of these is the “tradition” of top-dressing our greens with high sand content dressings every year.
Now I should warn you at the outset that this is a long one and you might want to grab a coffee before we get started. The reason for the length of this article is that I don’t just want to discuss the process of top-dressing; I also want to show you how damaging it can be to your green and how damaging it can be to your wallet. To do that I am going to re-present to you 3 of the most clicked on articles we’ve ever published on this site (which shows, I think, that many clubs already understand the problem). So here we go:
At most bowling clubs the end of September is when thoughts will start to turn to the autumn renovation program or the “closing of the green” as many clubs call it. Bowling clubs throughout the UK will take delivery of between 3 and 10 tonnes of very expensive top-dressing compost, which will be applied to the green after hollow tining or some other aeration operation, in the belief that Read more
Eric, Syd and Doug have demonstrated admirably the trait of resourcefulness and innovation that exists throughout the bowling scene.
A common theme running through all of these stories is the determination to do the job correctly, regardless of the financial barriers in the way.
I spelled out this need for clear and innovative thinking in my Manifesto for a Successful Bowling Club late last year. The Manifesto is still available Free here.
Although these readers have demonstrated the common theme of resourcefulness and innovation, the stories are also clear illustration of the main issue in bowling today; lack of funds!
When Eric emailed the details of his machine, he went on to say that he had often thought of trying to get a group of clubs together in his local area to share the cost and benefit of new machinery…another example of innovative thinking.
Almost every email or query I receive from readers of this site starts with or includes a sentence about how they are working under very difficult financial conditions.
Club Management Committees must start to embrace the Read more
