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What are the long term benefits of your club becoming a focal point for the local community?

Quite simply, the benefits are wide and far reaching. Just being the focus of community activities will bring your club an extraordinary amount of exposure from within and out-with your local area which all leads to free advertising for the facilities, products and services you sell to not just bowling members but a wide range of other people and groups.

Generous gestures such as offering free use of your clubhouse for a multitude of uses in the winter months bring financial and publicity benefits.

Imagine if every other week your club appeared in or was mentioned in an article in the local paper detailing a local event or group’s activities and every time it happens it ends with “and thank you to the bowling club for providing their facilities and support to our event”.

The FREE bowling club success Manifesto is still available here.

Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
How do you increase club membership numbers in a time of economic turmoil? How do you retain members when there is a natural decline in bowling participation? This eBook sets out a plan for transforming any bowls club into the central hub of its community. FREE download for Academy Members more details
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Barriers to Club Survival and Turnaround

When thinking about turning your club’s fortunes around it is easy to get sidetracked by barriers; and even easier to think that all barriers are the same.

However, if you look closely at the barriers to starting the process of recovery, there are different varieties; on a basic level some of these barriers are “problems” and some are “constraints”.

Here are a few Problems:

  1. We don’t have any money to spend on marketing
  2. Our facilities are a bit tired looking
  3. The heating doesn’t work very well
  4. Our bar license doesn’t allow for that type of business

and here are a few Constraints:

  1. There is a lack of interest in bowling
  2. Its winter and nobody wants to know about bowling
  3. We can’t get enough junior members
  4. Our bowling membership is declining year on year

Have a look over them; you will notice that you normally can’t do much about constraints, but you can usually resolve problems.

So…stop worrying about the constraints; work around them.

Start dealing with the top 3 problems which are holding you back today. Going back to our problems above:

We don’t have any money to spend on marketing

Your target market is known to you: get out and talk to them…its FREE

Our facilities are a bit tired looking

Hold a paint and barbeque afternoon next Sunday for members

The heating doesn’t work very well

Find a local engineer (member) and do a deal…or use the warmer rooms to start with.

Our bar license doesn’t allow for that type of business

Create a new category of membership for your new target markets or re-negotiate the license.

Above all get working on something…decide what the top 3 barriers (problems) are and get working on them.

What can your club do for free for the local community?

This week I will again be looking at some club turnaround focussed issues.

I’m going to kick off with a look at what your club can do for the local community without charging!

The readers and members of this site represent the tip of a large pyramid of bowlers. By this I mean that if you are reading this you are among a minority of bowlers and parties interested in the health of the game of bowls that actively engages with others in the online environment and also that you are among the small number of people within the game that are actively looking for solutions to the difficulties the game is experiencing.

As an internet and world wide web user, you can’t have failed to notice the impact the technology has had on Read more

Take a Business View for Club Success

image021Committees are difficult structures with which to run a business, but there can be no doubt in any bowling club official’s mind that the only way for clubs to survive and prosper in the future will be for them to be managed as proper businesses.

In the trying times we find ourselves in, both in relation to the falling uptake of the sport and the general financial climate in the country, the commitment to this approach could quite possibly be the only deciding factor between success and failure for many clubs.

Although the traditional committee structure employed by most clubs can make it difficult to consistently apply the strategic approach needed for long term business growth and improvement, this can be eased by the introduction of Read more

Understanding your target audience

Today I would like to introduce the concept of “a target audience”

I deal with this comprehensively in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and it takes a view that the successful bowling clubs of the future will look quite a bit different to the ones we are familiar with today.

The essence of this is that not all of your club’s revenue will come from bowlers and that you will need to set your sights on a much wider range of “customers” within your local community if your club is to thrive.

This is why I have repeatedly used the terms Member, Customer and User; to try to differentiate between the traditional bowling club member and the future mix of customers a club (the word “customer” of course emphasising the need for clubs to think like businesses) will require to focus on if it is to attract and sustain sufficient foot-fall to thrive in the future.

Of course, people won’t be conveniently Read more