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 Building
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Welcome to Club Kayak
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WINTER 2006 - SAFETY HARBOR, FLORIDA USA
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PART 2 - PARTICIPATION
This is the second part of a three part series
on Building a Paddle Club by Hank Brooks and the Tampa Bay Sea
Kayakers.
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Building Participation
Rule of Thirds: An investigation
into our club membership and participation has found that we could
divide the membership into three categories. I call this the "Rule
of Thirds". About 1/3 of the people are very active, 1/3
are moderately active and 1/3 we never see. My "guess"
is that most clubs have approximately these divisions of members.
| Portion of Membership |
Paddling
Frequency |
Attends
Meetings |
Probability of
Renewing Membership |
| 1 / 3 |
Weekly to once a month |
6+ per year |
High – very active kayakers who support the club |
| 1 / 3 |
4 to 6 times
per year |
2 to 4 per year |
Medium – Have many activities in which they are involved |
| 1 / 3 |
Once a year
on vacation |
Seldom if ever |
Low – kayaking does not fit into their life as a regular
activity |
Problems With Most Clubs
As with most clubs, about 10% of the club
members do 90% of the work in the club. This past year we have
been frustrated in getting sufficient members to lead club-sponsored
trips and to participate in the events that we did schedule. We
have also noticed that many members are not renewing their membership.
We decided that we needed a strategy to overcome these problems.
That’s when we formed our Marketing Committee.
Goal To Build Membership and Club Participation
We broke our goal into two parts:
- Bring in New Members. The theory here is that if you have
200 members in your club you have 20 “worker bees”
(10% of club membership). If you have 350 members, there will
be 35 “worker bees” to help lead the club and it’s
activities. So our goal became to increase our membership from
200 to 350 members.
- Increase Member Participation / Avoid Losing Members (we
believe that the strategies to increase member participation
also will help avoid losing members)
Strategies To Employ
There is probably not one "magic bullet" to solve these
problems, but rather a whole system or "bunch of things"
which we must do to help solve our problems. We broke our strategic
approach into four factors:
- Club Members – recruiting new members through their
solicitations
- Kayak Shops - which carry our recruiting brochures and recommend
our club
- Advertising and Publicity – getting the word out about
our club
- Club Policies, Practices , Paddles - this includes everything
from our dues structure to the types of paddles we have each
month
Putting it all together in model or graphic form, it looks like
this:
Part 1:Getting
Started, Part 2:Participation, Part
3:Membership
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