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Your Club Doesn’t Have a Recruiting Problem. It Has a Keeping Problem.
Pull up your club’s membership roster from three years ago. Count how many of those names are still active today. If that number stings a little, keep reading, because the fix almost certainly isn’t a better flyer or a louder social media push.
I’ve spent years standing in front of camera clubs all over the country, and nearly every one of them treats membership the same way: recruit hard, then hope. Boards put real time and money into getting people in the door and almost none into figuring out why the people who already walked through it eventually stop coming back. That’s backwards, and the research on membership organizations backs it up.
You’re Probably Fine At Attracting People
Most clubs already do the attract part reasonably well. Open house, Facebook page, flyers at the local camera store. If you’re doing one thing right, it’s probably asking current members to bring a friend. A WildApricot survey of membership organizations found that roughly three out of four clubs and associations run a referral program, and it gets rated the single most effective recruiting tool they have, ahead of everything else they measured.
None of that is wrong. Keep doing it. But if you think your membership problem is a recruiting problem, you’re looking at the wrong end of the funnel. The leak isn’t at the top.
The Leak Is In The Welcome
Here’s the number that should bother every club board more than it seems to. Across hundreds of membership organizations surveyed for the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, overall member renewal rates range from 82 to 84 percent. First-year renewal, the people who just joined, runs 72 to 74 percent. That’s a 10-point gap, and it shows up survey after survey, year after year. Your newest members are the ones most likely to quietly disappear, and the reason usually has nothing to do with how committed they were. Nobody welcomed them, so they left.
Research from ASAE, the trade group for people who run associations for a living (yes, that’s a real job), found that members who rack up three or more meaningful interactions with your club in their first few months renew at close to 100 percent. Three interactions isn’t a high bar. A mentor introducing themselves counts. So does an officer sitting down with a new member for ten minutes and actually asking what they’re hoping to get out of the club. Even something as small as someone remembering their name at the second meeting, not just the first, adds up.
Clubs with a formal welcome plan, even a basic one, see 68 percent first-year retention. Clubs with nothing structured see 62 percent. While six points doesn’t sound like a big deal, it is when you realize it costs nothing but attention. It requires no budget or equipment, just somebody deciding to notice new people and interact with them.
Then You Keep Losing Them Quietly
The keeping problem doesn’t stop after year one. When membership organizations get asked why people don’t renew, “lack of engagement” tops the list nearly every time, cited by close to half of associations surveyed. Not cost. Not competing hobbies. Engagement.
The drop-off almost never happens all at once. A member doesn’t wake up one day and quit. They stop coming to one meeting, then two; they skip the holiday party; the contest deadline passes, and they don’t submit anything. By the time their membership actually lapses, you realize that they actually checked out months earlier.
Your roster is full of members who are technically still on the roster, but functionally they are already gone. If your club isn’t watching for that, you’re finding out the hard way, at renewal time, when it’s too late to fix it.
Ask, Don’t Guess
The fix for all of this is almost embarrassingly simple: ask people what’s actually going on, at three different points, instead of assuming you already know.
New members, around the 90-day mark. This is your chance to catch a small problem before it becomes a quiet exit. Ask:
- What made you decide to actually join, not just visit?
- What’s one thing about the club you expected that hasn’t happened yet?
- Who have you had a real one-on-one conversation with since you joined?
Current members who’ve gone quiet. This is the group almost every club ignores, because they haven’t officially left yet. If someone hasn’t shown up to a meeting, contest, or activity in a couple of months, that’s your trigger to reach out. Don’t wait for renewal season. Ask:
- What’s kept you from coming to meetings lately?
- Is there something specific that would bring you back?
- Do you still feel like part of this club, or has it started to feel optional?
Members who didn’t renew. This is the survey almost nobody sends, and I think I know why. Boards are afraid of the answer. It’s a lot easier to tell yourself someone got busy or moved away than to hear that they felt ignored, or judged, or like they never quite found their place. Ask anyway:
- What’s the real reason you didn’t renew, not the polite one?
- Was there a specific moment you decided you were done?
- What would have changed your mind?
You won’t get a 100 percent response rate on any of these, and that’s fine. Even a handful of honest answers will tell you more about your actual retention problem than another six months of guessing.
Start Here
If you only do one thing after reading this, don’t start with the exit survey. Start with the members still on your books who haven’t shown up in a while. They’re the easiest group to reach, the least defensive to talk to, and the most likely to come back if somebody just asks what happened. Your recruiting is probably fine. Go find out where you’re actually leaking, and fix that instead.
Now go pick up that camera and shoot something! Because – “Your BEST shot is your NEXT shot!” — Joe Edelman
