Phillip Cooper, Customer Success Lead at Whoosh, discusses how clubs can best utilize member data. Whoosh is a club operations software company.
By Phillip Cooper, Customer Success Lead at Whoosh
One of the most important and underutilized resources of any club is their member data.
Reasons for this are varied and include data errors or omissions, incomplete or inconsistent data, and a lack of perceived value. At its core, your data is more than simply a name and membership type. If you have clean data, you will be able to better understand what membership types use the club and in what ways. This will help you make better decisions about your club that will positively impact business operations. For example, if you know that social members are currently vying for booking slots that would normally go to a golf member, you might enact a restriction that limits access or add additional tee times to meet demand.
Additionally, member data can and should be leveraged to promote a better member and guest experience. Want to send invites for a ladies’ golf event? Is your Kid’s Klub closed? Is there an upcoming pickleball tournament? Any marketing materials around these events should target the correct demographic of your club. Members only want to receive relevant emails and texts. If you have clean data, you save your club operators time and specifically target the intended members, streamlining your communications.
Here are three tips to clean up your member data and make the most of it:
Clean It Up
Before you can optimize your data, you need a clean place to start. In the world of data, “bad-in= bad-out,” meaning you can’t optimize what you don’t have. So, where do you start if you have data that is patchy and incomplete? You start with an audit of your existing data and look for areas where data is missing or incomplete. From here, kick off a campaign to fill those holes. A great opportunity to do this is when you’re collecting member dues or at the start of your club’s busy season.
Keep It Clean
The frequency with which you review your data aids in detecting areas where you can have a more complete picture of your members. Regularly auditing your data is the key to long-term success. I recommend auditing your databases twice per year to maintain accurate data. Be sure to audit member and family phone numbers, emails and marriage status at a minimum. While many clubs accomplish audits via member surveys, a more modern approach is sending push notifications to update the member information in your club app. Ideally you are working with a company that can facilitate a seamless transfer of information between your club app and CMS provider.
Collect Clean Data from the Start
The best thing you can do to ensure your data stays clean is to complete member profiles with as much information as possible from members and their guests. You may not have another opportunity to collect this information when you need it most. This means it’s important to collect correct family and dependent data (including significant others), up-to-date contact information, and other demographic information that may be of use to your club. This helps you understand your membership holistically as you’ll have better data on how members of a family utilize the facilities.
About the Author
Phillip Cooper is the Customer Success Lead of Whoosh, a modern club operations software company recently recognized as one of the most innovative technologies in the club industry. He is a customer success expert with more than 10 years of experience leading customer success and support teams. Phillip can be reached at [email protected].
Tell Us What You Think!
You must be logged in to post a comment.