New approaches to membership classifications are not only reshaping the makeup of private clubs, but also how they are governed and operated.
Membership classifications at private clubs used to follow a pretty simple rule: Everyone was either in, or they were out. Sure, there might be some distinctions between full-privilege memberships and those restricted to areas and activities like tennis, the pool or social/dining. But for the most part, members were members, and it was pretty easy to make up governing Boards and operating committees that properly reflected who belonged to the club, who used it, and who was interested in helping to set its short- and long-term policies and strategies.
All of that got a lot more complicated in a hurry about 10 years ago, however, when the golf boom began to subside at the same time that the recession brought the value of traditional club membership under serious new scrutiny, especially for the post-Baby Boom generations.
Many clubs’ immediate reaction was to institute deep discounts and incentives to try to make traditional full memberships more palatable for prospective new members. While this succeeded in many cases in attracting bargain-hunters into the fold, it also had the predictable effects of cheapening club brands, diluting the value of memberships and relaxing long-established standards. Most divisively, it created real resentment among long-time members who understandably wondered why they were suddenly sharing facilities and amenities with newcomers who in many cases had not only paid significantly less for the price of entry, but were now also getting to use the club at more favorable pay-as-you-go rates.
The backlash from these situations has prompted many clubs to rethink their strategies for how to appeal to new generations of members who want to join for different reasons, and use the properties in different ways, while still properly respecting, and protecting, the rights and privileges that existing members have paid for and earned. This has led to innovative approaches in even the most traditional settings, such as the “culinary membership”—essentially a new and more effective twist on imposing food minimums—that The Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, Fla., has successfully introduced, to give those who pay for a $2,000 annual dining credit access to the property, but without any golfing privileges.
Finding the Right Mix
In many cases, the shift to develop attractive new membership classifications has also led to significant shifts in how clubs are structured and governed. One of the more dramatic examples of this comes from The Club at Boca Pointe, in Boca Raton, Fla.
“We are one of the few country clubs in South Florida that is non-mandatory, which places us in a unique situation of being able to build a membership base without the ability of demanding equity from those who live within the 3,400-home community in which we operate,” reports Boca Pointe’s General Manager, Helen Karpel. “We have a very loyal base of approximately 900 equity members, but it has been our aggressive non-equity membership programs that have enabled the club to move forward, by allowing other prospective members to design their own lifestyle and not have to live here [to use the club].”
Boca Pointe’s new membership and governance structure has made it easier for the club to proceed with some $16 million in recent renovations, Karpel reports. Most recently, $6 million was spent to open a new 14,000-sq. ft. athletic center, while also upgrading the lobby of the main clubhouse, the main dining room and the ladies’ golf locker room, and also to install a new irrigation system on the club’s 18-hole golf course and re-sod its fairways with Celebration grass.
These improvements were expedited, Karpel reports, after Boca Pointe’s equity membership voted for a bylaw change that permitted the Board and management to create trial memberships over a two-year period, and by market research that identified “a path that we followed for building new membership programs.”
“We used the two-year window [of trial memberships] as a learning curve,” Karpel says. “The research proved that potential members wanted to choose the amenities that suited their lifestyle without making long-term commitments, and that the traditional equity model was antiquated.
“Something new was needed for our club to sustain a revenue base to support the amenities [that members now wanted],” she adds. “So we developed a series of non-equity memberships that allow prospective members to define their own lifestyle by selecting membership categories that meet their needs. If you want golf, you get golf only; tennis only, it’s there, and so forth.
“And if you were a typical ‘snowbird’ or ‘snowflake’ or new to the community, you could buy a passport membership that allows you to use the facilities on 30 different occasions, to get a taste of the club,” Karpel says. “If you wanted to play golf, work out and eat dinner in the same day, that was considered one visit.
“The equity members saw the results: more people using the facilities and their dues stabilized,” says Karpel, who reports that the new programs have brought in the equivalent of over 70 new full-time members.
And the success of the initiatives, she adds, prompted Boca Pointe’s equity members to pass another bylaw change “that further empowered the Board to continue to evaluate and create additional new memberships, to match the needs of our changing community.”
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