While there was some initial hesitation about how appropriate or relevant our annual Ideas Issue might be this year, we found that many managers are eager to offer special concepts and features as they return to full operations, as members look to return to their clubs as trusted, safe-haven environments.
Over the rest of this month and into the first part of July, our website and daily e-newsletter will feature stories from C+RB‘s 14th Annual (June) Ideas Issue, which you’ll also get in the mail in the coming days.
There was some initial hesitation as we set out to put the issue together this year. While you’ve always told us that it ranks as one of our most popular and useful issues each year, there was certainly a question about how appropriate or relevant its content might be for the 14th annual version, given how different this year has already turned out to be from the 13 that preceded it. And we weren’t even sure many club managers would want, or be able, to talk to us about ideas we’d seen or heard about at the Club Management Association of America (CMAA) Idea Fair or through other sources, because most of them involved concepts and events that predated the coronavirus outbreak.
We vowed to go ahead and contact those clubs to see if they felt their ideas still had validity, and we were fully prepared to scrap doing an Ideas Issue this year if it became clear that they didn’t. But as you’ll see from the articles that we’ll post in the coming weeks and when your print issue arrives, clubs were not only still eager to tell us about their successful ideas, but when we asked if they could still be applied during their post-pandemic recovery efforts, all said yes, even if some concessions might now need to be made for social distancing and other safety concerns.
Many said, in fact, that being able to offer these kind of special concepts and features would only add to the appeal they expected to be able to offer later this year, as members looked to return to their clubs as trusted, safe-haven environments.
We’re also featuring an “idea” this year that doesn’t involve a special theme or a new twist on an activity. This story jumped out at us at the CMAA Idea Fair, because the poster describing it (at right) stood out like one of those get-help signs you see on train platforms.
Highlighting personnel and management issues, such as Lindsay Pizarro of the California Yacht Club has done with her effort to help other managers, women and men, take the right steps in maternity- and medical-leave situations, is also an “idea” that’s taking on more validity and importance these days—especially as new light is being shined on diversity and equality questions that the club industry, like all sectors, will now need to be prepared to take a renewed look at going forward.
So for all of these reasons, we’re glad we forged ahead with Ideas Issue #14, and we hope you find it to be just as useful, if not more so, as the first 13, as you and your staff start to pick up the pandemic pieces and regenerate your operations. In fact, we hope it helps to spawn a flurry of great new ideas you can implement in the second half of this year—and when you do, please let us know about them for our 2nd Annual Top Innovators Awards in December, which you’ll soon see more details about as well.
Tell Us What You Think!
You must be logged in to post a comment.