Managing Your Members - LSV Club Support Manual

Volunteers are valuable members of every club. Finding what interests and motivates your members will help you make their experience more meaningful and satisfying, and in turn keep them interested and involved in helping your club.

People volunteer for a variety of reasons including to learn new skills, help others, make new friends, explore career opportunities, feel needed, appreciated and useful, to gain a new direction in life, to give something back to the community or club and most of all – to have fun!

To ensure that your club has adequate volunteers to support its activities, clubs need to be actively and formally acquiring, on-boarding, engaging and renewing members.

a) Member On-Boarding

Good ‘on-boarding’ is a crucial to ongoing member retention. If the new member feels welcomed and instantly part of your Club’s community, their continued engagement with the Club will be more likely. This should be a formalised and planed activity, and ideally last for the members entire first season or year with the Club.

Ideally the club will have an allocated person or committee who is responsible for member on-boarding. As soon as a new membership application is received someone would be in touch with the new member to welcome them, thank them for joining the club, and make a time with them to have an initial induction meeting.

During the face-to-face induction meeting the person responsible for on-boarding would familiarise the new member with the following:

Club Member Handbook
Position description (outlining their role and its impact on the club)
Introduction to other volunteers and key position holders within the club
Administrative systems
Emergency procedures and contact details
General housekeeping of club business

It would also be a pertinent time to talk to the new member about what they want to get out of being a member of the club (eg new skills, take on an Officers position in addition to patrols etc etc), as well as discuss with them what their skills are – for example a new member may have a background in marketing, which could be a real asset to your club. Keep a list of these skills, and make sure you invite the person to utilise these as positions and projects come up.

Throughout the new members first season the person responsible for their on-boarding should keep in regular contact with them – give them an opportunity to express any concerns or raise questions, invite them to participate in activities or further training / development, provide them with information about further pathways in SLS etc. Contact could be a mix of emails, phone calls and face-to-face time with the person.

b) Member Acquisition

Your club should be engaging in activities to actively recruit members. The specific activities undertaken will depend on the identified need.

Ideas for recruitment may include:

Producing a volunteer/member information kit as an introduction for prospective members
Using the local or community newspaper for specific recruitment messages or feature articles
Utilising community announcements on the radio
Promoting your club and its activities as part of Year 11 and 12 Physical Education and Leisure Studies
Conducting Community Education Sessions with local primary schools
Promoting the opportunities available for training and personal development within Life Saving
Engaging in community activities which showcase the benefits of becoming a lifesaver
Local letterbox drops

LSV has also created a member recruitment campaign with assets for clubs to use, these can be found in section 6.3 Member Recruitment

c) Member Engagement

Various retention strategies may be implemented by clubs to maintain the interest and enthusiasm of existing members. These include ongoing encouragement to get involved, communicating effectively, providing further training and development, using member advocates, ensuring all members understand retention is everyone’s job

(i) Encourage member involvement

Members do not want to sit passively on the sidelines while your club works toward its goals. If they can’t take action – any action – they will lose interest in continuing their membership with the club. To keep members engaged, do what you can to help them get involved. Encourage them to attend events, invite them to participate in fundraising opportunities, ask whether they would like to work on any projects etc. You need to show the new member the value of their engagement and how they are/can contribute to achieving the club’s goals.

(ii) Communicate appropriately

When it comes to communicating with members, quality is more important than quantity. Make sure that all communications you send are relevant to your members, to the point and timely. Let your members choose their favourite methods of communication, and let them opt out of certain channels. Never forget that every member interaction is an opportunity for branding, and these interactions must be part of your member retention strategy.

(iii) Training and Development

Clubs can easily offer members training and development to assist in retention as training is designed to teach someone about a specific task, and development will satisfy a member’s need for personal growth and prepare them for future roles and responsibilities. The training and development methods adopted to further your volunteers might include workshops, guest speakers, role plays, demonstrations, self-paced learning resources, internet-based learning, audio-visual resources, conference courses, seminars, small group exercises, discussions, mentoring and vocational courses. Training of volunteers may increase a volunteer’s willingness to adopt roles within your club, and increased confidence may motivate them to take on more responsibilities. It is important to remember that finding the right balance of responsibility will ensure members are not over-worked and eager to stay involved with your club.

(iv) Take advantage of Membership Advocates

You will most likely have a number of extremely loyal members who would love nothing more than the opportunity to rave about your club to other members. So identify who these brand advocates are and build a relationship with these members with the goals of using their passion to help drive member engagement.

(v) Understand that Retention is everyone’s Job

Every single person that works for your Club needs to understand the impact they have on retention. It’s not just the membership director’s role. Every touch point a member has with your Club affects the way they view you, and the way they view the value of their membership. So make sure everyone is well educated on the benefits of membership, the ways you communicate and your Clubs mission and vision.

(vi) Find out why they joined and do more

Every member has a reason they joined. Find out what it was and you have the secret sauce behind member retention. Use that information to customise your offerings and your communications.

(vii) Exit Interviews

When a volunteer leaves your club it is a good opportunity to gather information as to their reason for leaving and their experiences at the club. The information gathered may be used to improve the club and recognise the efforts of volunteers. The simplest way to find out why they left is to ask them – this can be done in person or over the phone. This is not always easy to do, particularly if it is negative feedback, but if you want to improve your club, you need to know the reason why people are leaving. You must also ensure that if you’re going to ask the questions, you need to be prepared to respond and change.

d) Member Renewals

Use a multi-layer approach for renewals. When the time comes for members to renew their membership, give them as many chances to say, “yes” as possible. Develop a planned approach that involved phone calls, email, postal mail and in-person contact with members. Track member involvement at all times and use the information you collect to remind your members of the programs and resources they’ve taken advantage of during their membership with your organization.

There are many ways to get feedback from members who have left. Below are a few options:

Questionnaires and Surveys. Asking member to put their thoughts in writing on a questionnaire or survey is one of the most well-established feedback techniques. If your club has an effective database of contacts for your members, it should be easy to email something out to members who have left. Another easy option is to use one of the free online survey tools (eg. Survey monkey, Survey Gizmo etc) available to develop one which you can send out to your members to complete.
Website feedback. If you have a website, you can set up an area for members to provide feedback through this. This is also a good strategy to implement for all members to use, so hopefully you can hear of any discontent before it leads to members leaving.

Understanding why members leave is crucial for the sustainability of your club. Understand that not everyone is prepared to provide feedback, but those that do should be listened to. If one person has something negative to say regarding your club, you can be certain that there are potentially more out there who won’t say anything but will take their membership elsewhere.

Some principles for great service for your members:

Be happy if members voice their concerns to you. The ones you need to worry about are those who tell their friends about their concerns via social media.
Make it easy for members to provide feedback. That way you know exactly where the issues are within your club and can work to resolve them.
Make member servicing everyone’s responsibility. Adopt a policy of continually improving member service.