Pulse Surveys for Members

Pulse Surveys for Members
 

By: Bill Stepec
Director of Marketing & Communications
Ontario Racquet Club

What keeps our Clubs afloat? Depending on who you ask, you'll get a different answer.

Quality facilities, cashflow, member sentiment and an engaged staff are all important - but if you're in Marketing & Communications, you'd say that information is the resource you need to take things to the next level.

In most cases, it's only become easier to know more. Most club software - any modern system, anyways - will allow you to generate endless reports on attendance, facility utilization, member cash spend, etc.

These tools and reports, however, are inherently at odds with our industry's healthy pre-occupation with bespoke, personalized service. In fact, the whole process seems set up to encourage herd mentality, promoting demographics and personas over individuals. Knowing that all of your yoga or pickleball classes fill up is a great starting point, but it certainly doesn't tell us the whole story. As much as our members vote with their time and their wallet - how do they really feel about our clubs?

Traditionally, member surveys are the go-to for qualitative feedback. Once or twice a year, we'd assign every member with 25 plus minutes of "homework", with only a few hundred of your most engaged members filling out the survey in its entirety. We'd then pour over the data and come up with an action plan based on this feedback, often waiting a full year to see if those same KPI's see any improvement.

This maybe made a lot of sense back when having an online presence was a novel thing in our industry, and there was little expectation for clubs to be agile in their decision making. A lot has changed.

Pulse Surveys for Members

The traditional "pulse survey" focuses on monitoring satisfaction over time and is common practice amongst many organizations. The idea is to hit your target with frequent, short surveys looking to gauge engagement and get feedback about super-specific topics. Sending them out regularly means you get almost real-time feedback on changes, and the super-short nature of this survey means the completion rate will be quite high compared to the half-hour questionnaires we might have inflicted on this group ten years ago. These surveys are typically made with staff and employee feedback in mind, but why not extend then mentality to our members as well?

Our members are consistent, invested “clients” compared to what one might experience at a retail storefront, for example. Members are "invested" in the club by nature of our membership models - it's not unusual for a member to come to the club at six years old and continue their membership through to late adulthood. We have a consistent, captive audience - so our methods of collecting feedback should reflect this.

The Process

The idea, again, is to send out a very short survey, and send it out often. We use special software for this - Keepme.ai - but it's likely your existing survey and mass-emailing, and club software can do this with a little bit of manual work.

First off, design a survey of no more than three questions. We only ask two questions; we request an NPS score - "How likely are you to refer us to a friend" - plus we ask for open-ended comments. While I would encourage anyone going down this road to ask for a rating of some sort, it doesn't need to be in the NPS format. I would absolutely recommend offering members a chance to leave open-ended feedback on this survey, as that's where you'll do the majority of your learning.

Secondly, this needs to get sent out to members. I would highly recommend sending this to members who are in some way engaged - the easiest way is targeting people who are attending the club with some regularity. Pull a list of everyone who has checked in, or used one of your services in the past month, if in doubt.

Most clubs have a fair amount of members who maintain a membership but don't attend for whatever reason. This survey is not for them - although you're more than welcome to tackle their reasons for non-attendance in a separate survey. If you want to go down that route, I would encourage you to do it when they are not close to their renewal period, as the last thing you'd want to do is prompt them to cancel their membership. But that's a blog for another time.

So, we have a list of members who attend regularly. Our software emails about 50 of these people every day asking for feedback, so long as they haven't answered one of our surveys in the past three months. It does this automatically and feeds us the results, which is very nice from a convenience standpoint.

If you're doing this within your existing e-blast software like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, I would likely opt to send out the survey bi-weekly to a subset of members. On subsequent sends, ask the system to filter out anyone who opened or clicked on your last few survey emails, so you can make sure the same member hasn't gotten your survey twice in a short timeframe. Again, our members aren't surveyed for a full three months before they're eligible to receive a new questionnaire from us.

On the survey software side, I would suggest duplicating the survey every month. This makes it easier for you to see how your member's priorities might change throughout the year, also making it a simple matter to compare year-over-year results. Having one survey you use for a full 12-months can become a headache to organize and pull actionable results from. That said, I would suggest keeping your questions the same to the degree that's practical, so as to maintain apple-to-apple comparisons.

The Results

From here, you'll get a steady stream of member feedback that is highly specific not only to that member, but also when the question was asked. Club overcrowding might come across as a huge issue in January or June, for example, but is not on anyone's list of concerns come August.

We generate a regular report that's shared with our department heads and staff. I personally go through and categorize feedback, often "softening" any comments I feel are mean-spirited so as to keep it practical for the team.

Since we use special software for these surveys, we're also able to reply directly to every comment. Our COO and Assistant General Manager send a quick note to everyone who replies to our surveys with a comment - probably about three or four dozen messages every week. It's a nice touch, and even if we can't accommodate some of the outrageous or impractical requests our members challenge us with, everyone is appreciative to "feel heard".

Our software can then give us a few common themes among the comments, and even break down overall sentiments based on demographic, which is very neat and occasionally quite helpful. If your software can't do this, I would suggest leveraging Chat GPT or some other Large-Language-Model artificial intelligence for help analyzing data. Make sure you turn off learn capabilities so as to maintain privacy, but this can be a helpful tip if your survey software can't offer much in terms of insights.

Bill Stepec is the Mad Genius of Marketing & Communications at the Ontario Racquet Club. He spends his days looking for ways to enhance member experience, finding opportunities to elevate everything awesome, and all-in-all living the "brand life".