Most sports clubs will be interested in recruiting new members. A steady influx of new members helps to keep your club vibrant and forward-looking. As well as enlarging the pool of people to play with, and create club teams and leagues, the recruitment of newer and younger members ensures that you're building a participation base for the next generation of top players.
Membership forms
In the Resources panel to the right, you'll find template resources for a club membership form and a parental consent form (for junior members).
Once your membership starts to grow, you'll require some form of database to keep track of all your member details. There are several software programmes that can do this, and some clubs are exploring online membership databases where members can update their own details. For very small clubs, you can establish a simple membership record using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet programme, with one row per member and each column capturing a different data field (address, age, telephone number, playing handicap, etc.). You may soon outgrow this simple system are require a more robust database such as Microsoft Access, or one of several purpose built sports club databases.
Maintaining membership records in a database has several advantages:
- It's easy to find and update each member's record
- The entire database can be transferred on disk from one officer to another when postholders change
- You can use mail-merge functions to automate the process of creating address labels for your member mailing.
- You can quickly analyse the membership information to find out, for example: the number of senior and junior members; which members live in a particular area; and select the sub-set of women members.
New member induction
It's a good idea to create a 'Welcome Pack' for all new members. This helps them to find their way around, and feel at-home more quickly. It makes them feel valued and will help them to stay committed to your club. A Welcome Pack might include:
- A welcome letter from the chairperson
- The club handbook, or list of rules
- Details of the club programme, with dates, times and locations
- A calendar of training events and matches
- Information about the league and competition structures
- Contact details for the National Governing Body
- Copies of significant policies, such as the child protection policy, or the health and safety policy
Membership recruitment planning
Whilst some member recruitment happens of its own accord, it's often worthwhile to create a more pro-active plan to attract new members. A useful starting point is to discover how your existing members found out about the club:
- By word-of-mouth from family or friend
- By introduction from another member
- By advert or notice in a newspaper (which?)
- By contacting the National Governing Body for the sport
- By contacting aLocal Sports Council (which?)
- By searching on the internet
- By contacting a sports development officer or local authority department (which?)
- At a sports centre (which?)
- At a school (which?)
Knowing this information will help you decide where best to focus your future recruitment efforts, either because that route works well, or because you've identified a gap in your publicity.
Vary many local sports clubs find that a large proportion of their new members are recruited by existing members. You might want to consider running a campaign to "Bring a Friend", and to arrange publicity for a series of Open Nights for visitors and potential members.
It's very likely that your club will want a simple leaflet, poster or flyer to advertise its activities. There's a simple template in the See Also section. The key to success with printed materials is getting them displayed in the right places. Try to define where your potential members spend time, and look for ways to distribute your materials in those places.
Maintaining a simple club website can also be an effective way of attracting newer (and often younger) members. Many club websites are hosted on the free space provided by Internet Service Providers to their members. Your website will be more prominent if it is linked for other relevant places; make sure that it is linked from your National Governing Body, your local council, and local sports council websites, as well as from all the locality websites in your area.
To develop even more ambitious plans, your management committee might want to establish a Membership Working Group to oversee a membership recruitment action plan. There's a template for such a plan in the See Also panel.
