It’s the Christmas mailing time:
sending out the newsletter and the subscription notices.
The newsletter has pictures and is
printed using different colours. We therefore suspect it’s one of the few
things we produce that most people actually look at, so we try to get
interesting articles; and more importantly try to get people to finish them in
time for a publishing deadline. That takes time.
The subscription notices are more
mechanical: we know what the subs will be after the AGM (although we still have
to wait to hear what the various national and county affiliation fees will be).
But they signify an important issue: how many people will renew, and how far
down the waiting list should we go to fill vacancies? Each year for the past
few years we’ve had about 50 people choosing not to renew, which is pretty much
in line with the national average percentage, after a period where we lost
fewer. There’s all sorts of articles and theories about why golf clubs are
losing members (time, cost, social factors, handicap system, too many golf clubs,
easier to play social golf through pay and play) and all sorts of efforts made
to reinvigorate memberships. We can look with interest to see which efforts
work because our waiting list – more or less – gives us flexibility. But one
day it won’t be there and we’ll need to decide how to react. This year’s
subscription process will indicate how soon that day will be.
Two other points on
subscriptions:
- we are in the middle of
changing banks to HSBC so we start the new year with them. We’ve decided not to
encourage direct transfers into the account this year to avoid confusion; we
will next year. We will continue to be unpopular with bank counter staff as we
bank £200K’s worth of cheques and cash in the first couple of months.
- we are unusual in asking members
to approve subscription levels for the coming year at the AGM. This is good in
that members approve them; it’s bad because we have to decide what we recommend
early in the year which is before we know the year’s financial position and
what our competitors (other clubs) are doing. The draft of the new rules keeps
this arrangement but I’d like to discuss it because it can put us on the
backfoot in a year, like this year, when other clubs are raising their subs by
more and the unexpectedly bad weather in summer hit our results. We may well
have kept 2013 subs at the same rates, but we would have made that decision with better
knowledge.
