Most club have a lot of member data: club departments know how many dining reservations each member has made, the number of golf rounds played, the special events and services that each member uses. But how many clubs make this information actionable in real time via a single reporting system?
Baltusrol Golf Club, working with MetricsFirst, has implemented an effective way to funnel information from many disparate systems into a single dashboard to draw meaningful, fact-based conclusions in order to understand and improve club operations. By creating a central data “warehouse,” we can show not only how many rounds a golfer has played, but also how many times he or she dined following a round, played the round with a guest, or used another club amenity on the day of their round. Bringing different types of member data together creates a more holistic view of how members actually engage with the club—and where there is an opportunity to create an even better experience.
When making club decisions, the board, committees, staff and executives no longer rely on opinions, hunches, anecdotes and misinformation. Instead we have fact-based conversations that look at raw numbers that prove or disprove our beliefs. Using a simple yet customizable dashboard, information from multiple software systems can be merged to create new views and reports that allow clubs to make informed, strategic decisions—on a daily basis—for key indicators like food and beverage covers, golf retail, lessons and usage, spa and clubhouse data and even trends in member demographics and utilization.
This new approach to automatic data integration allows development of trend reports that are meaningful to how the club should function and the ability to ad- just operations accordingly. The information allows the club staff, board and committee chairs to work together in making decisions on best practices using facts and usage data that helps put everyone on the same page. The outcome has been impressive, with the club’s leadership spending much more time on solving rather than diagnosing the problems.
What has been surprising is how the dashboard has changed the approach of senior department heads in their areas of expertise. Factual information can be just as surprising to the professional staff. Years of experience and knowledge develop preconceived thoughts. Most of the time they are accurate, but sometimes they are not. The dashboards are used by all departments to help staff think outside the box and to look at a different approach to some issues.
For example, the data showed that the membership was placing orders during the downtime between lunch and dinner from our limited menu at a higher rate than we thought. We decided to develop an upscale pub menu for the time period with more options. It was a success with great member feedback and increased sales. Accurate information can be a great resource to becoming a more successful club.
Our example illustrates the value for clubs to be able to access actionable data to draw conclusions and devise strategies for member recruitment and retention or to evaluate program budgets and member engagement. The benefits from a data warehouse are twofold: It creates transparency in communication by facilitating fact-based conversations, and it identifies key membership and utilization patterns. Forecasting future club programming or capital investment based on concrete emerging member trends is now a reality.
Boards, staff and committees can use their club’s dashboard to view data from multiple departments and organize it into a user-friendly report where they can monitor their progress against goals. The system can group members based on their activities and demographics, spot at-risk members based on their club engagement level, help in the capital planning process by comparing usage rates at various club facilities and help in the recruitment process, among other functions.
This holistic approach is already proven in other industries, and now there is a more business-oriented approach that can help all clubs succeed.
Kevin Vitale is General Manager/COO of Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J. and serves as NCA chairman. He can be reached at [email protected].