Telling Club Stories
Imagine a husband and wife who are considering making a significant investment: a membership at Medinah Country Club. The husband wants to join. His wife, though, is less sure.
They visit Medinah’s grounds and take it all in: a broad green canvas of world-class golf, a host of attractive amenities for them to enjoy with their children and, of course, that iconic, other-worldly clubhouse.
Husband and wife walk these grounds. They listen to their guide as he talks of Medinah’s family-focused culture. But the wife is still not sure—not yet.
Taking a winding path back to their car, she spots off to the side a quaint little sign that says, “Caution: nesting birds.” It’s a small consideration. This sign takes on larger significance in the wife’s experience. For her, the sign is tangible evidence that the promises, the facts presented—and the surface appearance of things—were real.
“If they care so much about accommodating a nesting bird, think how much they must care about their members,” she says. This helps her decide. “Yes, I’m in,” she tells her husband.
THE POWER OF STORIES
Medinah Country Club General Manager/COO Robert Sereci, CCM, ECM, likes to tell this story. It’s a good story, not only because it is true, but also because of the way people make the big decisions in their lives.
We all have a worldview—the sum total of our life experience—which often predisposes us to say, “no, that’s ridiculous” or “yes, spot-on!”
This worldview is not purely rational. It’s rooted in something deeper than logic and is resistant to change.
The wife in the story at Medinah had a worldview. It was probably something like this: The most important things in life are the things that are real to me: values and community. But, the world is full of salesman selling stuff. Fortunately, I’m no easy mark and I look for proof of claims made.
In Sereci’s story, Medinah’s message—we are a caring community for your family—is a good one not only because it influenced the wife’s decision, but also because Medinah’s values were experienced by her in a way that symbolized more than benefits and features. The sign provided tangible proof of intangible values. Something seen, but also felt.
Good stories spread. Bad stories can spread as well, dooming companies and institutions to irrelevance.
Private clubs vary but at the core, the story they want to tell is the same: We are community.
COVID-19 has changed the club industry in ways we are still analyzing, but it hasn’t changed the story clubs need to tell. The story that explains your “why.”
BAD STORIES
It’s sometimes useful to consider what stories not to tell. Here are some stories you might be telling right now that are better left untold.
Reporting Facts – That $15 million capital improvement project you just finished may be state-of-the-art—and necessary to your club’s survival and success—but people don’t join because of what you have; however, why you have it, is a different and better story to tell.
Sanitation – In the era of COVID-19, ensuring the safety of your members is a top priority, but it is also expected. Over-communication to your prospective members about your hygiene procedures may distract them from the club’s goal of providing a comfortable and relaxing respite.
Discounts and Incentives – Most clubs don’t have a fee problem—they have a value problem. Discounting membership may seem effective in the short term, but in the long run, it usually fails because it doesn’t inspire loyalty.
COMPELLING CLUB STORIES
Baltimore Country Club
Across the country, private clubs have found proactive, creative ways to cultivate community and channel that message to members.
The story of how Baltimore Country Club (BCC) met the challenge of sustaining member engagement in the pandemic began on March 16th when the order for full shutdown came down from the state authorities. The club immediately sent an email alert to its members and offered its first virtual program the very next day.
“Your membership needs to be informed,” says General Manager Kent Johnson. “If you’re not communicating enough and you’re not communicating effectively, you’re going to lose engagement. And if you lose that, you lose the value and members will start to ask themselves why they need to be paying for membership they’re not getting anything from.”
In short order, the club harnessed the creative capacities of its staff in putting together an impressive suit of virtual programming and pandemic-related services: The BCC Pantry (an online store selling necessities like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, face masks and basic groceries); Thursdays in the Garden Live, an instructional video series with the club’s horticulturalist; and virtual wine tastings with wine kits available for pickup at the club, just to name a few.
The club could have sent an email blast to members letting them know, or it could have created a directory page on its website. Instead, Baltimore Country Club chose to echo the ingenuity of the club’s new offerings through a medium that was itself altogether new: a digital magazine.
This multipage flipbook, sent out to members in early April, functioned as an online menu for the club’s virtual programming, with imbedded links and video that both advertised individual offerings and facilitated member’s participation. Additionally, the magazine subtly integrated with the two main social media platforms the club uses, Facebook and Instagram, with a simple icon indicating where the class or event would be hosted online.
The magazine also has an outward-facing dimension to it, epitomized by the “BCC Cares” page, which highlights the member-led initiative to provide meals from the club’s kitchen to frontline workers at local hospitals and provides a link for giving to that initiative. At its highpoint, the BCC cares program provided 250 meals per day.
The overarching message of this magazine is a simple but profound one: Baltimore Country Club is a caring community and one that sticks together through hard times.
The Country Club
At The County Club, in Brookline, Mass., the decision to shut down in mid-March initiated a nearly two-month closure. Club leadership felt it was important during this prolonged closure to keep the relationships between staff and members visible.
“Your club is not just the property you own, it’s not your building or your golf course,” says Jackie Singleton, the club’s communications director. “It’s the relationship between your members and employees and what that means to everybody.”
In the absence of in-person interaction, video helped fill the void. While the club relied on a strong production team for its more “produced” content, it was the more improvised and less refined video—shot with just an iPad or iPhone and a mic—that generated a buzz.
One video spliced together “hello messages from the club’s Tennis Committee. Each committee member, together with the tennis staff, filmed themselves hitting a tennis ball at home. The collective effect, with just some basic iMovie editing, was that of one person hitting the ball to the next—creating a warm message of collaboration and unity in the digital space even under lockdown.
Another viral video success was the Taco Tuesday showdown, which developed organically when The Country Club’s grounds superintendent had the gumption to challenge the club’s master executive chef to a cooking skills contest. Unfortunately for the chef, lockdown prevented taste from being a scoring criterion, and the grounds superintendent won on the strength of his bravado. The video was shared with members on Instagram to wide interest.
WHAT’S YOUR CLUB’S STORY?
As private clubs increasingly move toward a new normal, the question arises: What will be the lasting impact of COVID-19?
Clubs who rose to the challenge under the pressure of the pandemic availed themselves of different modes of communication. What unifies their individualized approaches is the story they have told about themselves; the club as a community enduring, even thriving, through the pandemic. Perhaps surprisingly, clubs are discovering new modes to deliver these stories. Most are digital and deliver a visual and emotional wallop. In many ways, this makes a better story.
Is this your club’s experience? If not, it still can be as many private clubs across the country are experiencing a surge in demand during the pandemic. The need for community is more acute now than ever.
Odds are they want to believe in your club and its promise. Will you deliver?