Main

How To Improve Your Club’s Communication With Its Members

Date:

Did you know that pirates don't sound how we imagine them to? The "pirate accent" with all the "arrrghs" and "me hearties" is just a West Country accent. 

In 1950, Robert Newtown, an English actor from the West Country, played Long John Silver in Disney's adaptation of Treasure Island, and two years later, he starred as Blackbeard in Blackbeard The Pirate. These roles and movies were so famous that they changed how Hollywood and all of us viewed the way pirates talked forever. 
 

pirate accent

 

So no, all pirates didn't actually sound like the missing member of the Wurzels. They would have had a wide range of accents, including English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Portuguese, and many, many more.  

My point is that it's all too easy for miscommunication to happen and lead to misunderstandings. When you're running a club or association, those misunderstandings can be a lot worse than a generation of actors doing a West Country accent for no reason. 

So today, let's talk about ensuring that you communicate with your members as effectively as possible and avoid any major miscommunications 

How An Up-To-Date Website And Mobile App Can Improve Your Club’s Communication  

In today's world, your club or association's website is likely the first impression the vast majority of new potential members will get of your club. You need that first impression to be as positive as possible. Your website should be professional and functional, showcasing your club's unique style and personality. 

You risk losing prospective members if your website fails to make a good first impression. 

Beyond just driving away new members, if you're trying to run your club with an old, clunky website and system, it can create unnecessary complications for your administrative team. That will put undue stress on your admin team and potentially stop some of them from volunteering around the club in future. 

Losing club volunteers is a serious concern, and you should be aware of it. For more information, please read How To Keep Your Club Running As Volunteer Rates Drop

Mobile App To Help Your Club’s Communications 

Now, some website builders or membership management systems will offer an integrated mobile app as part of their service. Having a mobile app for your club can be a massive benefit to your operations. It can make communicating clearly with your members much more manageable. 

As technology advances, it is becoming increasingly common for younger generations, including Gen X and those below, to prefer owning smartphones over computers. 

Although you may have many members who currently own computers rather than smartphones, it's important to consider attracting younger members to your club in order to ensure its success for years to come. To achieve this, it's crucial that your club is as mobile-friendly as possible. A mobile app makes accessing your club information from a smartphone much easier and more convenient.

 

Gen X and those below prefer owning smartphones over computers. 

 

Depending on the provider, an integrated mobile app can provide you with a whole host of new tools to communicate with your members better. 

These communication tools usually include but are not limited to: 

  • Push notifications to members' phones
  • In-app notifications 
  • Group chats
  • Emails to their phones 
  • The ability to sign up for events from the mobile app

Basically, a good mobile app takes all the online interactions between you and your members and puts them in their pockets. A modern website and an integrated mobile app can significantly reduce the work required to run your club and make it more attractive to new members.

How Email Campaigns & Newsletters Can Improve Your Club’s Communication  

Emails are a super helpful tool for communicating effectively with both your members and potential members. They allow you to communicate quickly and easily with a large number of people. There is more to effectively using emails as a communication tool between you and your members than just signing up for Gmail or Outlook and starting to type. 

Anyone can do that, including the university professor below, who I imagine was on quite a lot of pain meds at the time of sending the first email. 

 

Email Campaigns & Newsletters

 

This is where having an email marketing system comes in handy. An email marketing system is software that helps clubs and associations create, send, and manage email campaigns efficiently. These systems can allow you to build and organise contact lists, design visually appealing emails, schedule automated emails, analyse the performance of your emails, run newsletters and much more.

An easy-to-use and effective email marketing system is crucial to the long-term success of your club. They make the emails you send out to your members and prospective members much more accessible to organise and more effective. 

For the best results, your membership management system and email marketing system should likely use the same database to avoid constantly updating and maintaining two separate databases. 

If you are looking for tips on creating a great email newsletter, read 5 Steps To Write A Club Newsletter Your Members Will Love To Read.

How Planning Club Events Can Improve Your Club’s Communication  

Club events are one of the most important aspects of running a club or association. Those events are likely what the club was built around, so ensuring you can plan and host events quickly and efficiently is key to your success as a club. 

You need to be able to communicate clearly to your members when your events are on, how to purchase tickets, attendance requirements, where the event is, and much more. If you get multiple questions from your members about the above every time you have an event, you have a communication issue.  

A good event management system enables your club to plan events, sell tickets online, keep track of event attendance digitally, and organise every aspect of your events quickly and easily. This will go a long way in reducing communication issues and result in fewer repeat questions from members. 

Using such a system can improve the quality of your events and make them easier to manage. This, in turn, enables you to run more events for your members, which can lead to happier members.

How Group Chats Can Improve Your Club’s Communication

Email campaigns and newsletters are great ways to communicate with your members. Still, sometimes, something less formal and more conversational is needed. When you think about it, emails and newsletters aren't how most of us communicate most of the time. While writing this, a friend from the rock climbing club asked a group of us if we wanted to go for a climb today after work. They asked in a group chat; if they had asked via a fully formatted newsletter, I would have had some serious questions for them. This is where group chats come in. 

Group chats like the ones used in the Member Jungle system are an excellent way to have more conversational contact with your members. Chat rooms provide a personal touch that emails and newsletters lack. They help create a sense of community and are more in line with people's attention spans and communication methods today. Chat room notifications are sent directly to members' phones, allowing for more direct communication, and members can mute them if needed.

Member Jungle offers the option for event-based group chats that can be created when you create a new event. These chats run alongside the event and can be set to delete a chosen number of days after the event. Organising events can be made easier with event-based chats as they provide a perfect platform for answering members' queries, sharing updates, and keeping everyone informed during the event.

For more information on group chats, please read Why Your Club Should Be Using Group Chats

How To Start Improving Your Club’s Communications Today

So, as you've probably gathered, the easiest way to improve your club's communications is to start using a membership management system. I know I mentioned Member Jungle several times, but we aren't the only option; there are plenty of other excellent membership management systems out there besides us. 

So, if you are curious about how some of these others are, look at The Best Membership Management Software For Your Club

For more information on what else a membership management system can do to help your club, see What Is Membership Management Software For Nonprofits? All Your Questions Answered

 

Related Articles

Let's Keep in Touch

Subscribe and never miss another blog post, announcement, or special event. We hate spam and will never sell your contact information, we will only send you our monthly Member Jungle newsletter, full of great articles.