My advice is to start with the old-fashioned social networks that human beings have used about for several million years. Humans have always lived in tightly networked groups called tribes or communities. Most of these were small with a few hundred people. Farming communities even now tend to be numbered in populations of a few thousands. These are the types of small towns around the world where everyone knows everyone. This was the bane of many a small boy who found that when he was doing things he shouldn’t, it was not just his mother, but every other mother in town who would catch and correct him.
Health club owners know the most powerful new member is one who has been referred by an old member. As a result, health clubs that regularly drive up their sales have a half a dozen or more referral tools sitting on the shelf to be used.
Very few clubs take advantage of the kind of these direct social networks. Remember the “six degrees of separation, the idea that it would only take six people, each one who knows the next one, to connect you to any other person on earth if you made the right series of connections? John Crystal, an early career planner in the ‘60s who worked in parallel with Richard Bolles of “What Color is your Parachute?” often did studies with students and demonstrated that in any group of 30 people, it would only take three links to connect with a randomly selected person in any city in the United States. Wow! Think of all the referrals! On the club scale, we see social networking occurring when people play tennis, squash, racquetball, and participate in group exercise. Tennis and squash by their very nature encourage a higher degree of interaction and bonding between participants than group exercise.
I don’t have the answer for you, but I do have a good question. What can you do in your club to nurture a higher degree of the normal, natural type of social networking that humans have been doing for millions of years among your members? We know some simplistic answers like having comfortable places where members can sit and talk, providing coffee, filling the lobby with the daily newspapers so people sit and read and often talk, and potluck dinners. The question is what principles can you discover and then put into practice to deepen this connectivity?
REX Roundtable members report that participants in a strong group X program stay members twice as long as fitness only members. I assume the increased retention is due to the connectivity to the instructor and to the class mates. Now suppose you dialed up the connectivity?
Tags: engagement · referrals · retention · Social networkNo Comments.
