Understanding Your Web Sites Audience: Current Members
Produced by: Red Rock Partners. All Rights Reserved. Copyright ©2000.

Last month's article (Understanding your web site's audience: Potential Members) laid the groundwork for this article, and two more upcoming articles. To recap, there are four audiences that your club needs to address with the club web site. These audiences are, in no particular order of importance, existing members; potential members; potential users of club facilities; and employees of the club. The topic for this article focuses on addressing the needs of your existing membership.

The value of statistics. Before you begin a web-based marketing program, you need to understand the makeup of your audience. There are a couple of different ways to do this, the easiest being a member survey. Create the survey that it is available as an insert in your clubs existing newsletter; put the survey on your club web site; have it available at the front desk; and plan a telemarketing program to contact unresponsive members. Make the survey short, concise, and easy to complete. Remember, the old adage: if you fail to plan, you can plan to fail. Gathering statistical evidence about the makeup of your membership is vital to moving forward with designing (or redesigning) your club's web site.

To further emphasize this point, consider a small club in Southern Minnesota that Red Rock Partners was giving a presentation to. The directors of the club met with Red Rock in the club grill area, where we ate lunch and discussed the value of a web site. The club's GM was losing interest in the conversation, and commented that their membership is old, non-technical, and probably does not know how to use the Internet. In fact, according to this GM, their membership, as a whole, has no interest in learning about the Internet. To drive home his point, he discretely pointed out two members watching TV a few tables away from us. There, said the GM, are prototype members from our club. Do you think that they even know what a computer is? At that moment, one of the two members in question held up his hand. Gesturing towards the TV screen, he pointed out to his fellow member the stock quotes running across the bottom of the screen. We overheard his comment that he had to go home and move some of his stocks via his trading company's web site!

The obvious moral is that management should never base business decisions on assumptions about their membership's habits. Whenever possible, generate real statistics, while respecting your membership's desire for privacy.

Developing content for your members. Content for your members is different than content for non-members. One of your goals is to provide an easier way for them to access the clubs services. Integrate your club directory into your site, giving your members access to each other's names, telephone numbers, addresses, etc. - always up to date with no additional work on your part. Put your newsletter on-line, providing not only the newest version of the newsletter, but also searchable archives of past newsletters. Add member account access to the site, allowing your membership to see where there accounts are at without having to call the accounting office. Develop an event calendar that shows the main attractions for the upcoming months. And always make it easy to read, intuitive to navigate, and fast to download.

Non-relevant content - good or bad. Your goal, as a management team, is to put yourselves in the shoes of your audience. What is it that your audience wants to see? Do they want to see sports scores, weather links, advertisements from car manufacturers, and stock quotes? Probably not. Most web users already have a list of sites to fulfill these needs, which are bookmarked in their Favorites area. They will bookmark a sports site for their golf scores and a weather site for their weather updates. And, most importantly, they will bookmark their club web site for their updates on what is happening at the club. Never lose sight of the fact that you will develop a loyal audience for your web site only if you focus on delivering, fresh, relevant content that is applicable to your club. You cannot successfully compete with portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, so don't bother trying. A club's niche is in providing content about the club.

Maintaining content for your membership. Once you have developed the initial layout of the content, you need to quickly determine how you want to maintain it. One way to address this is to have each section owned by club personnel. The responsible person can then deliver new content on a regular basis to the person or company that formats and publishes your web content. Alternatively, you can have your web designer create templates for you, and you can update the site internally. This works well if you have one or two people on staff that know how the web works, and have a desire to be involved with the project.

Wrapping it up. Carrying on with the theme of old, but applicable, sayings, here is another one. It is easier, and cheaper, to keep existing customers, than it is to procure new customers. The same holds true for your membership. Figure out what they want, and work on the economics of meeting those wants and needs.

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