The Members Your Club Keeps Overlooking
Picture your most engaged members. The ones who show up for every event, answer every survey, and tell you exactly what they think of the new menu. They’re easy to spot, easy to please, and easy to build a strategy around.
They’re also not where your growth is coming from.
The Trap of Designing for Who’s Already In
Most clubs, without meaning to, build their entire member experience around the people who already love it. The communications, the programming, the tone of every email, all of it gets calibrated to the members who are already fully bought in. It makes sense. Those are the members you hear from. They’re loud, present, and easy to satisfy.
But a club that only listens to its most engaged members is optimizing for people who were never at risk of leaving in the first place. Meanwhile, a much larger group sits quietly at the edges: people who belong to your club, live near it, or have every reason to love it, but haven’t yet been shown that it’s for them.
This isn’t a membership numbers problem. It’s a design problem. Clubs consistently underinvest in the members and prospects who don’t yet see themselves reflected in what the club offers, how it communicates, or what it seems to value. And the cost compounds quietly. A member who never fully connects rarely complains before they leave. They just quietly stop renewing, and the club is left guessing why someone who seemed satisfied walked away.
What Sports Franchises Figured Out
April Seifert, PhD, president and data scientist at Sprocket, has spent her career studying why people stay loyal to teams, brands, and communities. Her work with professional sports organizations revealed something counterintuitive: the fans who show up for everything, who love every experience the team offers, aren’t where a franchise’s growth comes from. That audience is already maxed out. They’re already in.
Growth comes from a different kind of fan. Someone who doesn’t immediately assume an event or experience is meant for them. Someone orbiting the edges of the fan base, connected through a relationship or a passing interest, without yet having found their own reason to feel like they belong. Seifert calls this fan the “moon.”
“She’s in the ecosystem. She’s in the universe with the team,” Seifert says. “But she doesn’t have her own gravity yet.”
The insight isn’t about sports. It’s about where attention gets misallocated. Organizations pour resources into deepening loyalty among people who are already loyal, while the people most capable of becoming the next generation of committed fans, or members, go almost entirely unaddressed.
This happens because the loyal core is visible and the orbiters aren’t. A franchise can watch season ticket renewals, track merchandise sales, and survey the people already showing up. The person standing at the edge of the fan base, present but not yet invested, doesn’t generate the same signal. She’s there. She’s just not being counted, and she’s not being spoken to.
Who Your Club’s Orbiters Are
Every club has its version of this. The spouse or partner who comes along to events but has never been invited to feel like a member in their own right. The younger member who joined because of family but hasn’t found their people yet. The new member, six months in, still waiting for something to make this place feel like home instead of a nice amenity they’re paying for.
These aren’t disengaged members. They’re pre-engaged. They haven’t opted out of belonging. They simply haven’t been given a clear, specific reason to feel it yet.
There’s also a version of this among prospective members. Someone who’s visited the club, liked what they saw, and still hasn’t joined, not because the amenities fell short, but because nothing in the experience told them people like them belong there. They left uncertain whether this was a place built for someone like them or a place built for someone else. That uncertainty is often mistaken for disinterest, when it’s simply an absence of invitation.
Most clubs never see this gap because their listening tools aren’t built to find it. Annual satisfaction surveys go to whoever fills them out, which tends to be the members already invested enough to bother. The quietest, most peripheral members, the ones with the most room to grow into full belonging, rarely show up in the data at all.
Finding the People You’re Missing
The fix isn’t a bigger survey. It’s a different kind of listening.
Seifert’s advice for leaders who want to understand this more clearly starts small.
“Grab ten members, one at a time,” Seifert says. “Don’t pick the loudest ten. Don’t pick the longest-standing ten. Get a good cross-section of them.”
That cross-section should include a few who recently left. Ask what they hoped the club would provide. Ask what they wanted their average day here to feel like. Ask whether the people they hoped to meet are the people they’ve met.
These conversations surface something a survey can’t: the members who are technically inside the club but still standing at its edges, waiting for a reason to move closer in.
Once you can see them, the work becomes specific. It might mean rethinking who gets invited into which experiences, or noticing which communications quietly assume a member is already fully engaged when they’re not. It might mean building an onboarding path for the member who joined eight months ago and still hasn’t been introduced to anyone outside their sponsor’s circle. If your club isn’t already assigning sponsor families to guide new members through their first year, that’s worth fixing on its own. It might simply mean a phone call: a GM or membership director reaching out to someone who joined recently, not to sell anything, but to ask how it’s going and listen to the answer.
None of this requires guessing. It requires asking the right people the right questions, and paying attention to who’s been left out of the conversation entirely.
Why This Matters More Than It Used To
Members today have more competing options for their time, money, and attention than at any point in recent memory. Wellness clubs, travel, boutique fitness, and a dozen other categories are all fighting for the same discretionary hours a golf or country club membership used to claim by default.
That shift changes the math. A club that once could count on inertia, once someone joined, they stayed, now has to earn ongoing relevance with every member, including the ones who joined for reasons that had nothing to do with the club itself. A spouse who joined because their partner did. A younger member who joined out of family tradition. These members didn’t choose the club the way a founding generation might have. Without a deliberate effort to bring them in, they’re the ones most likely to quietly drift away when a more convenient option appears.
The clubs that will be strongest a decade from now are unlikely to be the ones with the largest current membership rolls. They’ll be the ones who found their orbiters early and gave them a reason to stay in orbit.
The Growth That’s Already Inside Your Walls
The instinct to focus on your most visible, most vocal members is understandable. They’re the ones asking for your attention. But a club’s future rarely gets built by further satisfying people who are already satisfied.
It gets built by finding the members who are already present, already paying dues, already physically inside your walls, and giving them a reason to stop orbiting and start belonging. That opportunity doesn’t require new marketing or a bigger membership drive. It requires noticing who’s been quietly waiting for an invitation you haven’t sent yet.
This article draws from Episode 115 of Clubs Made Meaningful: The Data Behind Belonging, a conversation with April Seifert, president and data scientist at Sprocket. Her perspective on loyalty, belonging, and where growth comes from informs how we think about the members clubs consistently overlook.
Schedule a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll show you how to find the members already inside your walls who haven’t yet found their reason to belong. Want more content like this? Sign up for Clubs Made Meaningful Insights: original frameworks and ideas on identity, belonging, and club culture, delivered weekly to your inbox.
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Clubs Made Meaningful
A Podcast by Sussner
