It’s summer and most ski club boards and committees are hard at work planning for the upcoming ski season. Your club is probably doing the same, working out the trip schedule as best you can. Do our members really want an overnite trip that they have to drive 250 miles to get there? Is that why we had trouble selling it last year? Or was it something else? One way to find out this and many more questions is to survey your club. That way you will know exactly what they want. Do they want hot tubs or a pool or both? Do they want condos or a hotel? Do they want ski-in, ski-out or do they want to save money by staying away from the mountain. Do they want a good size base village with all the amenities they can walk around in or will they cook in the condo in the woods and save money instead? Do they want to book an all inclusive package or do they want to get there on their own using frequent flyer miles? You may think you know the answers, but you won’t know for sure unless you conduct a survey.
One of the things we found out about our club was that most people did not know a lot about our website other than to sign up and pay for trips. We have an extensive website (https://www.uppercapeskiclub.com) where you can post a classified ad, review the past history of club fly trips, watch club videos, or even look at more than 72 webcams from major resorts around the world. We are beginning an educational email program to inform our members of all the things they can do on our website because of this survey result. People were much more adven- turous in their travel aspect than we had believed before the survey. They wanted to go all over the place, including Alaska and Europe, even to South America to ski, and most wanted to go for at least 10 days, some even longer. This was a surprising result as our club is very cost- conscious — or so we thought before the survey.
Another revelation was that almost everyone wants a hot tub, with a pool being a close second. We knew this intuitively and the survey confirmed it. Last, many wanted to further explore a bicycle and barge trip to Europe like we had done earlier in the season. So survey away and remember to combine that with any information you can gather off of your website. Demographics will play a major role as the members in your club age. A skier with aging knees may eventually leave the club, but if you offer other activities such as a bike and barge trip or a kayak trip, they may return to the club to travel and play with their longtime friends at the ski club, even if they no longer ski.
A few words on the survey itself. Some people will take it to heart and give you thorough answers if you provide space for them to write their thoughts. Others just want to choose A, B or C and be done with it. Be careful how you word your questions or you will get back useless information. Remember to use the K.I.S.S. principle; “keep it simple stupid”, and you will get back meaningful results. Limit your survey to no more than 20 questions or people won’t fill them out. Before having your members fill it out, try your survey on fellow board members to discover any weaknesses and then make corrections to it. As for the timing of when to survey, we conducted a survey at our an- nual season finale dinner in April before the meal was served. The results took several nights of tabulating, but some definite trends emerged. Using the survey information you can fine-tune your trip and event offerings to better target and more importantly please your membership. Happy members will spread the word and help your club grow and prosper.
