On 16/10/2008, at 4:24 PM, harry medlicott wrote:
Our experience at Lake Keepit is that with a bit of an effort on
the part of instructors we get a quite reasonable conversion rate
from AEFs. We also need the money. Also where would our new members
come from if it wasn't through introductory flights? Anyone with any
bright ideas?
That's an excellent question, and it's a shame that we're in to 2008
and hardly
anyone has a clear idea.
The GFA has done stats with its own corpus of AEFs, and published an
article
in the Mag earlier this year about the woeful conversion rate of AEFs
to full
GFA members. The take-home message was confirmation of the fact that
gliding doesn't have a recruitment problem, it has a retention problem.
The typical AEF fronts-up for a joyflight then goes home. A small but
significant
percentage of them have enough fun to join the club and commence
training,
and almost all of them drop-out before first-solo. Of the ones that
proceed to
first-solo, most of them drop out between solo and C certificate.
Compared to
the number of AEFs flown nationally, the number of Silver badges
issued in
Australia is almost statistically insignificant.
That's why it's a mistake to view AEFs as a source of members. They
just aren't.
They're a source of money, which a club can use to improve its
services and
reduce its prices for its members.
(which, incidentally, appears to be the same way the GFA has seen
them, by
hiking the price to $20 and dumping concession discounts -- meaning they
get to keep the money instead of the clubs!)
In my experience, long-term members are people who always wanted to
learn
how to fly, but never knew they could do it as accessibly as gliding.
Kids,
sailors and motorcycle riders tend to be disproportionately represented.
If you can find a person like that, you don't need to give them an
AEF, you just
sign them up, get them straight onto the syllabus, train them, and
enjoy their
presence as a long-term member.
If you're confronted by a person who isn't like that, you'd be right
99% of the
time if you simply wrote them off as someone whose only value was to be
exploited for cash.
Remember: We don't need to be all things to all people. We'd double
our
membership base overnight if we looked at Australia's 21 million
population
and decided that we'd just be some things to about 4000 people. That
shouldn't be hard, but we spend so much time distracting ourselves with
marketing efforts to people who'll never give a damn that we completely
miss the 4000 people who'd take our membership numbers back to the
levels they enjoyed in the 1980's.
I don't think any club in Australia knows how to effectively identify
and
market to those 4000 people. I don't know. Maybe that's something the
GFA should be prioritizing, because it seems to me that a 100% increase
in long-term membership would be somewhat beneficial...
How many trainees just rock up at the airfield and sign up for a
training course?
At my club:
Almost no general walk-in joy-flighters.
Almost all people who our (limited) marketing efforts have identified as
someone who is likely to seriously enjoy the experience of flight.
The previous $5 charge covered an insurance component. If there has
been a change would be pleased to hear about it.
The GFA's justification for the change was that the amount of money
yielded
by selling 3-day memberships didn't adequately compensate the
organization
for the amount of administrative effort involved in processing them.
My response to that is pretty simple: The GFA is the only
organization I deal
with in 2008 which actually requires pieces of paper in order to do
things.
Literally every single other organization I have day to day dealings
with has
worked out that administrative overheads can be largely automated out of
existence if they're replaced with well-designed automatic systems.
Can you imagine what'd happen if someone like amazon.com or eBay
decided to put their prices up due to administrative overheads? They'd
lose all their customers. That simply isn't an acceptable outcome for a
business in 2008. Administrative overheads are things you eliminate,
not
things you bump up prices to accommodate.
In my ideal world, there'd be a web form on GFA's website which would
ask an AEF candidate for their details, present them with the terms and
conditions with a box marked "I Agree", and when they click it they'd
get
a reference/receipt number. When they fly they'd give the receipt
number
to the club/pilot, and afterwards they'd visit another bit of the GFA's
website, where each entry of a receipt number marked the AEF voucher
as "used" and debited a few bucks to the club's account.
Zero human involvement from the GFA, vastly reduced overhead from
club secretaries and treasurers, and total elimination of paperwork for
the AEF victim.
It's 2008. Why is this still being done on paper? Why does it still
have
any GFA administrative overhead at all?
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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