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
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------
but it hurt when I walked.
Mark Newton
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Fax: +61-8-82231777 -----
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