Are Your Members Ready to Approve Your Facility Project?

Rising costs continue to add new challenges to planning a club’s capital project, primarily by placing greater scrutiny on how a new project will be financed, and especially on how members will be asked to contribute. More than ever, how a project will be funded is the most important issue affecting project approval—and the source of the greatest uncertainty as projects are considered. 

But that uncertainty can be erased through the simple step of testing the membership. After over 40 years of work with over 2,000 private clubs, McMahon Group has found that no single factor will separate successful capital initiatives from stalled ones more reliably than testing member readiness and approval through a properly designed “opinion survey” that is conducted before any design commitments or timelines are established. Reaching the goal of successful approval starts with involving the members—and making any project the “members’ project” before any vote is taken.

The Reality of Funding

Every dollar that’s put toward capital improvements at private clubs comes from the same source: the membership. Whether it’s through a special assessment, increase in dues, adjustments to the initiation fee, or debts that are repaid over time, the source remains the same. As a result, member alignment should be a financial precondition for any capital project, and not an afterthought once designs are already drawn and execution is in motion. 

Clubs that treat member input on capital projects as a precondition consistently outperform those that view it as a step for further down the road—or ignore it altogether. For these clubs, McMahon Group has developed a project-opinion survey to pre-test project approval before member voting. Administered digitally (with paper options if requested), these surveys can quickly provide a snapshot of member sentiment and readiness that can help save valuable time and resources and set things in motion towards a favorable result.  

What Does an Opinion Survey Measure?

A properly designed opinion survey measures three things that, taken together, tell a Board and management exactly where to direct the club’s capital and energy. 

The first is the difference between importance and satisfaction. Importance measures how much members value a given project, while satisfaction measures how well the proposed structure of that project aligns with what members actually want—and the two can move independently. 

Consider a proposed new racquets facility offering tennis, pickleball, and paddle. Members may report high importance and support for a new facility, but low satisfaction with the proposed plan, because they don’t see paddle as a fit for the club. Capturing those distinct signals— members support the project in concept, but not as currently scoped—is exactly what the opinion survey is designed to do. And catching that gap before architects are engaged is the difference between adjusting a proposal on paper and scrapping a finished design.

The second important indicator is “want, versus willingness to fund.” A project may receive strong support in concept, but the opinion survey measures whether members would actually fund it through assessments or dues. It also tests the proposed funding mechanism as its own dimension. Members can endorse a project and indicate their willingness to contribute to it, but still reject the proposed assessment size, payment terms, or timeline. Supportable projects routinely fail on the funding structure alone, and an opinion survey will help catch this potential pitfall at the start of the process. 

The third key measure is members’ clear preference for whether potential facility improvements should be undertaken “now, later, or not at all.” The priorities that emerge when this question is asked in an opinion survey will clearly tell the Board and management which projects need to start immediately, which can wait, and which should be set aside entirely.

How Does the Opinion Survey Help the Project? 

A well-designed opinion survey provides the club with a 

data-backed defense. When a vocal minority pushes back at the next member meeting, the Board and management can point to results that clearly show where the broader membership stands and why that input should direct the club, rather than hallway conversations or the loudest voices in the room.

A well-designed survey also diagnoses what would actually change how a membership votes. Opposition rarely lives in one aspect. It can sit in the scope, the cost, the financing structure or the timeline of a project, and a properly designed opinion survey provides clear insights into which factors are most in play. With that insight, instead of guessing at the cause and adjusting the wrong variable. the Board and management can determine whether resistance is concentrated in the project’s scope, rather than its financial terms, and see exactly which phases should be pulled before binding the vote.

Surveying also shortens the timelines, rather than lengthening them. Boards and management sometimes resist testing member readiness because they fear a delay, but a survey conducted early prevents the much longer delay, and negative sentiment, that would be caused by a failed vote and forced restart. When a project stalls mid-stream, the cost is rarely just embarrassment. Months of architectural work get scrapped, negotiated loan terms expire, and construction scheduling is lost—all of which the membership ultimately pays for in the next attempt.

An opinion survey is not a vote on proposed projects. But it can have tremendous value to help lead to a successful vote, by acting as a pre-approval straw poll on the acceptability of a project that forecasts to the Board and management what a vote will look like, before that vote is binding.