Using Surveys Effectively to Assure Good Membership Input

Just what are membership surveys, and what are their purpose? Are they worth doing, and what should we be trying to find out through them? 

Membership surveys have been around for over 40 years. Over that time, they have proved effective for achieving a variety of objectives, including: 

• testing member satisfaction and perceived value for the club overall; 
• developing specific satisfaction and importance ratings for facilities, amenities and activities, including golf course conditions and operations, dining and many other areas; 
• assessing the performance of the Board and club management;
• testing facility projects prior to voting;
• testing controversial issues for member input, 
• and more  

A key to success with membership surveys is not overusing them to the point that members will no longer answer them. It is also important to know how to best use the survey and the questionnaire itself. The most effective surveys are customized for specific purposes, but are not leading and controlling to get biased answers. Maintaining objective survey research is a key to survey credibility—and one of the advantages of working with a club consultant like McMahon with 40+ years of experience, to help frame unbiased questions and interpret the results objectively. 

From Simple to Strategic

The simplest club surveys are those done annually to monitor changes in member satisfaction and issues of importance to them. They can be done by a club’s staff to produce comparable satisfaction results on a club’s basic offerings. Some clubs survey members more frequently, to monitor recent changes in offerings or conditions and determine if progress has been made. 

Beyond annual check-in surveys done internally, clubs also utilize surveys for facility planning or strategic planning. These surveys are more in-depth, gathering members’ input on major issues such as facility improvements, changing bylaws, addressing the size of the membership, merging/acquiring, etc. Because they are often potentially more controversial, they require different steps to develop the most effective questionnaires. 

For these surveys, it is usually best to have initial focus-group meetings with volunteering members (typically segmented by age), to develop a better understanding of issues before trying to describe them in a survey. The focus-group research will help get a proper reading of membership sentiment on new or controversial issues, so they can be described properly and clearly in a survey. 

For the full membership survey, it is important to get input from all members, including spouses, to get a complete picture of how the club is used and viewed by all adults in a family. Questions should also be asked to get full profiles of respondents so the results can be sorted by many demographics (age, gender, membership tenure, family size and other important factors). Working with McMahon Group, the results can also be benchmarked against comparable clubs and communities, as reflected by our vast database of survey findings. 

Survey Before You Build

Of all the major decisions a club faces, facility improvements carry some of the highest stakes—and the highest potential for member discord if handled poorly. In today’s club world, we at McMahon Group strongly recommend beginning any major facility-improvement project with a specially crafted initial set of focus groups, followed by an in-depth survey of members. This should be done before developing any capital-improvement plan for member approval. 

Once that survey is complete and a plan has been developed for member review, the club should utilize a facility-opinion survey. This is a totally different type of survey instrument than the in-depth surveys described above. A well-developed opinion survey about facility projects can provide vital upfront intelligence, to help avoid the controversies involved with deciding which facility projects should be done, the willingness of members to pay extra dollars for them, the disruption issues that could be caused during construction, and the possibility of increased operating costs. 

Turning Results Into Direction

Collecting survey responses is only half the work. The real value comes from what happens next — turning hundreds of data points into findings that the Board and management can actually use to make decisions. This is where the experience of an outside consultant matters most.

A consulting firm specializing in club research brings more than fresh eyes; it provides an established analytical process, refined across hundreds of similar projects, for cutting through the chatter and identifying what truly matters to members, versus what’s simply loud noise. At McMahon, we know how to cross-tabulate results by member segments—age, tenure, family status, usage patterns—to spot differences in sentiment that a simple top-line summary would miss entirely. And, as an outside organization not embedded in the club’s day-to-day politics, we can interpret results objectively, rather than through the lens of who’s pushing for what. 

Artificial intelligence has become a valuable addition to this toolkit, helping to organize the thousands of written comments that members provide and surface the themes that matter most. Used this way, AI is a powerful complement to experienced human analysis, not a replacement for it.

Statistics That Tell the Full Story

The end product of this process is a report that does more than recite statistics—it tells the club’s leadership a coherent story about what members value, where they’re divided, what they’re willing to support, and what the data suggests about the best path forward. That kind of clarity, built on objective analysis and years of comparative experience, is what makes the difference between a survey that sits on a shelf and one that actually shapes a club’s decisions.

When all of these tools are used, the success of survey research in helping to improve clubs is very evident—but only if the survey is done the right way for the issues involved, and the results are translated into meaningful insights by people who know how to read them. While they shouldn’t be overdone, when used properly surveys are very important for sustaining clubs’ success.