The conclusion that membership composition mattered raised a much bigger question.
If the long-term strength of a club depends on how many members become established rather than simply how many join, then understanding why members leave became increasingly important.
Like most clubs, we recorded the reasons members gave when they resigned, but I had never looked at them collectively. They were simply individual emails, each reflecting a personal decision at a particular point in time.
I began reading back through them over several years to see whether any broader patterns existed. What I expected was a fairly consistent range of reasons for leaving, regardless of how long someone had been a member.
Instead, a clear pattern began to emerge.
Members who had been with the club for many years tended to leave because of changing life circumstances. Age, health, relocation or family commitments featured regularly. Their decision to leave was very rarely a reflection on the club itself.
The reasons given by newer members were quite different. They were much more likely to mention difficulties integrating into the club, finding people to play with, balancing membership with work or family life, or simply not playing enough golf to justify the subscription.
When is a resignation preventable?
Share of resignations classified as potentially preventable, by tenure at time of leaving
The more letters I read, the less convincing the idea of a single measure of member churn became. It was also clear that there was limited scope for improving retention among established members — but considerable potential among newer ones.
We tended to talk about members leaving as though it were a single phenomenon, yet the evidence suggested otherwise. A member leaving after twenty years because of ill health was fundamentally different from a member leaving after eighteen months because they had never really found their place within the club.
If the reasons for leaving were different, perhaps the opportunities to prevent those departures were different too.
A resignation caused by declining health may be unavoidable. A resignation caused by a member failing to integrate into the club might not be. If that process could be better understood, perhaps some departures could be anticipated and prevented before the resignation letter arrived.
The question was no longer simply why members left. It was whether the conditions that led to those decisions could be recognised while members were still part of the club.
That thought changed the direction of the analysis.
Instead of starting with the point at which members resigned, I began to wonder what would happen if I started at the opposite end of the journey. Rather than looking backwards from the day someone left, what if I followed members from the day they joined?
It seemed a simple enough question, but it led to a completely different way of looking at membership. Instead of seeing a collection of joiners and leavers, I began to see members progressing through a journey, with some becoming established and others leaving before they ever reached that point.