When I first started looking at membership through a lifecycle perspective, I assumed its value lay in explanation. If I could understand why members left and when they were most likely to leave, perhaps I would have a better understanding of the club's long-term health.
For a while, that seemed reason enough to continue the analysis. It explained many of the patterns that had puzzled me for years and offered a much clearer picture of how members progressed from joining to becoming established.
The more I worked with the data, however, the more I found myself asking a different question.
What would happen if the same lifecycle was plotted for different groups of members?
It was a straightforward enough idea. Rather than looking at the membership as a whole, I separated members according to characteristics that seemed likely to matter. Members with handicaps could be viewed separately from those without, as could different membership types, ages and genders.
I expected the differences to be relatively modest.
Instead, some of the curves looked as though they belonged to completely different clubs.
Groups that appeared almost identical in the annual membership report often followed very different journeys over time. Some became established quickly and remained members for many years. Others experienced much higher levels of resignation during the early stages of membership and never developed the same long-term stability.
What interested me was not simply that those differences existed, but that they appeared to reflect different experiences within the club itself.
Members who developed a handicap, found regular playing partners or became involved in competition golf seemed to follow consistently stronger journeys than those who did not.
That did not necessarily mean those activities caused members to stay, but it suggested they formed part of a wider process through which members became established within the life of the club.
Gradually, the emphasis of the analysis began to change. Rather than concentrating on the reasons members left, I became increasingly interested in the conditions under which members stayed. The objective was no longer simply to explain resignation. It was to understand whether there were identifiable pathways that led more reliably towards long-term membership.
Once viewed in those terms, many everyday club initiatives began to look quite different.
Helping a new member obtain a handicap, introducing them to regular playing partners or encouraging them to enter their first competition were no longer isolated activities carried out in the hope that they might improve retention. They became opportunities to influence the shape of the membership journey itself and, in doing so, increase the long-term value created by every new member who joined the club.
Looking back, that may be the greatest value of lifecycle analysis.
Retention by handicap status
% of members still active, by months since joining
The analysis cannot predict the future of any individual member, nor can it prevent every resignation. What it can do is identify the experiences and behaviours that consistently appear alongside stronger outcomes — and in doing so, change where clubs direct their attention.
Getting a new member their first handicap, introducing them to regular playing partners, encouraging them to enter a competition — these have always been part of good club management. What the lifecycle makes visible is why they matter so much, and how early in the journey they matter most. The gap between a member who becomes established and one who quietly drifts away is not always a function of what the club did wrong. Often, it reflects whether certain things happened at all.
That, perhaps, is the most useful thing this kind of analysis offers. Not a diagnosis of what went wrong, but a clearer view of what clubs can do more deliberately — and earlier — to give every new member the best possible chance of becoming a long-term part of the club.