After publishing an article on membership churn, I received a number of responses from clubs around the country. Most were interested in the figures themselves, but one question appeared again and again.
"Do you know whether that's good or bad?"
The honest answer was that I didn't.
In many ways, that was the very reason I had written the article. I had spent years trying to understand the membership at my own club and had become increasingly convinced that headline measures such as churn, recruitment and membership growth revealed only part of the picture. Yet however much analysis I carried out, I was still left with a fundamental problem. I had no reliable way of knowing whether the patterns I was observing represented a particularly strong membership or a relatively weak one.
That uncertainty is surprisingly common. Most clubs know their own numbers in considerable detail, but very few know how those numbers compare with clubs facing similar challenges. A churn rate may appear reassuring or concerning depending entirely on the context in which it is viewed. A three-year retention rate may look disappointing until it turns out to be among the strongest in the sector. Without comparison, even the most carefully analysed statistic exists in isolation.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that understanding a membership and evaluating it were two different problems. Lifecycle analysis had helped explain how members progressed through the club and where long-term value appeared to be created or lost. What it could not tell me was whether those patterns represented good performance or untapped opportunity.
That required a different perspective.
What does good look like?
One example brought this home to me particularly clearly. Like many clubs, we recognised that we had relatively few women between the ages of 18 and 50. It was something people commented on from time to time, but without any wider context it was difficult to know whether the issue was genuinely significant or simply reflected a national trend.
Benchmarking changed that completely.
When our membership profile was compared with the county average, around 27% of female members across comparable clubs fell within the 18 to 50 age group. At our club, the figure was just 4%.
Female Members Aged 18–50 · Benchmark comparison
It could no longer be dismissed as simply a reflection of a national trend. The comparison suggested that something specific to our own membership was contributing to the imbalance.
More importantly, it changed the conversation. The question was no longer whether we had enough younger female members. It became why clubs facing similar conditions were attracting and retaining significantly more of them than we were, and what could be learned from that comparison.
The same principle applies across almost every aspect of membership. If lifecycle analysis can be applied to one club, it can equally be applied to many. Once those journeys can be compared, entirely new questions become possible. Do members with handicaps consistently follow stronger journeys than those without? Do clubs with higher long-term retention share common patterns of onboarding or engagement? Are there characteristics that repeatedly appear among memberships that become stronger over time?
Those questions struck me as much more valuable than simply comparing annual churn rates or membership totals.
Without benchmarking, discussions about membership performance can easily become subjective. Different stakeholders bring different experiences, assumptions and expectations, often leading to very different conclusions from the same data. Benchmarking introduces an external point of comparison that helps ground those conversations in evidence rather than opinion.
It also allows clubs to identify the opportunities where strategic effort is most likely to make a difference. A club may discover that its recruitment performance is already strong but that retention lags behind comparable organisations. Another may find that retention is healthy but that recruitment is weaker than expected. In both cases, benchmarking helps direct attention towards the areas where action is most likely to strengthen the membership over the long term.
Traditional benchmarking tends to compare outcomes. One club recruits more members than another or reports lower churn or higher growth. Those comparisons are useful, but they rarely explain why the differences exist. Lifecycle benchmarking compares something quite different. It compares the journey itself and, in doing so, begins to identify the experiences and behaviours associated with members becoming established within the club.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the real value of benchmarking was not comparison but context.
Understanding the lifecycle of a single club explains how its members progress from joining to becoming established. Benchmarking places that journey alongside others and, for the first time, begins to answer whether those outcomes are typical, unusually strong or indicative of opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden.
Looking back, the question I was asked after publishing that article captured the issue perfectly.
"Do you know whether that's good or bad?"
At the time, I couldn't answer it.
Without a benchmark, very few clubs can.