Are traditional cricket club membership fee structures still relevant?
Is that time of year again: inbox filling up with requests for membership fees, which seems as good a time as any to share part of some work we have been doing with a few clubs.
Increasingly clubs are introducing Family Memberships, reflecting the growing number of families that are now playing with parents wanting to play alongside their children in Development Teams. This is great to see, makes sense and is an indication of how membership structures (and fees) are evolving.
For years now clubs have been offering Junior Memberships, again reflecting the growing number of juniors playing senior cricket. Again, sensible, welcome and a strong indicator of the direction of the game.
An interesting debate for many clubs: do you charge a junior the same match fee as a senior? When asked this the answer we give is “yes, 100%, they use the same ball, same scorer, same pitch, same umpires (well if they are lucky), and have access to exactly the same experience as the senior players”
And then we have the generation old Full Membership!
Coming in at around £75, often with a club shirt included in the first year of membership, it still reflects the ‘old school’ of being available for selection each week, and voting rights at the AGM which approves Finances, Committee Appointments and Selection of Captains.
Feedback is very clear: this structure of membership remains very popular with players who see the right to vote as being a mandatory aspect of being a member, although clubs increasingly see less participation from members at AGM’s, more so amongst the new members who seem OK with leaving the running of the club to those that ‘know what they are doing’.
Another view gaining traction comes from those players who are far from regulars, often only making up the numbers, and don’t see any ‘value for money’ from a Full Membership. Cubs have approached this is a number of ways with the two most popular being to offer these players Junior or Social membership, although many admitted that they often just charged these players a match fee as they were doing them a favour.
An option we have proposed to a few clubs is to trial a Social Player Membership. This is often as low as £10, and comes with no voting rights but does provide members access and benefits within the club (bar, clothing, any deals with local sponsors). When they play they pay the usual match fee, plus £5 but this is capped.
For example at my own club the Full membership fee is £75 and the Social membership is £10. There are 18 fixtures for the second team (the team that this level of player would play) so the start point would be £65. The match fee is an extra £5 per game, capped at 13 games (£65) after which the match fee would revert to the normal £10. This way if the player plays more than 13 games they are paying the same as a Full Member, but less than 13 and they are in effect on a “pay to play” scheme.
Response to this approach has been favourable, although many see it as complicated, but they like the differential and that players on this membership could still pay as much, but forfeit the members right to vote as that is not included in Social Membership. Players see it as a pragmatic and reasonable approach.