All of us are ambassadors of the sport. Whether you take an active roll in recruitment or not, just being friendly to a visitor at your home club goes a long ways towards growing the sport. When it comes to kids who are enthusiastic about aviation, especially gliding, this is about the lowest hanging fruit one can think of in terms of recruitment.

Regardless of whether someone takes part in the EAA's Young Eagles youth ride program, I highly encourage SSA members to offer visitors a ride on their own dime from time to time, especially where it's known the passenger is interested in learning to fly gliders or otherwise become a pilot. Keep in mind, in many cases you can sign up both a parent and teenager to learn to fly gliders.

Another thing to consider is does your club have a nice looking glossy, color brochure and website to go with? Does it have a Facebook page? If not, these are things all clubs should be focusing their efforts on. Without these marketing basics, how do you expect the public ever to find you, let alone learn about our sport? Once these things are in place, club members can do what in the non-profit world is called community outreach, but in it's simplest terms, meet with civic groups, host Boy Scout Troops and Girl Scout Troops, attend local county fairs, festivals and farmer's markets, high school STEM or career events, EAA pancake breakfasts, EAA Young Eagle Rally's.... anywhere you can get yourself in front of a crowd of people.

Sadly, too many clubs take the position that they're not interested in growing their club (or the sport). I invite the leadership of these clubs to gather demographic data, more specifically age, and see exactly how many members the club will have to replace in 10 years just to stay the same size. Furthermore, I encourage Directors to try to quantify attrition rates among new members (0-2 years), existing members of 2-5 years, and various demographics such as members age 73 (the average age of death for Men in the USA), Student Pilots who have not earned their PPG as well as newly minted Private Pilots (see what those groups' attrition rates are and on average how long it takes before they drop out). If this doesn't scare you into marketing your club and conducting local public outreach, I don't know really what to say to you.

Clubs naturally suffer from attrition that's job and/or family related. Often times members leave because they have to care for elderly parents, children, or grandchildren, or the obligations of a club get to be too much for their hectic lives. Hybrid club models that charge members more $ for FBO type service do exist. Lastly, ask yourself is my club family-friendly or not? Can kids or grand-kids play at the airport or are they not welcome. Does the clubhouse feature amenities that a spouse can occupy their time with? Do they have a playgrounds, picnic tables or camping areas? Certainly, family-friendly sites benefit from these features and are much more welcoming for adults to bring their spouses, children and/or grandkids. IMHO, the a glider club really is no different than a yacht club or country club (where the regular planning of social activities are a must), except that we fly gliders instead of play golf or drive sailboats.

Moderate controlled growth in a club combined with improved member retention (especially members who've been with a club for less than 3 years), is the key to club success. And from a club Treasurer's point-of-view it's well worth our energy to focus on this as the larger and more active our club membership is the healthier are clubs tend to be financially.

- Chris Schrader
SSA Growth & Retention Committee