Growth in soaring

2cernauta2 wrote:
Intruduction courses are much better at retaining new members.
Costs are not the main reason for not getting into gliding.
Fear is.
Gliding is dangerous, IMVHO, or at least perceived as dangerous.

I have spoken with quite a number of people who have quit gliding
after a few or many years. Cost is the first topic they provide, but
if you ask some questions, available time (work, family) is generally
the 2nd. The third is having achieved only small goals (or, high
expectations and lesser results; results/costs ratio); this is
definitely harder to admit for most.
Finally, two topics get into play, and I strongly believe they are
most important:
. the quality of sociality in the club, or the bad quality of human
relations (quarrelling between groups of members, disagreements, poor
management of the club, sometimes even intrusions in very private
aspects of family life...)
. safety of the sport. In the 15 years of my gliding career, my
phonebook spots a black line in almost every page.

Sociality can be very hard to manage, bust must be addressed by the
club's management. When fights and quarrelling are going on, and the
members feel they have to "choose which side they should stand", or
they struggle to keep themselves out of the fight, my experience is
that the club will loose about 10percent of its members. And most of
the rest are quite unhappy.
I expect that commercial operations might be less prone to this
problem. If the operator is customer-oriented, of course.

Safety, and the achievement of reasonable goals, can in part be
addressed by a group of volunteers devoted to personalized, advanced
cross-country techiniques. But, it takes some very special kind of
people, to stay in gliding for a long time at high level of
commitment, like most of us do. We can't expect everyone to be like
us.

I believe any promotion/retention strategy can't be complete if it
doesn't aim at these two topics also.

Aldo Cernezzi

Fantastic analysis, Aldo. Each of your points are so true. I have seen
each one occurring. In particular a lot of casualties, even for very
good pilots, even instructors. I would only add that, since only few
people will retain the necessary high level of commitment for a long
time, it is essential to gain new recruits among young people who are
the best fit to begin gliding (learn faster, progress faster, etc.).
And i maintain that number one factor why young people interested in
this activity don't join is money. For slightly older people it is time.
Of course, to attract young people, another essential factor is good
social management and the presence of other young people including
ladies. You will have hard time to attract young people in a crowd of
retirees. To say the truth, in the clubs i have seen, there has always
been a steady influx of young guys and girls. But after one of two
years, most of them have disappeared by lack of money-time-motivation,
whatever.






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Michel TALON