How to get more members through the door: a UK committee guide to club growth

Before you do anything, separate the two halves of growth in your head. Acquisition is getting new members to join. Retention is keeping the members you already have. They are different problems with different fixes. A club that recruits ten members a month but loses twelve is shrinking. A club that recruits five and loses three is growing. Acquisition is the focus of this guide. Retention is covered in the companion guide on why members aren't coming to club nights.

Most clubs cannot answer the question "who is your ideal next member" with anything more specific than "more members." That is the same as having no answer. Spend half an hour at the next committee meeting describing the next twenty members you would love to attract. How old. From where. Working what. Looking for what.

You do not have to be exclusive about it. The point is that everything else in this guide gets easier when you can picture the actual person. The open day that's designed for the 30-something young family looks completely different to the open day designed for the recently retired. Both are valid. Both work. A generic open day designed for nobody in particular usually works for nobody in particular.

The classic open day done badly: turn up between 10 and 2 on Saturday, free tea, committee members in red shirts, half a dozen curious people, three sign-ups. Forgotten by Tuesday.

The five things to get right:

1. One specific audience. Pick from the previous section. The open day for new families looks different to the open day for over-50s. Promote it accordingly.
2. A real reason to come. Not "come and see the club." A specific activity, a guest speaker, a free taster session. Something the visitor can picture themselves doing.
3. A frictionless join path on the day.Visitors arrive, like what they see, and want to join. If the answer is "fill in this form and we'll get back to you in a fortnight," you will lose half of them. A QR code that takes them through to a signup flow on their phone in 90 seconds is the difference between a visit and a member.
4. An immediate follow-up. Everyone who attended but did not sign up gets a personal email or message within 48 hours. Not a mass mail-out. A short note from a real human at the club.
5. A second touch in week 2. An invitation to a specific event within the next two weeks. "Come back for the quiz on Thursday" converts more open day visitors into members than any other single tactic.

By a wide margin the highest-conversion channel any club has. A friend bringing a friend converts at multiples of any cold acquisition channel. The reason is obvious: the new visitor arrives with a built-in social anchor, a guide for their first night, and an answer to the "where do I sit" question.

And yet most clubs do nothing systematic about referrals. They wait passively for members to invite friends. Instead, ask. A specific ask works. Once a quarter at the committee meeting, agree the next bring-a-friend night. Promote it explicitly as "this is the one for bringing someone." Give existing members permission and a reason. You will be surprised how many bring someone when asked, who never thought to invite anyone the rest of the year.

• Local council listings. Most councils publish a directory of community groups. Most clubs are not in it. Fixable in an hour.
• Noticeboards at the doctor's surgery, the library, the church hall. Free. Untargeted but cheap.
• Local Facebook groups. Especially the parish, village or neighbourhood ones. A short post once a month, not five times a week. Polite, not spammy.
• Partnerships with adjacent organisations. The school for the junior side. The local business association for sponsorship. The university for alumni. A single relationship lead per partner, kept warm over years.
• A real local press story once a year. Centenary, charity fundraising milestone, a notable member achievement, a returning founder. Local papers still run these and the audience is exactly the demographic most clubs are trying to reach.

None of it is glamorous. All of it works. Most clubs do none of it because nobody owns it. Assign each item to a named committee member and check in once a quarter.

The single most expensive mistake in club growth is the join process that takes too long. Visitors who decided in their living room on Tuesday night that they were going to join your club, will give up by Wednesday morning if the joining form is on page three of a tired website and asks for twelve fields including their employer.

The standard you want to hit:

• A QR code that goes to the join page works on phone in under 90 seconds.
• Minimal fields. Name, email, date of birth, the membership category they are joining. That is genuinely it.
• Payment in the same flow. If joining costs money, the card details get entered there and then, not "we'll send you an invoice."
• Confirmation immediately. The new member knows they are in before they put the phone down.

Comnly does this by default with payment links built into the join flow, and no commission taken by Comnly on member payments (standard Stripe processing fees apply). The point is not that you have to use Comnly. The point is that whatever you use, friction at the join page is where clubs lose the people they spent the most effort trying to attract.

Ask any committee about their last 50 new members and they will know one or two by name. The other 48 signed up, were never really welcomed, never came to a single event, and quietly stopped being members in everything but the membership database. This is probably the single biggest hidden problem in UK club membership and almost no club tracks it.

The pattern is always the same. A prospective member meets the club at an open day or hears about it from a friend. They are warm. They join, often in a moment of enthusiasm. Nothing happens for a week. They start to feel awkward about turning up cold. By week three they have quietly decided "I'll go when I get a chance" and a chance never quite arrives. By month three they have written off the subscription and stopped checking. The club never knew they had a problem because the member never complained. They just disappeared.

A member who has been around for a year is extremely unlikely to leave in a given month. A member who has just joined is at their highest risk of becoming a paying ghost in their first six weeks. The first 30 days decides whether they stay, engage, and actually become part of the club, or whether they become another name on a database that nobody can put a face to.

What the first 30 days needs to include:

1. Day 1: Welcome message. Personal. From a real person. Names a specific event in the next two weeks they should come to.
2. Day 3: Practical info. How the club runs, where to find things, who to ask for what.
3. Day 7: Invitation to a specific recurring event. "Most of us are here Thursday night, come and say hello."
4. Day 14: A nudge to attend their first event if they have not yet. A friendly check-in if they have.
5. Day 30: A genuine "how is it going" from a committee member, not a form to fill in. This is the conversation that catches the wobblers before they quietly disappear.

This is hard to do manually for any club above 20 members and it is exactly what gets dropped first when the committee is busy. The clubs that do this consistently grow. The clubs that do not, leak quietly out of the back while the committee wonders why the front door push is not working.

Most clubs over-invest in social media reach and under-invest in their joining flow. A viral video of the cricket nets that gets seen by 5,000 strangers in another county is worth less than fixing the join page that the next ten serious enquirers will hit. Honest priorities:

• Local Facebook groups: high signal-to-noise, free, worth doing.
• Your own Facebook page: useful as a shop window for people who already heard about you, low effort to maintain.
• Instagram: works if you actually have visual content. Don't force it.
• Paid Facebook ads: usually a waste of money for clubs unless you have a very specific event and a very specific local catchment. Most clubs spend £50, get one sign-up, conclude ads do not work, when the actual issue was the targeting.
• TikTok: almost certainly not. A handful of clubs make it work but most do not have the audience or the content gravity.

Most committees report on total membership and call it analytics. Total membership is a lagging vanity number. The three numbers that actually drive growth decisions:

1. Net members this month. Joiners minus leavers. The honest scoreboard for whether the club is growing or shrinking right now.
2. Conversion rate from enquiry to paid member. Of the people who showed interest this month (open day visitors, online enquirers, walk-ins), how many actually joined. This is where the join page friction shows up.
3. 90-day retention. Of the members who joined three months ago, how many are still active. This is where the first-30-days work shows up.

Track these three monthly. Show them at the committee meeting. They are honest numbers and they will tell you exactly which lever to pull next.

Comnly does not recruit members for you. That is still the committee's job. No tool changes the fact that someone has to write the local press release, hand out the QR posters, ring the local school about the partnership.

Where Comnly does earn its keep is at the bits where most clubs leak. The join page becomes a QR poster to paid member in under 90 seconds, so the committee stops losing the warm prospects at the joining form. When a join request is approved, Comnly fires an automatic branded welcome (push and email together) so day one is never silent. From there the committee can send targeted notices to the new-member cohort specifically (the over-50s coffee morning, the new-members social, the next quiz) instead of blasting everything to everyone and hoping the new member spots themselves in it. Read confirmation tells you which new members opened the message and which did not, which is the early-warning system for the ones about to become paying ghosts.

The communication channel itself is the other half of the answer. A push notification lands in a new member's pocket the way a text from a person they know would. Email has been dead as a club channel for years because members no longer open anything that is not from a person, and noticeboards do not exist for members who have not been in the building yet. Push is where the attention is, and it is what makes a new member feel that the club has noticed they exist.

On the cost question: Comnly is £39.99 a month. The maths most committees find persuasive is the bar takings one. If the tool pulls in two extra members for a club night who would otherwise not have come, and they each buy five pints, the bar takings have already paid for the subscription. Add the new joiners you would have lost at the join page, and the sponsor income the club keeps 100% of (Comnly takes no cut of sponsorship), and the maths usually looks comfortable.

The deeper point: in 2026, the way members find a club, decide to join, and decide whether to stick around, all happens on their phone. The clubs that have moved with that are growing. The clubs that haven't, are not. Comnly is one of the tools that closes the gap. The committees that find their own answer to that gap, by whatever route, will be the ones that still exist in ten years.