Why your members aren't coming to club nights, and what actually fixes it

Members are not staying away because the club has changed. Most clubs put on much the same programme they always did, and the programme is fine. Members are staying away because the world around the club has changed and the club has not adapted to it. Specifically, the way members find out what is on, and the way they decide whether to bother coming, has completely moved onto their phones.

Twenty years ago a member knew what was on at the club because they were in the club three nights a week and saw the noticeboard, or because the chair phoned around. Today the same member is busy, juggling work and family, and the only way they will find out about Friday is if it lands in their pocket as a notification. If it does not land in their pocket, it does not exist.

The single most common cause. Members are not consciously deciding to skip Friday. They genuinely do not know Friday is on. The poster on the noticeboard does not count if they were not in the club that week. The post in the WhatsApp group does not count if it scrolled three days back behind a debate about Saturday's referee. The Facebook event does not count if Facebook's algorithm decided not to show it to them.

Run a quick test. Ask five members who did not come to the last event why they didn't. Count how many say "I didn't know it was on." If it is more than one out of five, this is your root cause.

A symptom of root cause 1, but worth calling out separately because committees often assume "we posted it in WhatsApp" counts as having told the membership. It does not. WhatsApp is a chat tool. Important committee notices sit alongside the photo of someone's dog, the debate about the AGM and the offer of a lift to Saturday. By the time a member opens the group, the notice is fifteen messages up the screen and they have already started reading from the bottom.

The full version of this argument is in the guide on moving off WhatsApp. For this guide the short version is: if the official channel for club notices is the same channel as the casual chat, the notices will lose every time.

A 60-year-old long-serving member and a 28-year-old who joined last year do not care about the same events. If the committee's every-event-to-everyone communication strategy sends a notice about the over-50s lunch to the 28-year-old and a notice about the new members' social to the 60-year-old, both of them quietly tune out. Members do not need every event personalised. They need to feel that the comms they receive are relevant to them.

This is the bit committees most resist, because it feels like extra work. In practice it is just being a bit more deliberate about who you target. The senior section gets the senior events, the new members get the new-member onboarding, the whole club gets the whole-club stuff. Three audience segments is enough for most clubs.

A member sees the notice on Monday about the quiz on Friday. They mean to go. By Friday morning, they have forgotten. They get home from work, the sofa is closer than the club, and they stay in.

The single highest-leverage fix in the whole of this guide is the 24-hour-before nudge. A short reminder, the morning of the event, going to everyone who said they were coming. It will lift turnout by a measurable amount on the first event you try it on. The reason it works is not magic. It is that members genuinely meant to come and just needed the small push.

Every club has them. The same eight people every Friday, the same crew running the bar, the same circle that organises the away trip. They are absolutely indispensable. They are also, often without meaning to be, the reason newer members feel like outsiders.

A new member walks in on their second Friday, sees the same group of eight people in the corner, finds nowhere obvious to sit, has a drink and leaves. They do not come back. The committee never knows, because the regulars had a great night and reported back that "it was busy."

The fix is partly about communications (a deliberate welcome for new members in the first 30 days) and partly about programme (events that are explicitly designed for new members to feel they belong on day one). Neither is software. Both are easier to execute when the committee has a tool that knows who joined this month.

If the same five things happen every week with no variation, members stop looking forward to coming. Even a small dose of newness matters. A guest speaker. A different format for the quiz. A new menu on Thursday. The classic Friday night does not need replacing, it just needs the occasional anchor event for members to point to and say "I'm definitely coming for that."

1. Of the members who did not come to the last three events, can we name them? If no, the issue is data not engagement.
2. What proportion of our membership received and read the notice about the last event? If we do not know, the issue is the communication channel.
3. Did we send a reminder the day of the event? If no, that is the easiest 25% turnout lift you will ever get.
4. Of the members who joined in the last six months, how many came to a club night in the last month? If under half, the onboarding loop is broken.
5. What was the last new thing on the calendar? If you have to think about it for more than ten seconds, there has not been a new thing.

If you want a structured version of the same diagnostic, the free five-minute UK Club Communication Health Check walks through twelve questions across six pillars and gives you a per-pillar breakdown of where the gaps are. No email gate to see your result.

Week 1: Fix the channel

Pick a channel members actually check. For most clubs this means moving the official comms out of WhatsApp and onto a tool that pushes a notification members will read. Send the next two notices through it. Track who opened.

Week 2: Introduce the day-of reminder

For the next event, send a reminder the morning of. Short, friendly, to the members who RSVP'd. Track turnout against the comparable unreminded event last month. You will see the lift.

Week 3: Segment one notice

Find one event that is genuinely targeted at a subset (the over-50s lunch, the new-members welcome, the women's section social) and send the notice only to that segment. Send a different notice to the rest of the club. Notice how much more relevant both groups find their comms.

Week 4: Pick a new anchor event

Put something genuinely new on the calendar for the next month. A guest, a themed night, a quiz format you have not tried. Announce it explicitly as "this is new, come and see." Members respond well to permission to try something.

Most of the work above is editorial and programme work, not software. The committee still has to decide what to put on, who to invite, and what feels right for the club. None of that lives inside a tool.

What does live inside a tool is the delivery layer. Comnly is the way the committee gets the notice into the member's pocket reliably (targeted push notifications, with read confirmation so you know it landed). It is how the 24-hour reminder fires automatically without anybody having to remember. It is how you segment the senior section from the new members without keeping a separate spreadsheet. It is how you spot the new members who have not been to a club night in their first 30 days, while there is still time to do something about it.

On the cost question: Comnly is £39.99 a month. If the new tool brings two extra members through the door on a typical Friday who would otherwise have stayed home, and they each buy five pints over the bar, the bar takings have already covered the subscription. Sponsor cards in the feed, which Comnly takes no cut of, are pure upside the club keeps. The maths usually works out on the first decent week.