The publishing possibilities offered by the smartphone/tablet age only serve to enhance the potential for strong and effective member/guest communication through a variety of means—including print.
For over ten years now, I’ve been visiting at least one club or resort property (often several) in person each month. As an important part of my on-site research, I always pick up, or ask for, a full sampling of newsletters, event schedules and calendars, membership/marketing brochures and other in-house publications.
Over the course of each monthly cycle preparing content for another issue of C&RB, I now also make online “visits” to dozens of other club and resort websites—and here too, an important part of the “trip” is to follow links for archived newsletter postings and other digital reports of member and guest activity at the property.
In my first few years covering the industry, however, there wasn’t much to be found online—and most of what I collected during my in-person visits didn’t make much of a favorable impression on me as a publishing professional. Because of that, I wrote an Editor’s Memo in one of our early years of publishing C&RB, offering to provide free feedback to anyone who wanted to send me samples of their club’s newsletter for a frank appraisal of where I thought it fell short and how it could be improved.
I received quite a few responses taking me up on that offer—more than I anticipated, I confess, and I must offer a very belated apology here to those who never heard back from me. But in more than a few cases, that was because the samples I received were really beyond repair. Usually it was clear they’d been sent by administrative assistant-types who’d had the task dumped on them and who clearly didn’t have the skill sets, training, resources or support needed to produce high-quality, on-target and effective publications on a regular basis. The desperation these people expressed in the notes they included with their samples was palpable—producing publications that would be read by all members, guest and staff scared them to death, and they were begging for any help they could get.
Happily, I’ve seen the industry come a long way in the years since. At many of the properties I now visit in person, I’m meeting marketing and communications professionals who have been hired for new, full-time positions that include all publishing responsibilities. They’ve been given sufficient budgets and are producing impressive pieces, both printed and digital, often with outside help from public relations specialists and website development/management experts.
And when I search websites for digital newsletters and other material, I’m finding them to be much more accessible. Where before they were often hidden under “members-only access”—if indeed posted at all—they’re now proudly and prominently displayed as very public illustrations of how current members and guests—and prospective ones—can enjoy the property’s full range of activities.
As noted in the article on page 49 of this issue (“Letting Tech Do (More of) the Talking”), the publishing possibilities offered by the smartphone/tablet age really only serve to enhance the potential for strong and effective member/guest communication through a variety of means—including print. I’ve in fact had many club managers tell me recently that they’ve seen a need to re-emphasize published material, as a way to better distinguish their messages and respond to member complaints about digital overload.
So if you’d still like to send me samples of your member/guest communications (print or digital) for my opinion, I’d be glad to take a look—I’m much more confident now that it will just be a matter of offering a few simple suggestions or, more likely, congratulating you on a job well done.
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