The Age Problem
All Membership Clubs suffer from the problem of Age Drift whereby the average age of the clubs members steadily climbs. IVC was originally intended for under-graduates and young graduates but it would now be hard to find many IVC members who are in their early twenties.
The issue is quite simple but very difficult to address.
If you take any group of people then if no-one joins and no-one leaves then in a year the average age will go up by a year. There are only two ways to stop this happening.
- Selectively lose members who are older than the average age
- Selectively recruit members who are younger than the average age
Option 1 - Lose members who are older than the average age
This is a minefield. It is hard to see how this can be done without it quickly becoming bitter and personal. IVC's do not thrive on controversy. It is hard to see how a policy like this can be squared with the fact that every IVC is owned by all its members and each member has a perfect right to enjoy their membership.Option 2 - Recruit members who are younger than the average age
It seems to be true that clubs attract members that are of about the average age of the club. If you can slant the club towards members that are younger than the average age then you can control the clubs average age.How to slant the club
There are not many things that you can do to make a club more attractive to younger members but there are two.First of all you can make a special effort to get younger members to put on events. Younger people will put on events that are attractive to younger people.
The other thing to do is to get younger members onto the committee. There is nothing wrong with people going onto the committee within a few months of them becoming members. Quite often what they don't know about the accepted ways of running the club can be more of an asset than a liability. It might be a good idea to try to get the average age of the committee to be less than the average age of the club.
Both of these measures are intended to do the same thing - to thoroughly involve younger members in the club which can only give the club a younger feel.
Who's Club is it anyway?
"Current members do not inherit the Club from previous members - they hold it in trust for future members". An IVC is too precious to belong to anyone.How high Membership Turnover helps
To keep the average age of the club down you need to either attract a small number of new members that are much younger than the average age of the club or else attract a larger number who are only a bit younger.Since clubs most easily attract new members who are about the average age of the club the latter option is easier. To put some figures on it - if you attract new members that amount to 10% of your membership each year then they need to be about 9-10 years younger than the average age. This will not be easy. On the other hand if a third of your members leave each year to be replaced then the new members only have to be a couple of years younger.
As long as you maintain your level of membership a relatively high membership turnover can be a great help in controlling Age Drift.
See the "Membership Calculator" for some figures.