Most clubs treat the mid-year survey like an annual physical — a rote checkup that produces a binder no one opens. That’s a missed opportunity. The summer survey window is the single best moment to course-correct before fall budget season, capital planning, and election cycles begin. Done well, it surfaces friction before it metastasizes into resignations, board fights, or contested elections. Done poorly, it produces a 47-question instrument that confirms what management already believed and obscures what members actually feel.
The discipline is in restraint. Ask fewer questions, ask sharper ones, and pressure-test your interpretation against what comparable clubs are reporting nationally. Below is a framework grounded in what current industry research tells us members and leaders are actually wrestling with right now.
Sources: GGA Partners, 2024 Club Leader’s Perspectives Report; Club Benchmarking, 2024 Club Governance Survey: Nomination & Succession.
Start With the Strategic Questions, Not the Satisfaction Ones
The biggest mistake in club surveying is asking members to rate the chicken Caesar before asking whether they still believe in the club’s direction. Operational satisfaction is a lagging indicator. Strategic alignment is a leading one.
According to GGA Partners’ 2024 Club Leader’s Perspectives Report, leaders and members are remarkably aligned on what creates member value — both groups rated “ability to access and use the club and its amenities” as the single most important dimension (members 4.48, leaders 4.61 on a 5-point scale). Where they diverge is on how well the club is delivering against the softer dimensions. Leaders rated “overall culture and feeling of the club” at 4.51 versus members’ 4.15, and “level of personal or professional fulfillment received as a member” at 3.89 versus members’ 3.50. Leaders consistently rated every value dimension higher than members did.
Gold = leader rating, dark = member rating. Source: GGA Partners, 2024 Club Leader’s Perspectives Report.
That gap is the survey signal that matters. Build your mid-year instrument around the key value dimensions highlighted in the GGA research — including access, culture, comfort and service, social network, programming, and personal fulfillment — and ask members to rate each. Then compare those scores to where your leadership team rates them. Anywhere you see a half-point gap or larger, you have a perception problem worth investigating before year-end.
Ask About Behavior — Yours and Theirs
The most under-asked question on club surveys is some version of: How do you feel about the way other members behave at the club?
The 2024 GGA Club Leader’s Perspectives Report found that only 9% of club leaders have no concerns about member behavior. The leading concerns were behavior toward employees (63%), member behavior and language (59%), members not understanding the club’s dress code (54%), and lack of child supervision from parents (48%). Lack of general member etiquette was also cited by 48% of leaders in that same report.
Bars are scaled to the leading concern (63%). Source: GGA Partners, 2024 Club Leader’s Perspectives Report.
If managers are seeing these issues, members are too — and the members who care most about culture are usually the ones quietest about it until they resign. A well-designed mid-year survey gives them a sanctioned channel to flag behavioral drift before it shapes their renewal decision. A few questions worth borrowing:
- How would you rate the overall atmosphere and decorum of the club compared to twelve months ago?
- Have you witnessed member behavior that did not reflect club standards in the past six months? (Optional open-ended follow-up.)
- How clearly do you feel the club’s expectations around dress, conduct, and guest policies are communicated?
The data from this kind of question is best read in aggregate trend, not anecdote. One angry member writing about a poolside incident is noise. A 12-point drop in “atmosphere” scores across multiple member cohorts is signal — and it usually predicts an attrition wave 18 months out.
Probe the Generational Mix Without Naming It
The composition of the membership is shifting fast. GGA’s 2024 Club Leader’s Perspectives Report found that 99% of club leaders report new members are either younger than last year (45%) or similar in age (54%) — meaning essentially no club is reporting an aging incoming class. That has profound implications for programming, food and beverage, technology adoption, and fitness/wellness investment.
Don’t ask members their age — most won’t answer, and you already have it in your CRM. Instead, ask questions that reveal generational priorities without flagging them as such:
- Which amenities have you used in the past 90 days? (Force-rank or check-all.)
- Which programs would you like the club to expand, and which could it scale back without affecting your experience?
- How important are wellness, fitness, and family programming to your overall club experience?
Cross-tabulate the answers against tenure and age bands you already have. The segment that joined in the last 36 months is your forward indicator. If their priorities diverge sharply from your 20-year members, your capital plan needs to reflect that — not by abandoning legacy programming, but by acknowledging that the new entrants are subsidizing renovations to facilities they may not use.
Test Governance Perception Before the Nominating Cycle
The mid-year survey is the right moment to take the temperature on governance — particularly if your club is heading into a nominating cycle in fall. The 2024 Club Benchmarking Governance Survey found that 60.10% of respondents agree or strongly agree their club’s nominating and election process is effective (18.10% strongly agree, 42.00% agree), with another 19.83% only somewhat agreeing. That leaves roughly one in five members ambivalent or worse about how the club picks its leaders.
That same 2024 Club Benchmarking Governance Survey found that 69.94% of clubs require active committee participation as a prerequisite for board nomination, and 46.90% always have board members serve as committee chairs. Clubs that rarely have contested elections — generally the healthier ones — share several traits: stable culture, leadership-development-focused nominating, formal succession planning, and active committee participation as a prerequisite.
Two questions are worth including in your mid-year:
- How confident are you that the board and committees represent the diversity of interests within the membership?
- How likely would you be to consider serving on a committee in the next 12 months?
The second question quietly builds your nominating pipeline. The Club Benchmarking governance research notes a recurring theme of clubs struggling to find willing and qualified candidates — a problem that compounds when nominating committees are recruiting from the same fifty names year after year. Use the survey to surface fresh ones.
What to Skip
The questions that should not appear on a 2026 mid-year member survey:
- “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend the club?” Most clubs are referral-gated by definition. Net Promoter Score was designed for consumer brands with viral acquisition mechanics. It misreads what private club membership is.
- Generic “rate every department” matrices. Members satisfice their way through these in 90 seconds. Replace them with three or four targeted questions about the departments where you have actual decisions to make.
- “What new amenities would you like the club to add?” This question generates an unrankable wish list and creates expectations management can’t meet. If you’re seriously considering a new amenity, run a dedicated feasibility survey on that specific question.
- Demographics you already have. Don’t ask members to re-enter their tenure, age, household composition, or membership category. It signals that you don’t know who they are, and it inflates dropout rates on the rest of the survey.
- Open-ended “anything else?” boxes at the end of every section. One global comment field is enough. More than that fragments the qualitative data and makes synthesis nearly impossible.
How to Read the Answers
The most common interpretive mistake is treating the survey as a referendum. It is not. It is a sample of the members who chose to respond — typically the most engaged, most opinionated, and most invested. Read it accordingly.
Three disciplines separate good survey readers from defensive ones:
- Segment before averaging. A 4.1 average score across the membership often hides a 4.6 from members of 15+ years and a 3.5 from members of less than three years. The average is the lie. The segments are the truth.
- Compare year-over-year before benchmarking externally. Your own trend line is more diagnostic than another club’s number. A score that dropped from 4.4 to 4.1 is a problem. A 4.1 score that’s been 4.1 for five years is a baseline.
- Read the open-ended comments before the quantitative results. The numbers tell you the size of the issue. The comments tell you what the issue actually is. Reading them in the opposite order biases you toward defending the department, not understanding the member.
The mid-year survey’s job is not to grade management. It is to give the board, the GM, and the committee chairs a shared, evidence-based view of where the club is healthy and where it is drifting — in time to do something about it before fall. The clubs that take this seriously are the same ones the Club Benchmarking governance research describes as having stable culture and rare contested elections. That correlation is not an accident. Members who feel heard show up differently when the ballot arrives.
Build the survey around the questions you’d actually act on. Skip the rest. Then, when the results come in, resist the urge to defend — and read them like a member would.
