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Memberships and passes are a common offering of recreation departments and aquatic centers of all types. They allow visitors to use your facilities regularly, enabling you to secure revenue and create stability for your organization. This helps you maximize community engagement and relationships.
But how do you ensure that your visitors have a positive experience with your memberships and passes?
To answer this question, we’ll cover three best practices for managing your recreation department’s memberships and passes. Then, we’ll explore the ways that CommunityPass can help you do those things. Let’s get started!
1. Make registration and renewal easy.
Imagine you’re interested in signing up for a membership at your local gym. When you call the gym to ask about it, staff members inform you that you’ll need to drive over and fill out a form. Once you’re done filling out forms, they let you know that you’ll need to pay upfront for your first month—but they don’t accept your credit card. How would you feel?
A key part of acquiring new members and retaining current ones is making registration and renewal simple, fast, and convenient. A few ways to improve your recreation department or aquatic center’s registration and renewal process include:
- Offering online registration. With online registration, prospective members will be able to fill out all the necessary forms and make their payments online from anywhere.
- Streamlining registration steps. No one enjoys filling out a form with ambiguous fields or unclear instructions. Make sure that your registration steps and forms are clearly outlined to prevent frustration and increase registrations.
- Communicating clearly via email. Send clear email reminders to individuals in the middle of the registration process reminding them to complete their forms and payments.
- Adding an auto-renewal option. To save members the hassle of visiting your facilities or website every month, give them the option to auto-renew their membership.
How CommunityPass Can Help
To improve your recreation department’s registration and renewal capabilities, CommunityPass offers the following features:
- Contactless Sales and Reservations. With this feature, prospective members will be able to purchase their membership and make facility reservations online.
- Fixed Duration & Recurring. When purchasing their membership, visitors will be able to decide how long they’d like their membership to be for, whether that’s a month, a year, or even longer! They can also set their membership to be recurring.
- Auto-Renewal. Members won’t have to worry about renewing their membership every month with CommunityPass’s auto-renewal function.
- Expiration Reminders. If a membership is about to expire, that member will receive a reminder encouraging them to renew, increasing your retention rates.
2. Entice potential members with a variety of benefits.
It’s not enough for recreation departments and aquatic centers to simply offer memberships and passes to visitors—you have to convince them to make a purchase. The main way you can appeal to visitors is by offering them a variety of benefits with your memberships.
Common membership benefits include:
- Access to facilities. While all visitors can expect some access to your facilities, you can reserve specific courts or special rooms for members.
- Free parking. To keep members happy, waive their parking fees. You can even create a designated “member parking” section of your parking lot.
- Priority registration. When you have a new event or program, offer members priority registration to guarantee their spot for popular activities.
- Event and program discounts. Offer members a discount on any signup fees for events or programs.
- Exclusive member-only events. For particularly sought-after activities, consider creating member-only events to entice visitors to purchase a membership.
- Equipment rental. Allow members priority for equipment rental, or access to nicer equipment.
How CommunityPass Can Help
Not all memberships have the same price and benefits. Consider offering different membership packages, with higher cost packages including more benefits. CommunityPass’s recreational management software can help you set those up with its Member Pricing and Packages feature, which gives you the ability to create and sell a variety of packages with no hassle!
3. Offer different types of passes.
Some visitors may not be interested in or may be unable to commit to a membership. For example, a first-time visitor might want to try out the facilities before making a membership purchase. Another visitor could be moving away in the near future and simply want to participate in a few events before leaving.
In these situations, visitors will be more interested in passes rather than memberships. Recreation departments that offer different types of passes attract more customers of different types. And, if pass-holders have a positive experience with your recreation organization’s activities and events, they may be inclined to purchase a membership in the future.
Common types of passes include:
- Day
- Multi-Visit
- Seasonal
- Annual
- Guest
How CommunityPass Can Help
Keeping track of passes can be difficult—depending on the type of pass, you’ll need to keep track of how many more times the holder can use your facilities or attend events. Luckily, CommunityPass has a Seasonal, Day, Guest & Free Passes feature, allowing you to create passes of different types and manage pass-holders electronically with no fuss.
Wrapping Up
Memberships and passes are key offerings of any recreation department. As a recreation department director, you know the importance of securing future revenue for your organization. If you’re looking for a way to upgrade the functionality of your memberships and passes, check out CommunityPass’s recreational software and how it can make your job a breeze and your members’ experiences enjoyable.
