Growing your gymnastics club takes time, effort, and continuous feedback on what’s working (and what’s not!). These days, the key to good quality feedback is the breadth of data you gather.
When you’re able to analyze participation, athlete development, and financial data, your club’s chances of success will increase.
That’s why our first solution for growing your gymnastics club is to equip your organization with automated registration and club management software. And yes, even if you don’t have club automation software (yet), you can still gain value from reading the tips below!
1) Get Setup with online registration
It may seem obvious today but it’s still worth saying; using an online registration system will save your gymnastics club a lot of time.
Why?
Because today’s best sports software allows you to set-it and forget-it. That’s how we’ve designed our Uplifter gymnastics software. Just fill in your class details, set the registration date, and our automation takes care of the waitlists, invoicing, payment reminders and more.
The time-savings this automation gives your club is huge. Just ask clubs like Prince George Gymnastics, who now saves 40 hours of administrative time during each registration period, thanks to effective automation.
With a surplus of time like that, you can reinvest your efforts into the other six rules below. It’s a sure-fire way to get your gymnastics club on the path for growth.
(If you’re interested, you can read more details about our software on our gymnastics software page)
2) Enrich your gymnastics class offerings to get more feet on the mat
Many gymnastics clubs are founded and directed by former competitive gymnasts. These are highly skilled athletes that want to share their love of gymnastics by teaching the craft to children in their community. It’s a beautiful gesture.
However, we’d wager that when an elite gymnast decides to retire their competitive leotard, their sole focus is probably on teaching gymnastics. They likely aren’t thinking, ‘I want to teach young tots how to be ninjas.’
Today, programs like ninja warrior training and parkour have big appeal to young kids.
For the gymnastics purist it may seem a little silly. But, introducing a ninja warrior or parkour class at your club can be a great way to get more feet on the mat.
Many times these programs attract young boys who want to be active but wouldn’t have otherwise considered gymnastics. As they become more accustomed to the gym environment, however, they may be more open to you club’s gymnastics offerings.
Pro tip: Consider running a competitive gymnastics or tumbling program at the same time, or just after a ninja warrior program. Can you picture the amazement on a ninja warrior student’s face as he watches a tumbler flip their way down the track across the gym? Suddenly your little ninja warrior wants to learn a back handspring!
Obviously, when you want to grow your gymnastics club, you have to think like a business. And good businesses know that you don’t just want a one-time customer, you want a lifetime customer.
Think of a ninja warrior or parkour class as an opportunity to turn a one-time customer into repeat customer by getting kids comfortable in the gym and surrounding them with gymnasts having fun.
Want to make sure your ninja warrior program is working for your club? Consider using your club data to measure how frequently your ninja students transition into gymnastics programs. Then project the lifetime financial value of each student transitioning into gymnastics programming. This exercise can show the positive long-term affects of adding programs to your club, outside of traditional gymnastics offerings.
3) Focus on participation & engagement to grow your gymnastics club
As a gymnastics coach, you want to see your gymnasts reach their goals. For some gymnasts, this means striving for national competitions. For others, it just means staying active with their friends.
When a competitive gymnast achieves their goals, it can be a huge inspiration for all other gymnasts. For coaches, it can also be a major point of pride. But it’s always important not to lose focus on serving those kids who just want to have fun.
If you want to grow your gymnastics club, you have to focus on the engagement of your recreational gymnasts.
Keeping your recreational gymnasts happy and engaged is not only good for business, it’s also good for the future of your gymnasts.
As we’ve written about before, keeping girls engaged in sport can help build self-confidence that leads to personal growth. This confidence can carry over from the gym to school, and from school to the boardroom later in life.
This means keeping gymnasts engaged in your recreational classes can help build future leaders in your community. And when your programming builds leaders, your club will benefit from parent recommendations and word-of-mouth.
All this comes just from giving your recreational gymnasts an opportunity to stay active and have fun!
4) Stay relevant by listening to your gymnasts
Keeping your gymnasts engaged is all about making sure they have fun with their friends in class. Now, no one expects you to keep up with pop-culture for kids. Who has that sort of time?
But what you can do, is listen to your gymnasts to discover their interests.
As we’ve mentioned before in our coaching tips article, kids can get a lot of enjoyment from relating skills they’ve learned to pop-culture.
Is there a way you can incorporate their interests into your gymnastics instruction?
Maybe you can designate a training apparatus to a specific cartoon character. Tell your 3 and 4 year-olds that if “Sky” from Paw Patrol was a gymnast, her favorite piece of equipment would be the trampoline because it makes you fly. A simple comparison like this can send a child’s imagination off to the races and increase their engagement.
(Just beware that you may end up with a few theme songs stuck in your head.)
5) Understand your gymnastics class churn rate
To fully understand engagement, it’s important to get a clear look at your gymnastics club churn rate. This means pulling class reports to better understand why a gymnast stops attending your club.
Getting this data without using software will take a lot of work. However, if your club software has 30+ built-in reports like Uplifter’s software, it’s easy to get these metrics.
To calculate your member churn rate, select a specific time period and divide your number of lost members during that period by the number of members at the start of the period. Then multiply that figure by 100 to get the percentage. That percentage represents your “member churn”.
Each business is different, but you could expect a healthy churn rate to be in the 1-2% range per month. If your churn rate is regularly higher than that, you should start asking questions to pin-point the reason. High churn rates can indicate a business on the decline.
6) Ask the tough questions about your club
If you find that your club has a high churn rate, or a churn rate you’d like to decrease, start looking for answers. Pull reports and look over your club data.
Ask yourself, “is there a class that’s causing gymnasts to drop out?” Or, “is there a certain age that students leave our club?” Finding these answers is key to the health of your club.
As we’ve explained in our gymnastics skill tracking article, there are lots of ways to create solutions to drop-out triggers. If there’s a specific skill that gymnasts are struggling with, a one-night intensive program can help.
Perhaps you find a group of gymnasts struggling to progress after a certain age. Rather than holding them back, creating new classes for older gymnasts practicing lower skill-levels can keep them having fun and coming back to your club.
Of course, figuring out the reason behind drop-outs can be complex, but that’s what your reporting is for.
7) Grow your gymnastics club by freeing coaches from paperwork
Coaches want to focus on coaching.
If you run a gymnastics club your coaches can become your product. They’re the ones that teach and form bonds with your students.
Often times, gymnasts may stay enrolled in your club just because they enjoy learning from one particular coach.
This means you can’t afford to saddle your coaches with piles of paper work.
Freeing coaches of tedious administrative duties allows them to focus on what they love: coaching. And when your coaches can put their best foot forward, your gymnasts will benefit.
At risk of sounding like a broken record, the easiest way to free up coaching time is with club software. When you can automate your registration, billing, payment reminders, and more, you keep these tasks away from coaches. Plain and simple.
Not surprisingly, it can also be much cheaper to automate these tasks than to hire additional administrative staff. So how do you make sure you get the right software? Shop around.
Software Shopping Tip #1: Shop around and don’t get locked into contracts!
Pro tip: don’t lock your club into a software contract. If a software provider wants to lock you into a contract, it may be a sign that they aren’t confident in their product.
At Uplifter, we offer month-to-month services because we’re confident you’ll love us. No contracts. No commitments required. Hundreds of clubs tell us that the time they save using our software is invaluable. That’s why they stay with Uplifter.
When you lock yourself into a contract, you may be unknowingly locking yourself into a product that’s years behind the curve.
We won’t mention names, but one of our competitors recently released a “ground breaking” feature that allows sports clubs to offer subscriptions for their services. It’s a very useful feature but there’s nothing ground breaking about it.
Here at Uplifter, we’ve been offering comprehensive subscription features to sports clubs for five years. On one hand you could say we were five years ahead of the curve. On the other hand, just think that a club who signed a contract with that competitor would have been stuck behind the curve for five years.
For us, features like this are essential to the success of your club. In fact, we consider it such an essential feature that we actually included it in our free online payments software plan.
Regardless, this is just one example of why locking into long-term contracts can be disadvantageous for a club. In order to make sure you’re not stuck behind the curve, avoid locking into a contract and shop around.
Software Shopping Tip #2: Follow the gymnastics industry leaders
When shopping around, look for credible clubs and associations that vouch for software providers.
When a large, well established club or association swears by a software provider, you know that they’re worth exploring in more detail.
At Uplifter, we’re proud that Canada’s largest Gymnastics Association selected us as their official member management software provider. Using Uplifter, Gymnastics Ontario manages over 120,000 members and 200 member clubs.
We’re also proud to have numerous large clubs with more than 2000 gymnasts recommending Uplifter, like Corona Gymnastics. We’re especially proud that Corona Gymnastics switched from another established software provider and saw an immediate 10% jump in online registrations.
Regardless of these examples, you want to be sure that the software providers you’re considering have large, established clubs happily using their software.
Summary: Comprehensive data leads to success
Keeping your recreational gymnast happy is vital to the long-term health of your club, so be sure to listen to your gymnasts and take the time to analyze gymnast participation data. Of course, financial data goes hand-in-hand with athlete participation, so invest time to calculate your club’s churn rate.
If you find that your club is averaging a high churn rate, ask the tough questions and look over your athlete development data. Creating new classes to keep kids engaged and happy can be a great strategy that benefits clubs and athletes alike.
As young boys and girls stay active, their confidence can grow. And when their confidence transfers over into their school work (and even their work place later in life) your club will benefit from positive word of mouth. In the end, the more comprehensive your club data, the faster and more confidently you can grow your gymnastics club.
