A School of Continuous Improvement impact report surveys five years of attendance across 214 clubs and reports the gap between a growing membership roll and the room as a distribution rather than a single participation rate.
A five-year survey of 214 sports clubs, choirs, sheds and allotment associations finds attendance distributed along a long tail of the enrolled-but-absent
The School of Continuous Improvement has published its Impact Report 2021–2026, a five-year survey of 214 sports clubs, choirs, sheds and allotment associations that reports attendance and commitment as a distribution rather than a single figure — and finds a long tail of members who remain enrolled without, in any given month, being in the room.
The survey underpinning the report asked each club’s own membership list to account for itself, rather than sampling who turned up on the day, a design the School credits with surfacing a gap — between a roll that kept growing and a room that did not — that no single club had previously had cause to name. The University reads the finding as confirmation of a habit it tries to hold institution-wide: that an organisation’s own numbers, examined carefully enough, usually say more than an external audit could.
A membership roll and a room are two different instruments. Five years of survey data have convinced us that treating them as interchangeable is where most of a club’s surprises come from.
— Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, welcomed the report’s account of a standing agenda item now piloted with clubs across the survey panel. “A committee that checks its own pulse once a year,” he said, “is doing something most institutions still don’t manage.”
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nmtlzc.