Online Community thanked for invaluable insight into membership benefits

Swim England’s Online Community have been sharing their thoughts on membership benefits – and having their say on how they could be improved.

Here, Leanne Brace, Swim England’s head of membership development, discusses the insight received and how it will be used.

Providing the best possible experience for our members is a key priority for everyone at Swim England.

We are constantly looking to create a better journey for all our members – but it’s important we fully understand your needs before we make any wholesale changes.

As members make up our Online Community, it was the perfect platform to ask a few questions and discover what you like, what you think we can do better and what you’d like to see.

We’re extremely grateful to the community for providing us with their views – it’s invaluable insight which is being shared with every team at Swim England.

It’s important the whole organisation collectively takes on board your comments – and your opinions will be at the heart of our discussions around developing membership in the future.

The next step is for the insight to be presented to the Membership Review Group to establish how we can make changes to reflect the feedback received – although there are some quick wins we can make, however.

One of the key themes that has emerged is around highlighting the benefits of membership. 

Having been made aware of this, we will now include a benefits spotlight in some of our monthly member newsletters, as well as through our social channels.

Optimising newsletter content so it is specific to our audiences is something we will continue to do and it was interesting to see a mix of responses when asked about the quantity of communication – with some wanting more and others less.

Hopefully, you will have noticed we are more aware of the language being taken across our emails.

On reflection, we agree emails were not using the right tone so these have been reviewed but this will continue to be ongoing.

We’re taking on board the need to improve the member experience across our website and other platforms – and we’re currently in the process of understanding the best possible solution to this.

Here to serve your needs

In other areas, it was pleasing to hear a majority are happy with the sign-up process for membership. 

We will continue to be mindful of the comments in the feedback, though, and will consider these when reviewing the sign-up process in the future.

Finally, we recognise our dedicated club volunteers face challenges due to governance requirements.

That is why we are carrying out a full review of our SwimMark accreditation, which will help drive and shape decisions on how we can best offer support, guidance and development opportunities to our clubs and members.

We are here to serve your needs and the Online Community’s responses will help us ensure that continues to be the case.

A huge thanks to everyone who completed the membership task – and to all our members for everything you do for aquatic sports.

We couldn’t do it without you.