Last week, the site of the Dutch bridgefederation NBB proudly announced:
Record aantal leden NBB
Per 1 januari had de NBB 116.874 leden. Nog nooit had de NBB zo veel leden, het vorige recordjaar was 2002 met 116.400 leden.
Which can be translated as:
Record number of NBB members
As of January 1 2012, the NBB had 116,874 members. Never before had the NBB so many members, the previous record was in 2002 with 116,400 members.
Time to congratulate the NBB? Well, I don’t think so. First look at how the membership developed:
This is the number of members as of January 1st for the last 30 years. As you can see, there was a significant growth before the turn of the century. However, since 2000, the number of members is practically constant, with some small year-to-year fluctuations. It can’t be said that the NBB does nothing to promote the game, on the contrary. However, it does not show any effect.
Is this because there is a lack of places to play? No, as of January 1, there were 1051 registered bridge clubs distributed over some 415 municipalities, or on average about 2.5 in each city or village. This number has also been constant for a while, but nevertheless, it should not be hard to find a club in one’s neighborhood.
What is even more worrying, is this graph.
This is the number of junior players over the years. A junior is defined as somebody who hasn’t reached his 25th birthday on January 1. What you see quite clearly is that the number of juniors has dropped from around 1.500 in 1980 to about 300 this year. That is an 80% reduction, again despite all efforts to attract young players to the game.
Looking at these 2 plots, one thing is very clear: Despite all the efforts, we have failed to attract new members over the last 10 years and completely seem to lose the younger generation. In short, as the commander of the Apollo 13 spacecraft said, “Houston, we have a problem”.
How to solve this? I don’t claim to have the final answer but I do see three steps of action:
First, in a previous blog, I already said that the advisory council has been asked to look at the image of the game. That is ongoing and all suggestions are still welcome. Advice and suggestions need to be implemented though and this is what I’m worried about. Time for my second point:
It has been a goal of the federation to grow in size for (at least) the last decade. It is clear that this goal has not been met. If one then looks at the board of directors and the senior staff of the federation, one cannot help but notice that most of them have been around for at least 10 to 15 years. Now what would you think that would happen if a regular company failed to meet one of its key goals for years in a row? Yes, right, the board of directors and senior staff will be thanked for their services and are then asked to vacate their desk by the end of the day. What has happened here? The goals haven’t been met for 10 years! Conclusion? Thank you and goodbye!
OK, we should have some folks lined up to replace them. I’m not going to give names here but there are lots of people around who do know how to market an activity. Spend a few dollars on a good headhunter and hire them. With a net growth of a couple of hundred new members in 2012, the costs for a head hunter will already be recovered.
Step 3? That is simple: whatever we have done in the past 10 years, hasn’t worked. Dump all existing campaigns and start from scratch. Don’t try to fix what is fundamentally broken.
Yes, this is a bit drastic for a Monday morning, but we really have to turn the tide. That requires new faces, not those who have failed consistently for the last decade.
Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion only. The views expressed in this blog do not in any way represent the opinion of the advisory council of the NBB.