South West Coast Path Association membership survey

Recently we asked you to tell us more about yourselves than we ever have before, through this years’ membership survey, and we asked you to let us know how we’re doing at delivering your membership scheme to you. 

The results are in. 36% of you responded to the survey this year. We are very grateful to all of you for spending the time to do this. We are now looking at ways to improve the membership scheme based on the wealth of information you have provided. 

Here is a brief summary of what we found out and some early actions we will be taking as a result: 

Over 50% of you carried out a web search about the South West Coast Path or came directly to our website at www.southwestcoastpath.org.uk which then led you to find out about joining the Association. The next most popular ways to find out about membership were from a friend (10%) and in the Complete Guide (7.5%)

The length of time that members have been with the Association varies widely. It’s great to see that we have lots of new members (20%), welcome, as well as a similar amount (21%) of those of you who have been members for over ten years. To have this percentage of long-term members is fantastic for a small charity like the Association. And for those in between, we thank you for staying with us so far and we hope you feel encouraged to renew with us again next year

When asked why you joined as a member, over 60% of you said that you needed information for planning a walk or run on the Path. This along with the fact that over 50% of you wanted to help to fund the Association to carry out its work, gives us a clear message about how important these two aspects of our work are to you. And we loved to hear that nearly 40% of you consider the Association a cause worth supporting

We now know, thanks to your answers, which types of topics you’d like to hear from us about. Walking (over 90%), scenic beauty (57%), wildlife (53%) and history (46%) were the most requested topics with food and drink, health and well-being and culture also being of interest to over 20% of members. We have a membership with very varied interests as many of you ticked more than six topics in total

As you can see from the chart below these are the people that you like to spend your time with on the Path. There were some surprises in these answers for us with over a third of you telling us that you like to spend time on your own on the Path

We know that our members are very engaged with the work of the Association. We always receive lots of feedback from you when we ask you, many of you e-mail or call us at the office on different matters and others of you take part in different activities including volunteering, contributing to appeals, attending events and in many other ways. Thank you for telling us how you feel about taking part in different activities. The activities many members showed a stronger interest in are shown in this chart. We also found out which activities members are less likely to be interested in doing which is just as insightful for us

About 80% of the members that responded to this survey were over 56 years old. We know from our membership records database that the profile of the entire membership is similar to these results. Less than 10% are under 45 years old. We now have most birth dates registered for members but if you are yet to tell us what this is it would be great to hear from you to complete our records

Around the same percentage of you have either nearly completed the Path or completed it (25%) or are in the early stages of walking the trail (22%). It is very inspiring to see that thousands of our members are currently walking the Path and are at different stages of completion. This supports our knowledge of the amount of people taking up the challenge to walk the whole Path (or completing it more than twice in some cases!)

Over 77% of you are very satisfied with your membership and if we include those that were somewhat satisfied this comes to 98%. This level of member satisfaction is very gratifying to see, but we know can do better. Those of you who contacted us about individual matters regarding your membership we will contact you separately

The question about how well we do at providing a unique, inspiring and value for money membership scheme wasn’t overly popular with some of you. You asked us to focus on looking after the Path rather than providing an inspiring and unique membership. We have taken this feedback on board. However, other members have let us know that we could be doing better

We have a responsibility to make sure that as much of your membership fee goes straight into furthering the vision and mission of the South West Coast Path Association as possible. We don’t often mention these in our communications with you, but as a reminder these are our vision and mission:

There are many points to pick up from your answers about how we can make your membership as efficient as possible, to put more money back into the Path. Of note, is the high % of members that think having different levels of membership is a good idea, at over 60%. About 58% of you think that publishing the guide every two years is a good idea. With a small majority (18%) saying that they would rather we didn’t do this. We would like to move to providing a monthly instalment option for membership and this was seen in a very positive light by the large majority of members. Increasing membership on an annual basis was less popular, although over 62% of members are in favour or not concerned with this idea. Where opinion was particularly split was on the matter of receiving the guide and magazine in printed or digital form. About 55% were more than happy or ok about receiving them digitally whereas about 45% were not.

The amount and type of communications that you currently receive seems to be about right. And it is clear, that most of you do not want to be contacted by phone. We’re glad that in an age of information overload we have got this right most of the time

It was unfortunate that many of you had problems answering Q13. of the survey. We’re sorry to have inconvenienced you and we will not be using this ranking question format again. It was not unexpected to see the Complete Guide as the most important tangible benefit of membership, with 75% of you putting this as your most important benefit. It shows us clearly that the guide still has an important place within our membership scheme. It was interesting to see that the Cotswold Outdoor and other member offers are less important to you. And encouraging to know that you feel the other tangible benefits such as the magazine and e-newsletters are more important

Of all the issues listed as priorities for the Association in this survey, making sure the Path is well maintained was your clear choice at 98%. This along with your priorities for us to protect the environment (81%) and have a stronger voice on planning decisions (53%), make it clear what is important to our membership. All the issues we listed, were seen as priorities to you, some less than others. Single issue campaigns, health and well-being and bringing more tourists onto the Path were least important to you

We asked if members had any further comments. We received 506 additional comments. Many were from you to wish us well in our work and to inspire us to carry on with what we’re doing. Others put across new ideas and comments about how we can do better in the future and others told us about their personal adventures on the Path and asked us to help them with a membership query of some kind. At just under a third of those who responded we are delighted to know that we still have a very engaged membership

Thank you for your time and consideration in completing your membership survey this year.   

Here’s a few actions we have taken straight away from your feedback: 

Ensuring membership details continue to be placed in each edition of the Complete Guide 
Asking members to tell their friends about joining as a member and what the benefits are (we have started this with the back cover advert of this autumn’s trailblazing magazine) and develop a member get member scheme 
We are already sending you news and stories about some of the topics of interest and we will now look to widen these to include more information about the wildlife and history on the Path as well as a sprinkling of these other topics that were identified (starting with the article about birds on the Path in the autumn Trailblazing magazine). 
We will do more to recruit younger audiences – which has already started through our social media communications, especially our Instagram content. 
We have started to develop monthly payment options for membership as well as having more discussions within the team on how and when we publish the guide and magazine. 
We have already agreed a new membership price from January 1st  2019 (more of which elsewhere in this e-news) 
We had a revamp of the magazine in 2018 and we will continue to improve the content, format and readability of each edition 
Any additional comments that needed answering we will have already replied to you or will do so over the next few weeks directly to you

We will also be taking forward a range of other actions over the next 12-18 months based on the information we received from this survey. Find out more here