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A governing body I work with organised a compliance workshop last year. Free. Relevant. Genuinely useful content about governance obligations that every club needed to understand.
They promoted it for six weeks. Emails to every club. Social media posts. A spot in the newsletter. A reminder the week before. Another reminder the day before.
One person attended.
The natural reaction is to blame the clubs. They don't care. They're not engaged. They don't take governance seriously.
But that's wrong. The clubs do care — most of them are run by volunteers who give up 10-15 hours a week precisely because they care. The problem isn't motivation. It's architecture.
The spray and pray model
Most governing bodies communicate with their clubs using what I call the spray and pray model. One message, broadcast to every club, through one channel, and hope someone reads it.
It looks like this: the communications officer writes an email. It goes to the mailing list — every club, every registered contact. The subject line is something like "Important Update from [State Body]." The email contains three unrelated items: a policy update, an event invitation, and a funding opportunity. Each is important. None gets the attention it deserves because they're competing with each other in a single email.
This same email competes with the 15-20 other messages from the governing body that month. And with the 200 other emails in the club secretary's inbox that week.
The open rate is 22%. Which means 78% of clubs never saw it. Of the 22% who opened it, maybe half read past the first paragraph. Of those, maybe a third took any action.
You've reached about 4% of your audience. And you're about to send another email.
Why broadcast fails
Broadcast communication treats all clubs as identical. But they're not.
A club with 400 members and a paid administrator has different needs, different capacity, and different interests than a club with 30 members run entirely by volunteers. A club in metropolitan Melbourne has different challenges than a club in regional Victoria. A new club in its first year needs different support than an established club in its fortieth.
When you send the same message to all of them, you're relevant to none of them.
There's also the signal-to-noise problem. When everything comes through the same channel in the same format — policy updates, social media requests, event invitations, compliance deadlines, funding announcements, newsletter digests — the recipient can't distinguish urgent from trivial without reading every message.
So they read none of them. It's rational. If finding the important emails requires reading twenty unimportant ones, the cost of attention exceeds the value.
The workshop autopsy
Let's go back to that workshop. One attendee. Why?
The invitation looked like every other email. Same sender, same format, same channel as the social media share request from last week. Nothing signalled that this was different or more important.
It was broadcast to everyone. The workshop was about governance compliance for club secretaries. But it was sent to every contact at every club — presidents, coaches, registrars, social media managers. The people who needed it most were the hardest to reach because the message was diluted across an audience that mostly didn't need it.
The ask was high. Attend a two-hour workshop on a Tuesday afternoon. For a volunteer who works full-time, that's a half-day of annual leave for a governance workshop. The governing body was asking for a significant commitment through a low-commitment channel.
There was no consequence for not attending. If the governance obligations were mandatory, the workshop should have been framed as mandatory training, tracked, and followed up. Instead, it was positioned as an opportunity — easily ignored.
Timing was wrong. The workshop was mid-season. Club administrators are at their busiest. Pre-season or post-season would have been better. But nobody checked the club calendar against the governing body calendar.
Every one of these factors is a design problem, not a motivation problem. The clubs didn't fail to engage. The engagement architecture failed the clubs.
What actually works
The governing bodies that successfully engage their clubs do five things differently.
1. They segment ruthlessly. Governance updates go to secretaries and presidents. Financial requirements go to treasurers. Competition matters go to registrars. Child safety updates go to child safety officers. Every message goes to the person who needs to act on it. Nobody else.
This requires knowing who holds which role at each club. That's governance data that should be collected and maintained anyway. If you don't know who your club treasurers are, you have a bigger problem than email open rates.
2. They separate channels by urgency. Compliance deadlines and mandatory actions go via direct email to the responsible person, with a clear deadline and a tracking mechanism. Informational content — articles, resources, event promotions — goes in a weekly digest. Social content goes on social media. Urgent operational changes go via SMS.
When each channel has a clear purpose, recipients learn what to expect from each one. An SMS from the governing body means something time-sensitive. A digest email means interesting but not urgent. A direct email to the treasurer means a financial obligation.
3. They make the ask proportional to the channel. Email is good for "read this" and "click this link." It's bad for "attend a two-hour workshop next Tuesday." High-commitment asks need high-commitment outreach — a phone call, a personal invitation, a conversation at a meeting.
4. They track and follow up. They know who opened the compliance email. They know who clicked the acknowledgement link. They know who hasn't. And they follow up with the ones who haven't — not with another broadcast email, but with a direct message. "Hey Sarah, we noticed the insurance certificate hasn't been uploaded yet. Is everything okay?"
5. They close the loop. When a club takes action, the governing body acknowledges it. A simple "Thanks, we've received your return" closes the loop and reinforces the behaviour. Most governing bodies ask for action and then go silent — clubs never know if their submission was received, correct, or sufficient.
The maths of relevance
Here's a simple calculation. If you send 20 messages a month and only 2 are relevant to any given club, your relevance rate is 10%. The other 90% is noise.
If you segment so each club receives only the messages relevant to them, your relevance rate goes to 80-90%. You're sending fewer messages. Each one matters more. Open rates climb. Action rates climb. And you stop training your clubs to ignore you.
The goal isn't more communication. It's less communication that matters more.
The uncomfortable conclusion
The workshop had one attendee not because clubs are disengaged. It had one attendee because the governing body used a broadcast tool for a targeted need, a low-urgency channel for a high-importance message, and a one-size-fits-all approach for a diverse audience.
Fix the architecture and the engagement follows. Send fewer emails. Make each one specific. Track whether it landed. Follow up when it didn't.
Stop spraying. Start aiming.
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