How to Measure a Club App

Your club was never in the sample

Someone has probably shown you a table of app benchmarks. Retention should be this. Notification open rates should be that.

Worth asking who was in it.

The leading push notification benchmark only counts apps with at least 1,000 active users that have sent at least 1,000 notifications in a month. So a club with four hundred fans on the app, sending a couple of notifications a week, is not a low performer in that data. It was never in the data.

Apple does the same thing in its own tools. Retention “may remain blank if privacy thresholds are not met, or for new apps and low-volume cohorts”. Google is blunter about its peer comparisons, which “exclude low-performing and abandoned apps”. Strip out the failures. Publish the average. Of course it looks hard to hit.

None of which makes those numbers dishonest. They measure what they say they measure. It goes wrong when a committee holds a volunteer to a benchmark their club was never counted in.

You are not too small to measure. You are too small for their benchmarks, and that is a much easier problem to fix.

Downloads are not the number

A download is a decision somebody made once, possibly months ago, possibly at a stall on registration day because a volunteer asked them to. Worth counting once a season to know the size of the pool. It belongs nowhere near a monthly report.

Three questions, in order

Most app reporting fails because it opens a dashboard and reports whatever is on it. Start from the questions instead and the metrics pick themselves.

1. Are they here? How many people opened the app this month, and is that more than the same month last season?

2. Can you reach them? How many have notifications switched on, and how many acted on the last one you sent?

3. Did it do anything? Votes cast, check-ins, offers claimed. Things a fan chose to do that you can count.

Answer those three every month and you are measuring your app properly. Fix them in that order: there is no point improving what people do in the app if nobody is opening it.

The comparison that actually works

At a few hundred users, one number in one month is close to meaningless. Twenty people going on holiday moves your monthly active figure by an amount that looks like a crisis on a chart and is, in fact, a school holiday.

What survives that noise is direction over time. The three comparisons worth making:

• This month against last month. Noisy, but catches a problem early.
• This month against the same month last season. The best one you have, because it controls for the shape of a season.
• This season’s average against last season’s. The one for the committee, because it is the least noisy.

Your app store peer benchmark is the fairest external comparison available, it is free, and it is already inside the tools you have. Just remember what Google removed from the group before drawing conclusions.

One number to treat carefully

You may have been told to expect notification open rates of twenty to forty per cent.

Treat that with real caution. The best-evidenced benchmark available reports median direct open rates in the low single digits across most industries, with sport ranking at or near the bottom of thirteen verticals on both opt-in and open rate. The most favourable credible figure we could find anywhere was 14.4%, for contextual notifications triggered by something a fan actually did, against 4.19% for generic broadcasts (Batch, 2025, across 10,000 apps and 800 billion messages).

A club hitting 6% is not failing. It is doing roughly what the evidence predicts. The way to improve it is fewer, better-timed, more specific notifications, not more of them.

One number you can fairly compare yourself against: push opt-in averages 61% across that same benchmark (67% on Android, 56% on iOS). Opt-in is a simple ratio that does not depend on how much you send, so it travels between apps in a way open rates do not.

What we would suggest aiming for

These are Tiparra’s recommendations for a first season, not industry benchmarks. We are stating them as targets because no published benchmark covers apps at club scale.

• Push opt-in: at or above 61%, the published cross-industry average. This one is genuinely comparable.
• Monthly active share: rising every quarter. Set your own baseline in month one and beat it.
• Notification open rate: better than your own last-quarter average. Judge each send against your own history, not an external figure.
• Actions per active user: rising across a season.

Notice that three of the four are comparisons against yourself. That is deliberate, and it is the honest position at this scale.

The one-page monthly report

• Are they here? [X] opened the app, from [Y] who have it. Same month last season: [Z].
• Can you reach them? [X] of [Y] have notifications on. Best notification: “[copy]” at [X]%.
• Did it do anything? [X] fan actions, [Y] per active user. Top three: …
• Sponsors: [partner] activation reached [X] fans, [Y] claimed.
• What I am changing next month: [one thing].
• What I need from the committee: [nothing, or one specific thing].

Keep it to one page. A two-page report gets skimmed; a one-page report gets read.

Taking it to the committee

Lead with the change, not the number. “412 fans used the app in June, up from 340 in the same month last year” lands. “Monthly active users were 38%” starts a debate about whether 38 is good that nobody in the room can settle.

Bring one number, one story and one ask. Everything else is an attachment.

Somebody will ask about downloads. Have the number, give it, and move on: “It is [N], and it is worth knowing once a season, but it counts a decision someone made once. What matters is how many came back this month, which is [X].”

The full guide goes further

Twenty pages on measuring a club app: where the famous benchmarks actually came from, what the numbers are worth at small scale, the notification log that teaches you more than any benchmark, and a diagnostic for when a number looks bad.

Download How to Measure a Club App →

Sources: Airship, Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks 2025 (9 billion app users, thousands of apps, 13 verticals, January to December 2024; covers apps with at least 1,000 active users and 1,000 cumulative notifications a month) · Batch, Push Notification Benchmark 2025 (800 billion messages, 10,000 apps and sites, July 2024 to July 2025) · Apple, App Store Connect Analytics documentation · Google Play Console, peer benchmark groups documentation.

Targets marked as Tiparra recommendations are our own guidance, not measured benchmarks. No published benchmark covers apps at club scale; we say so on the page because it is the reason the recommendations exist.