Why Silence Is Costing Clubs the Trust They've Already Earned
Aug 07, 2026
There's a moment in a conversation I had recently with Don Tilley from Gotcha4Life that genuinely took me by surprise. Don has spent years working alongside registered clubs, first at IGT, then at Learning Links, and now leading community partnerships at Gotcha4Life. He told me that even after five years working directly with clubs and casinos, he still didn't grasp the true scale of what clubs give back to their communities. It wasn't until he sat in a Club GRANTS ceremony and heard that one single club had given away just under a million dollars that it landed properly.
He rang his brother-in-law that same night. His brother-in-law had no idea clubs were not-for-profit at all. He assumed, like a lot of people do, that a club is just a business with gaming machines and a bistro.
That not knowing is the part I keep coming back to.
We built this gap ourselves
For thirty years I've worked in and around registered clubs, and I know for a fact that our industry does not have a generosity problem. If anything, clubs have been quietly propping up community infrastructure for decades, showing up for the fires, the floods, the local footy club, the primary school fete, without much fanfare and without asking for credit. That instinct is a good one. But somewhere along the way, quiet became invisible, and invisible became a liability.
Even from conversations with other Community Executives in the industry, I know how hard it can be to get some charities to even take a meeting, because they don’t understand why a club would want to give them money. Suspicion, not gratitude, is the first response. Not because the club has done anything wrong, but because nobody ever explained what clubs actually do or why they do it.
That's not a communications problem in the trivial sense. That's a trust problem, and clubs built it themselves through years of good behaviour and no explanation.
What Gotcha4Life gets right that we can learn from
Gotcha4Life has deliberately built its Mentally Fit Primary School program as a whole-of-school, whole-of-community model, rather than a one-off assembly or a photo for the newsletter. It's currently running in 68 schools and tracking toward 90, working with students, teachers and parents over multiple years, and specifically designed so that schools can eventually run parts of it themselves.
That last point is critical, because a charity partner built for genuine scale doesn't just deliver a service, it builds capability in the people it works with, so the impact keeps compounding after the partner walks out the door. That's precisely what I ask club CEOs and GMs to think about when they're choosing where to put their community dollars. Are you funding a moment, or are you funding a capability that outlasts the grant round?
The trust gap doesn't stop at your front door
I really want to push this further than a piece about external reputation, because I think that's only half the story.
If your own members and the wider public don't know what your club stands for, there's a good chance a chunk of your own staff don't fully know either. I've sat across the table from enough hospitality teams to know that people want to work somewhere that stands for something, and they want to be able to say so, to their friends, their family, even their next employer. If a bartender or a duty manager can't tell you in one sentence what their club actually does for the community beyond the bistro specials, that's a significant culture gap, and culture gaps show up in your retention numbers before they show up anywhere else.
Trust has a direction, and it starts inside the building. A team that understands and feels proud of what their club stands for will carry that pride out the front door and into the community without you having to ask them to. A team that's never been told will have nothing to carry. So make the story of who you are easy to find for the people who work for you, not just the people who might one day partner with you.
Where to start, if you're a CEO or GM reading this
You don't need a rebrand or a new tagline. You need to close the gap between what your club already does and what your own people know about it. Tell your staff first. Let it become part of onboarding, part of team meetings, part of how you talk about the business, rather than a once-a-year annual report line. Then let your community hear the same story from people who actually believe it because they've lived it.
Clubs have never had a shortage of good deeds. What's been missing is the habit of saying so, starting with the people closest to home.
If you want to hear the full conversation with Don Tilley about Gotcha4Life's work in schools and what it's teaching the club industry about community partnerships, you'll find it on The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast.
Or watch the full episode on YouTube below.
