I don't think there is one answer that will address the problems of every folk club, but I do think the core problem for all of them is the same, audience age: if you don't get a younger audience then you're doomed no matter how nice the toilets are or how great the support act is.

Folk clubs do have a bad image, but the problem isn't the f-word. Folk is going through one of its periodic upswings, festivals do well, there's lots of talented young performers, lots of publicity in the newspapers and music mags, in fact it's almost hip. Consider also nu-folk, (which I know isn't folk at all a lot of the time), a burgeoning and hip genre that attracts a wide but also much younger audience.

But how is that audience attracted? By the same means that any audience is attracted, speaking to it in its language and answering the "what's in it for me?" question.

To take the language point, do folk clubs make full use of the web, do they have a MySpace site, do they leaflet the Student Union rather than the folk club in the next town, do they present the performers as funky and interesting (not necessarily young), and so on and so on? I think not. I see a lot of folk club flyers, and almost without exception they're black and white, typed, possibly with a badly photocopied picture of the artist, some blurb that talks about their "musicianship" and perhaps a quote or two from a magazine that nobody under 20 reads or a musician that nobody under 30 has heard of. Not that likely to attract anyone young is it.

I could go on, but the point is, understand what the people you want to attract want and how they communicate, and act upon it. If you do so they will come.