As best I can tell, a “club activation” is just using a club callsign.
I, too, think the rigid 200 contact requirement isn’t encouraging adoption. Kevin’s idea of (number of participants)*(44) with an upper limit of 200 is quite sane. It’s a sliding scale that fits small group outings as well as large. There are a lot of clubs out there, and it seems feasible that many of them might only have a couple members who actively chase something like WWFF, SOTA, NPOTA, etc. Those clubs might also have occasions when folks try to activate a park far away from home. When operating far from home, it’s often impractical to impossible to schedule another chance to complete the activation when it may require plane tickets, many hours of driving each way, or multiple days off from work. For example, I personally have plans to travel across the country, and plan on trying to activate a park during my trip. It is unlikely that I could obtain 200 contacts during that attempt, so I will not bother using the club callsign. If I could stand a chance of getting a valid activation under the club callsign, however, then I could contribute something of value <i>to my club</i> by helping them get closer to an award. That’s what clubs are about, right? Like minded people joining together with common goals an ideals. A group effort. A chance for each individual to contribute a small part to the whole.
An ugly (IMHO) way to handle this is with national rules. Already within K-land we have a national rule saying individual activators only require 10 QSOs instead of 44. Perhaps we can have a club activation rule that’s specific to K-land requiring less than 200 contacts for a club? Again, ugly, but maybe a stopgap.