Evolve to a Better Membership

We often get asked by membership based organisations to review, establish or evolve their memberships. By making memberships easier to understand and purchase you can increase your revenue and decrease the stress on your volunteers or administrators.

Review why you have memberships

Your organisation has memberships for a purpose. Probably to cover the costs of running communal events or activities. Ensure you calculate all of the costs involved with running the events — including your own sanity and the sanity of the volunteers around you.

Membership Structures

Often they're an already established group so we ask how they arrived at their current setup. We find a huge number of variations:

• Annual memberships (beautiful and easy to handle)
• Quarterly memberships (~25% as nice)
• Rolling memberships (they start when the person pays)

The True Cost of a Membership

What is the current amount of administration time being spent on any of your memberships? With the average value of a volunteer hour being ~$30, it becomes quite easy to start to understand if a complex membership is worth not only your time as the administrator, but also if it is worth the hassle as the potential member.

2 hours x every 6 months x member = $120 per member of volunteer time per annum.

Flexibility and Simplicity

Look to offer the most simple, straight forward ways for people to get in, purchase their membership and get out. The less you have to bother them throughout a year the better for all parties.

Do not get pulled back by legacy "but this is the way we have always done it". Your organisation is competing for hearts and minds (and wallets) for members. They have an abundance of options for spending their time elsewhere like never before.