Ask Your Organization These Questions to Increase Your Membership Renewal Rate
by Joanna PinedaPosted on December 19, 2018
I’m working with a number of associations that are experiencing higher than desired membership churn rates. In some cases, nearly 25% of the membership does not renew each year. That’s a lot of members to recruit each year, just to recover from the previous year’s loss.
What to do? In this instance, we get curious about the new membership onboarding process and we ask these questions:
Do the non-renewing members share demographics?
Are there patterns in their activities? For example, we sometimes find that the members who choose to renew after just one year are often accidental members, or people who became members because they registered for a meeting or spoke at a conference. In these instances, these individuals sometimes don’t even realize they are members.
Are there certain activities or campaigns that generate more non-renewing members? For example, perhaps a certain list that you rent or buy generates members but they tend not to renew.
Do non-renewing members come from certain segments of your membership, e.g., a certain size company or type of business?
How does the organization welcome new members? What do they receive in the mail and online? What exactly happens and when?
If you’re not already tracking this information, it’s time to start! You’ll get valuable into who is not renewing and get a head start on getting those renewal rates up. In future blog posts, I’ll share tips and strategies for creating amazing new member onboarding journeys. Make 2019 the year of intentional new member journeys!
In honor of Earth Day, I want to share a story about our recent office closing at Matrix Group, and how we tried to do it in the most sustainable, community-minded way possible. Closing our Arlington, VA office was a bittersweet milestone. After years of working fully remotely and knowing that remote work was here to stay for us, it didn’t...
On Monday, March 31st, Matrix Group said goodbye to our office on the 3rd floor of 2611 South Clark Street in Crystal City. We moved into this space in July 2019, a mere nine months before the pandemic began. This new office was light-filled, full of collaborative spaces, decorated with purple splashes and Star Wars toys, and full of the latest...
CEO Joanna Pineda and I have a running joke that whenever we see “delve” and “embark” used in the same paragraph (even better if it’s the same sentence) we wager a lot that AI was involved in the drafting. If you've been using AI tools like ChatGPT for content creation, you’ve probably noticed this, too. AI definitely favors certain words -...
