Measuring Membership Performance
Traditional methods of measuring membership performance tend to look backwards at past results and do not always flag the key indicators needed to manage and grow membership. They tell us what happened, but not necessarily why it happened.
In the current climate, we need to understand cause and effect; what is behind the high-level numbers, and what is the chain of events that impact upon performance?
Each step on the mutual membership journey has a profound knock-on effect. Many membership bodies think they are OK because things are apparently stable, “there are no obvious problems, so we must be in good shape”. What they should be questioning is whether this is a false sense of comfort, and will current trends continue?
The quite dramatic challenges facing most membership bodies today require new measures, and historical performance levels are not future guarantees. They need to examine what is going on underneath the surface and not accept the apparently obvious.
A good example of making high level assumptions and not looking closely enough at the detail is the way in which retention is generally calculated. Usually, retention performance is measured, often only once a year, at a total membership level and a bit like this:
How many did I have (or think I had), and how many have I still got?
How many did I have last time, and is it fewer or more than now?
This can be misleading as the overall figure often disguises potentially higher early year’s losses and individual behaviour variations. Top level retention is frequently driven by some faithful friends and unfortunately, they won’t be around for much longer. Equally, numbers can be impacted by a cohort of free student members that never convert to full paying members.
Although figures comparing current and past recruitment, renewal and retention are clearly the vital signs of performance, they are usually at total membership level and are normally about numbers and cash. We work with our client organisations to measure the more subtle drivers of retention and growth and the effectiveness of their member’s journeys.
In addition to the facts and figures, the questions we encourage our clients to ask are:
What is everyone doing to keep our members happy?
Do we have a constant finger on the pulse to know how our members feel?
Is everything really ok on the membership journey?
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