When I started as the membership manager at Georgia Aquarium, I felt totally lost. There’s no textbooks or education programs for running a membership program. Many of us learn on the fly, piecing together whatever information we can find, and the big question is – how do you evaluate your program’s success? How can you use your data to make strategic decisions?
At S&W, we partner with zoos, aquariums, and other visitor-based organizations across the country to help their membership programs thrive. From this work, we’ve determined some key metrics you can start with and a set of benchmarks that you can use to evaluate your membership program.
Renewal Rates
It’s much more cost effective to retain a member than to reinstate them. Consequently, renewal rate is a key metric to consider. To find this number, divide the number of renewals by the total number of members eligible for renewal over a specific time period and multiply by one hundred. For example, if you had 1,000 membership renewals and 5,000 memberships were up for renewal, your rate is (1,000/5,000) * 100 = 20%.
Generally, you want your renewal rate to stay the same or increase year over year. Our benchmark for success is a renewal rate of 30-45%.
First year members generally renew at lower rates than multi-year members. Our benchmark for success for first year members is 20-35%, while we like to see a 50-65% renewal rate for multi-year members.
Member Composition
Another key metric to examine is the composition of your member file. Of your active member households, you want to determine how many are new members, how many are renewed from the previous year, and how many are reinstated, meaning they were a member at some point in the past and now they’ve come back to membership.
Renewed and reinstated members are more likely to renew and usually have a longer life on file. Generally speaking, they will provide more revenue for the organization and are more likely to move up the donor pipeline. With this in mind, we like to see a 60/40 split — 60% of the active members are renewed or reinstated while 40% are new members.
Membership Pricing
For a visitor-based organization, general admission pricing and membership pricing go hand in hand. When evaluating your membership prices, you should look at the average recoup value, i.e. how many visits is a membership worth?
If a general admission ticket costs $20, it would cost a family of four $80 to visit. Say your Family membership costs $180. Divide the cost of membership by the cost of tickets to find the recoup value.
$180/$80 = 2.25
We recommend that your recoup values average 2 to 2.5. Some membership levels may be slightly under or over this rate based on the number of admissions, but 2 to 2.5 is a good range to aim for. If all membership levels have a recoup value below 2, you may see more membership purchases in the short-term, but those members will generally be more transactional in nature and much less likely to renew, leading to an unhealthy file overall. If all of your levels have a higher recoup value than 2.5, you will most likely be pricing out a good portion of your prospects.
We believe in using data to make informed decisions, and we hope this helps give you a place to start when evaluating your membership program. I know from firsthand experience how overwhelming it can be. If you want to chat more or have questions, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me anytime.
