Grow philanthropic income and deepen audience relationships with our guide to creating a successful membership scheme.
When memberships are well designed and effectively managed, they can help you generate income from philanthropic giving and give audience members more reasons to engage with your organisation.
But to achieve this, it helps to step back and assess the bigger picture first. This means understanding why your organisation has, or wants to have, a membership scheme in the first place, researching your audience, and shaping a clear marketing and fundraising strategy for both the short and long term.
Use this how-to guide to develop a successful membership scheme for the first time, or to check that your current scheme is still working as well as it could.
1. Align on your objectives
First, you need to understand why your organisation wants a membership scheme. Knowing your objectives will help determine what type of scheme to develop:
- To increase attendance and secondary spend, choose a commercial membership scheme.
This type of scheme offers a financial incentive to join, rewarding people who book the most and encouraging them to book more, and is usually managed by the marketing team. - To generate philanthropic giving and encourage donors to take the next step in their relationship with your organisation, develop a philanthropic scheme.
There are few financial benefits to this type of scheme, but people who want to make a charitable gift or access non-financial benefits will be motivated to join. Usually, philanthropic membership schemes are looked after by the development team.
If your goal is to do a little of both, you need a scheme that combines a membership fee with a philanthropic gift. By working collaboratively between marketing and development teams, and with the benefits of a connected marketing, ticketing, and fundraising system, you can offer financial incentives while also increasing philanthropic giving.
2. Choose the right benefits to offer
When you’re thinking about what benefits to offer, there are two rules to keep in mind:
- Make sure your membership scheme brings in more money than it costs to run. This might sound obvious, but there are plenty of examples of memberships that don’t do this.
- Avoid offering a single membership with just one benefit level. It’s much better to offer multiple entry points by developing tiered memberships that offer benefits at different levels, giving more people a way in and more room to grow over time.
- Performing Arts Houston created membership tiers ranging from $25 right through to $10,000, giving people a clear path to grow loyalty and increase their giving year on year.
Benefits that cost you money
There are some benefits you can offer that will cost you a small amount of money, but may be an effective incentive to join your membership scheme. These financial benefits can make memberships easier to sell, generating income and more bookings.
In your Spektrix system, members can access any of the following benefits automatically when they log in. There’s no need for discount codes or manual processes from your team.
- Waived booking fees
- Percentage discounts on some or all tickets
- Top price seats at a discounted price
- Discounts on your catering or merchandise
- Free events, such as members’ receptions or season launches
Benefits that don’t cost anything
You can offer members valuable benefits that don’t cost you anything while still strengthening the relationship. These are a strong fit if you want to create a philanthropic membership scheme:
- Priority booking periods
- Priority mailings
- Thank you messaging in event programmes or on your website
- Exclusive access to chargeable benefits, like the ones listed below
Benefits you can offer for an additional charge
Finally, there are benefits that do cost something to your organisation, but can also carry a small additional cost for members. They require a small amount of administrative time, but are strong options for any kind of membership scheme because they can generate revenue and increase engagement:
- Pre- and post-event talks
- Building and backstage tours
- Dress rehearsals
- Artist meet and greets
3. Tailor your membership scheme around audience interests
You might know what you want to get out of a membership scheme, but to make it successful you’ll also need to give your audience what they want. Delve into audience behaviour by looking over booking and donation history, understanding interests, building segmentation models, and mapping them to audience members’ motivations and incentives, as part of your audience development planning.
The following examples explain how to analyse audience behaviour in your Spektrix system. If you’re using a different CRM system, reach out to your support team for guidance. They should be happy to help you make your membership scheme a success.
- Priority booking. Use drag-and-drop audience segmentation tools to build Customer Lists, where you can easily identify the people who book early and choose your most popular events. If they’re drawn to programming that regularly sells out, or if they love to pick their favourite seats every time, then priority booking may be a strong incentive for them to join your membership scheme. Priority booking is easy to configure, doesn’t cost you anything, and generates income through membership fees. It’s a great option if you’re just getting started with memberships and exploring which options have the greatest impact on audience engagement and long-term revenue.
- Waiving transaction fees. The Ticket Sales Analysis Report gives a breakdown of transactions by channel, price band, and more. This will tell you the proportion of audience members in your chosen segment who purchase tickets over the phone or in person. Waiving booking fees for online purchases not only provides a strong incentive for people to join, but also frees up time for your ticketing and sales team by nudging audience members to make their purchases through your website.
- Philanthropic giving. The Donations Analysis Report breaks down the proportion of audience members making a donation when they purchase tickets. If you identify a segment of audience members who already have a high propensity to give, a philanthropic membership scheme can encourage them to take the next step in their relationship with your organisation.
- Membership pricing. Understand audience members’ spending patterns using the Customer Analysis Report to explore average spend per order and per ticket. Use this data to estimate how much people might be willing to pay for a membership. For example, if the average spend per order is £30, a £20 membership represents a significant increase on the basket value. If the average spend per order is £100, that same £20 membership might be an easier upsell.
4. Do some due diligence
Make sure that you’re asking the right questions about your membership scheme and how it fits in with your wider offer. Talk to other departments, understand their strategic plans, and think collaboratively about how to build the most successful membership scheme.
- Does your membership scheme offer a better deal to audience members than any current offers, for example flexi-series, season tickets, or preview nights? Your membership needs to be easy to understand, so avoid conflicting messages and make sure your members get the best deal. Looking at how organisations like Royal Exchange Theatre position Season Tickets alongside other loyalty offers can be a useful way to sense-check your own approach, ensuring that different routes to loyalty feel complementary rather than confusing.
- Does your membership scheme undermine your other fundraising efforts? If you have targets for individual giving, make sure you’re not confusing people by encouraging them to become members while also asking them to sign up to regular donations.
- How many members do you need for the scheme to be profitable? Don’t forget to take into account any team time required. Once you’ve worked this out, is it still feasible?
- Who will be responsible for managing the scheme? A CRM with good, integrated fundraising and membership tools should make it easy to create and sell memberships, and help members access their benefits. But even the best software relies on your team finding the time to monitor sales figures, track targets, and continually improve the promotion of your memberships.
Promote your membership scheme
Even with strong incentives on offer, you’ll still need to market your scheme to audience members. Here are a few ideas to get your membership invitation in front of the people most likely to show an interest.
- Target potential members. Segment your database to find audience members based on their past behaviour. For a commercial membership scheme, look for people who spent over a certain amount on tickets in the past year and might have saved money as members. For a philanthropic membership scheme, focus on audience members who regularly donate at the point of sale.
- Flag potential members to upsell. Once you’ve identified your most likely prospective members, tag them in your CRM system. That way, box office and front of house teams can quickly see who they are when they call, collect, or scan their tickets, giving them an opportunity to upsell your membership scheme at the point of sale.
- Create a simple purchase pathway. Make it easy for people to purchase memberships online, as part of another transaction or as a standalone item. In your Spektrix system, you can mix and match targeted upsells at checkout with one-click membership prompts on the website, making it a smooth and simple process for visitors to join your scheme, no matter their starting point.
6. Keep your members engaged
So you’ve developed a solid membership scheme and you’ve got a growing list of members. Great work. Now you need to keep them engaged. Here’s how.
- Set memberships to renew automatically. Memberships set to auto-renew can see higher renewal rates. Using Continuous Payment Authority, audience members can purchase renewable memberships online with just one added checkbox, increasing your long-term revenue while maintaining a smooth booking journey.
- Remind members to enjoy their benefits. Once your scheme’s up and running, make sure members are making the most of any benefits you offer and are engaged with your organisation. Set automations to flag any audience members who haven’t accessed key benefits and contact them individually, or build email automation programs to remind them not to miss out.
- Remind your whole team to say thank you. Tag members in your CRM system so they’re highlighted to box office and front of house teams every time they visit. Keep team members informed about member benefits and current philanthropic activity so they can thank members for their support and remind them what more they could enjoy.
Above all, don’t forget to listen. Give members the opportunity to tell you what they think, ask them what other benefits they’d like to receive, and reach out to them if they don’t renew. Even if you can’t persuade them back, it’s important to know what made them leave. Be sure not to promise you’ll fulfil every individual request, but record feedback, look for patterns, and use feedback to drive sustained success.
7. Keep experimenting
Once you’ve developed a membership scheme that fits your objectives and the needs of your audience, don’t stop there. Too many membership schemes fall flat because they are never reviewed. Undertake regular data analysis and review members’ feedback to check whether the scheme is working as you intended or whether there’s room to achieve even more.
If lapsed members tell you the price is too high, consider a lower-cost, entry-level tier. If a good proportion of people choose your highest tier, consider creating an even higher-value option. If very few people are attending post-event talks, try replacing that benefit with something that resonates more strongly with your audience.
Organisations like Cincinnati Shakespeare Company have used flexible pass products to test new ways of encouraging repeat attendance, adjusting the balance between discounts, commitment and choice over time as they learn more about audience behaviour.
The makeup of your audience changes year on year, so make sure you’re not doing things one way just because that’s how it’s always been. Mix and match incentives to meet the needs of your longstanding audience segments, and to build loyalty among the audience members of tomorrow.
