Making the most of membership
Membership is special.
There are lots of ways to take positive action for the things we care about, and lots of ways for organisations to set themselves up to deliver impact. But at its best, becoming a member of something offers a unique opportunity to cultivate a long-term, heartfelt commitment to a cause. At its best, membership can bring us together into lasting relationships with other people who share our beliefs and concerns, building our collective muscle and even making lifelong friendships.
Too often, however, membership can feel uninspiring and transactional: “fund our work, and you’ll get some perks”. Members are treated simply as a source of income, nothing more. The organisation does its work on behalf of members, rather than working with them towards a shared purpose. And all of this is reinforced by a membership “industry” that’s heavily focused on CRMs, member benefits and customer journeys.
Membership can and should be so much more. We believe that reimagining membership as purposeful and participatory is crucial to maximising organisational impact and sparking civic renewal. We’re looking for forward-thinking membership organisations to join us in lighting a path for the rest of civil society. Could you be one of them?
The challenge for membership
How can we maximise members’ participation in both our organisations and our purpose?
And how can participation help make membership organisations more impactful AND more financially sustainable?
We first posed these questions 10 years ago in our landmark Future of Membership report, co-created through a collaborative innovation project with six membership organisations. In the report, we set out a new vision for participatory membership: thinking of membership as a relationship rooted in shared purpose, not just a transactional product.
Having worked with over 50 membership organisations since to increase acquisition, retention and impact through the power of participation, we’ve seen that these core questions are both as urgent and as generative as ever. What’s more, several new questions have emerged:
How can member-led participation help organisations go further and faster, maximising their impact?
How can we design participatory membership experiences that nourish people’s sense of agency and purpose?
How can we diversify participation opportunities so that ALL members can contribute their ideas, creativity, passion and experience?
How can we help members collaborate with other members?
How can we make members’ participation in decision-making meaningful and manageable?
We are now seeking to convene six to eight membership organisations to explore the value that participatory membership has to offer in today’s context, centred around the core convening question:
This will be an opportunity to forge a new understanding of membership based on our existing insights and tools, while also collaboratively exploring new frontiers and building fresh approaches that can be shared with the wider sector.
What we’ve learned already
Our original report challenged the conventional wisdom that treats mass membership as a consumer product. This is based on assumptions that members primarily seek “value for money” and generally don’t care enough to step up and get involved in taking action or making decisions. Instead, the organisation delivers the mission for the members, and the members simply pay for it. (We also found that the small core of members who do try to get involved in decision-making often end up being treated as stakeholders to be “managed”).
Membership organisations need income. But in the long run, this product-driven way of thinking hurts them. Transactional relationships weaken retention — if members don’t use the perks right away, they don’t renew. Providing member benefits can become an industry in itself, diverting resources away from your true purpose. In some cases, organisations can forget why they even had members in the first place: all the energy goes on sustaining the membership base, rather than on mobilising it.
Thankfully, there is a better way of sustaining a member organisation while also increasing impact. We call it participatory membership. It means treating members as Citizens — creative, caring and collaborative, and open to participating in a shared purpose — rather than transactional Consumers.
Towards participatory membership
Our original research found that value exchange is indeed becoming more and more important to people, but it’s not limited to ‘value for money’. People will buy into relationships in which they believe they are respected and have a role. Member benefits have a role in expressing this (especially for mutuals and co-ops, where shared material benefit is part of the core ethos), but emotional and hands-on involvement is a critical part of the equation.
We also found that, while old ways of participating (e.g., attending AGMs or branch meetings) may be in decline, there are many new, diverse and creative modes of participation emerging and flourishing everywhere. It’s simply wrong to conclude that “people don’t want to participate”: many are simply waiting for the right opportunity.
These insights support a shift from transactional, Consumer versions of membership towards more purpose-driven, participatory and Citizen membership.
The Three Principles of Participatory Membership
So how can member organisations put this approach into practice?
Through experimentation and reflection with our collaborative innovation partners, we developed three principles for organisations who want to increase their impact by making membership more participatory:
PURPOSE: Communicate a clear mission for members to step into
PLATFORM: Find ways to work with members, not just for them
PROTOTYPE: Build energy by experimenting together
Below, we describe some of our original thinking around each principle, what we’ve learned since, and which emerging questions we are now looking to dive into.
Purpose
Our original question was: How can membership become a relationship rooted in purpose, not just a transactional product?
Through our explorations, our participants learned how to make purpose central to how they communicate with members. They also made time to reflect internally on their purpose and how it relates to their activities, and explored ways to measure purpose through KPIs and other metrics, so as to better integrate it into membership strategy.
Crucial to this is recognising that value exchange also has an emotional component. In our work since, we’ve noticed how powerful, longstanding relationships are created whenever membership meaningfully fuels people’s own sense of personal purpose and identity.
This leads us to an emerging question: How can participatory membership nourish members’ own sense of agency and purpose?
Platform
Here, we started by asking: How can members become participants in purpose?
The lightbulb moment for most participants was making the shift in mindset from “consultation and feedback” to genuine co-creation. This requires a willingness to ask open-ended questions and be open-minded about the answers. Crucially, creating a shared platform based on a shared purpose also requires different structures and processes. It means recognising that people are different and designing a range of participation opportunities to meet members’ diverse needs and preferences (thinking that we’ve developed further with our Everyday Participation toolkit).
In the years since, we’ve also seen that many people place value on how membership helps them to make trusted human connections to other people who share the same interests and ideals, building their social networks and self-directed collective capability.
With that in mind, our emerging question is: How can membership become a platform for peer-to-peer connection, collaboration and creativity around a shared purpose?
Prototype
Our final question was: how can we build energy for new ways of working?
We knew that committing to participatory membership would be a bold step for some organisations. Our solution was to take a “prototype” approach.
This meant moving away from “plan, do, review” and embracing “make, measure, learn” — getting small and scrappy versions of ideas out there quickly and rapidly iterating, rather than letting the desired change get bogged down in a quagmire of strategic planning. To support this, we explored ways to reduce the risk of experimenting, allowing organisations to iterate faster.
Prototyping also offers more opportunities to involve members in creating the change you want, through co-creation and co-production, rather than developing participatory membership behind closed doors. This builds energy, momentum and engagement, while improving outcomes by drawing on a wider pool of ideas and perspectives.
We still believe in the core tenets of the prototyping approach. But having worked with many membership organisations over the past ten years, we’ve seen how challenging it can sometimes be for some organisations to drive internal change through more agile and iterative ways of working, even where there is a clear commitment to reimagining membership. Prototyping sometimes doesn’t seem to “fit” within the wider organisational culture, making it a challenge to give permission, manage expectations and overcome bottlenecks.
As such, we are now asking: how can organisations carve out safe spaces to trial new membership opportunities and propositions?
Join us!
We are now inviting membership organisations to take part in a new collaborative innovation project that will explore these evergreen and emerging questions. It’s an opportunity for you to explore, learn and experiment alongside your peers while working with New Citizen Project’s established tools and frameworks.
Our collaborative innovation processes are rooted in the principles of action research, cooperative inquiry and appreciative inquiry. This means we learn by doing, learn from each other, and start with what’s working rather than what’s not.
This collaborative innovation project will make use of both tried-and-tested and experimental tools developed by New Citizen Project, including the “Three Principles of Participatory Membership”, the “Six Squares” diagnosis tool, the “Seven Modes of Everyday Participation”, “Purposeful Questions”, the “Narrative, Rituals, Totems” cultural change framework, and others.
Outputs and outcomes
What might happen as a result? Last time, our participants radically changed the way they communicate with members, created new volunteer roles, made staff roles more purpose-based (e.g. revitalising the role of visitor experience teams), developed new participation opportunities along the whole “spectrum of participation”, created more collaborative and localised relationships with activist members, and involved members in the co-creation of major strategies, among other outcomes. What might you be able to achieve?
