The Future of Membership is Participation
There’s an outdated conventional wisdom among membership organisations that, implicitly or explicitly, we still see and hear far too often.
It goes something like this:
We live in a consumer society, and as such membership is best thought of as a transaction. From cultural organisations to environmental charities, people don’t become members so much as buy memberships. Their decisions are more prompted by material self-interest based on the value for money of the benefits on offer than by any investment of meaning or identity. They don’t really care that much, and certainly don’t want to get more deeply involved, as anyone can tell by the dwindling numbers of the same old faces turning up at Annual General Meetings every year. As such, membership organisations with any sense are best advised to broker partnership deals that “service” their members, maximise the revenue they earn, and use that to fund the rest of the organisation to get on with the work, maybe publishing the occasional update in the members’ magazine.
At the New Citizenship Project, we see people differently, so we see the situation differently. As a result, we believe there are big opportunities for both revenue and impact that are currently being missed. There are two aspects to this different view.
First, what many perceive as a rising emphasis on value for money and transactional benefits is in our view a rising emphasis on the value exchange, a much broader concept: people want return on investment, yes, but primarily because they want their involvement, whatever form that takes, to make an impact on the world.
Second, where others see declining participation, we see a decline in the old means of participation. It may well be true that fewer people are attending AGMs and the like, but it is not true that fewer people are getting involved in society. In fact, in our digital era, more and more people are getting involved, because the means of doing so are proliferating; it’s just that it’s not always noticed because organisations often aren’t looking in the right place, or offering the kinds of opportunities people now want to take up.
Starting in October 2015, we put this hypothesis at the heart of a pioneering Collaborative Innovation project, bringing together six leading membership organisations to explore and experiment with what we have come to call Participatory Membership.
This brought us to our model of the Three Principles of Participatory Membership, which we’ve since applied with over 70 organisations through a mixture of one day bootcamps, further Collaborative Innovation projects, and bespoke consultancy; and it’s delivering some great results. By way of brief introduction, the three principles are:
Purpose: because if you are going to involve people in your work in the world, you need to be clear with them what that work is, not leave it hidden. Think of the National Trust, an organisation that has dramatically shifted its membership communications. They used to run a visitor attraction business and use the revenue to fund conservation; now they communicate their cause in looking after special places much more clearly — and they’ve hit their 5 million member target three years early as a result.
Platform: because to involve people, you need to create space and provide tools for them to act with you, not do everything for them. People can and want to contribute to your work, if you make it creative, fun and worthwhile to do so. The best example here is one we haven’t been directly involved in (except as members!) but talk about constantly. Brewdog is the only company to make the Sunday Times list of Britain’s 100 fastest growing companies for the last five years running, and they are doing it by leading the way in creating the space and the opportunities for members to deliver their (slightly less lofty!) purpose of making everyone as passionate about craft beer as they are: from effectively inventing equity crowdfunding back in 2007, to the Cicerone course training people to be beer experts, to open-sourcing their recipes, to the 6000-attendee AGMs to building bars where their Equity Punks are, there are so many ideas here worth stealing with pride (behaviour we encourage in all our participants!). Their fifth equity round is open now if you want to join in/spy… https://www.brewdog.com/equityforpunks
Prototype: because, especially for established organisations, this is a big and difficult shift. You can’t flick a switch, but rather than extensive planning, what we’ve found is that the greatest effect is to be achieved by picking something small, starting, and building the energy. Our favourite example here is the work we’re doing with Parkinson’s UK, who we’ve helped to define a radical new vision for membership which will come to affect the whole organisation — but who are holding that vision lightly, and building towards it step-by-step, changing emails and wording and building the energy.
We’re extremely proud and excited to have shared this work with so many great organisations already, but there’s still so much to be done. At a time when division and isolation seem increasingly powerful forces in our society, this is a hopeful trend, but also a call to arms. By reclaiming membership as a relationship rooted in shared purpose, people working on membership can do something that will not only deliver for their employer’s bottom line; they can also help to rebuild the foundations of a more coherent, relational society. If that’s a club you’d like to join, get in touch.
The full report, including more details of the Three Principles of Participatory Membership, is available at www.thefutureofmembership.info. A one day bootcamp sharing the findings in more detail is now booking.
