Memberships

 There is a confusion that I have noticed with how organisations set up membership schemes that I think is worth spelling out, so I can just refer back to this in future. 

There are two kinds of membership schemes, for two kinds of member:

Type 1 members are your best friends. They want to support you. They want to give you money so that they can feel good about themselves. In return, they might appreciate a thank you and a news letter, perhaps priority booking or a mention in the programme. 

The membership scheme is effectively a recurring donation, and is set up to benefit from gift-aid - it is important that nothing of quantifiable value is given in return for the membership. With their membership, they are giving you money.

 

Type 2 members are your best customers. They buy a lot of tickets already, and are prepared to commit to continuing to buy tickets if it saves them money. You are prepared to give them a discount per ticket in return for a minimum up-front payment; you are taking the security of knowing you have their membership fee over extracting the highest possible margin from them - perhaps even going as far as giving them a free ticket to every single film, for an up-front payment.

These members can make a simple financial calculation to decide whether membership is worth it - if you're giving them 10% or 100%, they can multiply their expected spend on tickets by the discount, compare it to the cost of membership, and decide whether to buy or not. With their membership, they are saving themselves money.

 

It is crucially important you don't mix the two kinds of membership up: if someone is giving you £100 for an Associate Membership because they basically like you and want to donate £100 towards keeping you going, don't insult them by then offering 10% off - that introduces the calculation as to whether it is "worth it", which unless they spend £1000 / year on tickets it won't be, it reduces the value of what they're giving you, and it mucks up the Gift Aid calculations. Similarly, if someone is paying £25 for an annual membership that gives them 10% off tickets, and they are doing this because they spend more than £250 on tickets annually, don't confuse things with "members only VIP events" and priority booking. 

There is one exception to this - or perhaps, a 3rd kind of membership.

Type 3 members really want to buy tickets for one particular show. If you expect to sell out very quickly, a "priority booking" membership acts as a simplistic but emotionally more palatable form of dynamic pricing. Saying "We have 500 tickets to sell, tickets are £20 each and will likely be sold out in 2 seconds flat, but for a mere £30 membership fee you can have priority booking and buy tickets before they go on sale to the public" is functionally equivalent to saying "Tickets are £50 each, but if any are left after the first day of sales we will reduce the price until they are all gone", whilst managing to look like you aren't "really" charging £50 a ticket. If you have assigned seating and you don't want to have price bands where the best seats are £100 and the rubbish seats are £10, then making all the seats £10 but having a priority booking period that costs £90 to access so that all the best seats are sold to members gets you to the same place whilst enabling you to announce "all tickets £10" on your marketing.

So:

First decide what kind of members you have. Then design a membership scheme that best enables you to keep those members happy.