Understanding Membership Metrics
Membership metrics can tell you a lot about the donations and engagement coming in and out of your organization on a regular basis. This is essential for figuring out budgeting, learning more about your engagement, and figuring out how to improve your membership overall. There are a lot of membership metrics out there, however. Jumping right in, it might feel overwhelming and confusing to decide which metrics are the most useful. We’ll go over why membership metrics are important and the best metrics to use when analyzing your memberships.
Why are Membership Metrics Important to Your Organization?
As we mentioned before, membership metrics tell you all about how your members are interacting with your nonprofit. You might notice your projected budget is all over the place because you have inconsistent donations or your discounts aren’t being used. Whatever the issue, metrics can point it out so your team can come up with better ways to improve membership engagement.
Different Segments of Membership
Memberships on their own are a fairly broad metric to look at. Breaking up your memberships into segments can help you see how different types of memberships make up your entire membership base. This allows you to tackle different problems accordingly. How often do your new members stick around? How many members do you have with memberships older than 5 years? Then you can dive into how your members engage with you. Engagement and length of membership are important to differentiate before you dive into each segment’s metrics to get a more accurate idea of how to utilize your metrics.
Typical Membership Metrics For Your Nonprofit Organization
So now that you’ve created segments for your membership base, you can take each segment and analyze them accordingly. Similar to a business, these metrics serve to help you learn more about your members and market to them in a way that leads to additional support for your organization.
- Lifetime member value.
Often referred to in for-profit organizations as “customer value”, this metric is used as a means to tell you more about the projected net profits you can expect from a member. This is based on the time they’ve spent with you. If someone’s been donating for 3 years, you can likely expect them to donate more, and when you group those long-term members together you get a better idea of how much money those members bring in. This is great for budgeting and marketing. You can nurture those memberships in a way that differs from your new members to show you appreciate all the time and money they’ve given to you. This is also a great way to find people to reach out to for continued volunteer support.
- Membership retention rate.
This metric tells you what percentage of your members are staying and the average amount of time they stay for. This helps you understand what points people are at the most risk to stop engaging and come up with plans on how to remedy that eventual loss. This is also great because it gives you a realistic expectation for how many of your customers are likely to stay for a given time period.
- Conversion rate among members.
Conversion rates have to do with your members doing something positive with their membership. This could look like signing up to become a volunteer, checking out your nonprofit’s podcast or educational content, or making a donation. Going with your segmentation, you’ll be able to see how new and old members are interacting with your organization. Knowing how often people are doing the types of engagement you want them to can show you problem areas that need improvement and the reliability of new and old members. Maybe your volunteer sign-up forms are hard to find or you need a better plan for coming up with donations which is why you rarely get new members volunteering. Whatever you discover, it’s an important metric to improve your marketing tactics.
- Upsell/unique giving rate.
In for-profit organizations, upselling is something most of us are familiar with. When you make a purchase from a website, you’ll often see offers before checkout for other items or get offers for discounts. This would be purchasing outside of the norm that was achieved through marketing. When you do this with donations and support, you should take note of how often you’re able to upsell to your members. This can account for a successful or unsuccessful upselling campaign and your segmentation can tell you more about which avenues of engagement are doing the best for your upsells.
- Membership churn.
This metric tells you what percentage of your members don’t stick around annually or within a given time period. Paired with your retention rate, both metrics paint a picture of how long your members typically stick around. This is important because if your percentage is high, you should come up with a plan to see continued support. Even a small amount of improvement in your retention rate can increase the number of supporters you have, and with your cause, every little bit counts.
How Acme Can Help Track Membership Metrics You Need to Know About
Acme Ticketing’s membership management software can help you look at your metrics through comprehensive CRM integration. You’ll be able to look at how your members engage with you to create powerful marketing campaigns for your nonprofit. Acme Ticketing also handles donations and has integrated payment options to make smooth and professional transactions easy for your supporters. If you’re interested in seeing how Acme Ticketing can help your nonprofit, request a demo today.