We are exploring Auto Membership Renewal and are looking for anyone in the community to share their experiences. We are looking for information around what the member journey/experience has been.
Examples of what we are looking for: What has been the uptake? How responsive they have been? How many opt out? Challenges with expiry or ways you mitigated this.
We do have Memberships as Products but aren't looking for the technical - interested in the experience for the Members as well as the experience for staff who directly interact with the members.
If you are willing to share we would love to connect with you!
I'm eager to learn about other's experiences as well!
Hi Brenda,
We have had a very successful auto-renewal program running for over 20 years. Our memberships are also set up as products. Right now we have almost 50% of members enrolled. The program's success is due to several factors: longevity of the program (we've had a long time to ramp up), we integrate sign up at the point of purchase (the Visitor Services teams are trained in how to talk about it and sell it), we communicate with members to remind them when they are up for renewal and make it easy to cancel (even after they renew we allow them to cancel -- I think knowing we aren't trying to be sneaky about it makes it easier to sell), we offer a 10% discount on renewals for members enrolled in the program. This program has been really helpful in retaining renewal revenue when we have been closed. About 65% of these members successfully renew each year (this factors in those that opt out or where credit cards don't successfully charge or members cancel after renewal).
For communications, we send a letter and email letting them know their renewal is going to be processed and ask them if they need to update their credit card, change their level, add a donation or cancel. If we don't have a card saved correctly or if their charge doesn't go through we send another letter and email.
Our CRM team set up a pricing rule so members can self-serve and renew themselves if they have new credit card or if their charge doesn't go through right away.
Feel free to reach out if you have more questions! Sue
Hi Sue.
Thank you for sharing all of this valuable information with us regarding auto renewals. Do you have your members sign any type of agreement to acknowledge that it will auto renew?
Hi Sue,
Thank you so much !! This is great information and we would be interested in contacting you with some additional questions.
Brenda
Hi Jessica,
Pre-covid, members signed something when they joined or enrolled at the Box Office and we would keep those slips of paper for 1-2 years.
We did not have members sign anything when they joined by web or phone though. We are very flexible about refunding if we charge members and they want to cancel (this number is pretty low -- about 2%). The only challenge we have is when members follow-up after more than one year of renewing and say they didn't realize they were on an auto-renewal plan and want refunds for multiple years. In some cases, they have not visited but they've received membership cards, magazines, emails, multiple notifications that we would be charging.
We have both an Auto-renewal Program and Auto-renewing Installment Plan program and are set-up as MaPs. Our Auto-renewal Program has been in place for 7 years. About 10% of our member HHs are currently enrolled in AR and the renewal rate of this population is around 50%. One thing to note is that we migrated to Tessitura in Spring 2019, so the program has been active in Tessitura for almost two years and we definitely had a bit of an adjustment and learning period around the migration of this program to Tessitura.
AR enrollment is available through our TNEW Cart, Direct Mail, Contact Center and Front of House. Web cart enrollment is by far the most popular enrollment channel and members can opt into the AR program by checking off a checkbox on the review level page of the cart.
Our communication and charge plan for this program is that we charge monthly on or around the last day of the month, so we send a 30 day notice renewal 30 days prior to the pop that is going to be charged for that month. During this 30 day time period members have the option to opt out of their AR by calling the Contact Center. Once we run the monthly charge, we then send a Declined Credit Card email to the population that initially declined. Members are instructed to call our Contact Center to update their credit card and we attempt to charge the declined pop 3 more times (usually the following three Fridays). If credit cards still decline after all four charge attempts we then remove the AR flag and these members enter back into our renewal cycle.
A few last details: we’ve done very little promotion of our AR program so to this point our enrollment numbers are due to members self-selecting the option, but AR enrollment incentives are definitely in our FY22 plan (ex: one idea is a year 2 renewal discount). And, while the Academy has been closed, we have paused AR and Installment Plan charging, notifying members that once we reopen we will resume charging.
Happy to chat more if you have any additional questions!
Hi Sue, my museum also has a long-standing monthly giving program. We transitioned it to Tessitura in March 2020 and we have manually added the pledges to charge monthly at the beginning of each fiscal year. This works, but isn't as automated as we'd like.
We do not have the memberships set up as products. Since yours are set up as products, does that automatically restrict the 12 months of payments to a given fiscal year?
We process the payments annually so we do not have to worry about limiting the number of payments.
Sue