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!
Hi Brenda,
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!