Lower monthly dues payments are more appealing to the budgets of many members and prospects.
Your members live in a subscription economy.
Many of them pay auto-renewing monthly fees to watch movies (Netflix), listen to music (Spotify), cook dinner (Blue Apron), or enhance their wardrobe (Stitch Fix). Would some of them do the same for association membership?
The data says yes. More associations now offer auto-renewal monthly membership because the demand is there. In our last post, we explained why this is a growing trend. With auto-renewal – also known as perpetual membership – monthly dues payments are automatically charged to the member’s or employer’s credit card or made via an electronic funds transfer from a checking account.
“23 PERCENT OF MEMBERS OPT INTO AUTOMATIC RENEWAL AT ASSOCIATIONS THAT OFFER IT, PER ENSYNC’S THE STATE OF PERPETUAL MEMBERSHIPS REPORT.”
According to Marketing General Incorporated’s (MGI) 2016 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, 29 percent of associations now offer automatic renewal and 41 percent of them offer installment plans as an alternative to annual payments.
Even ideas that are trending in the association community must be backed up by data based on your own member and market research.
Younger or early career professionals who don’t have a professional development budget to spend.
Get a sense of your members’ comfort level for this method of payment.
Don’t try to sell your members something they won’t use. Find out if there’s an interest in this plan.
Do you have the technology in place to make this work? Ask your AMS or CRM vendor if they can support auto-renewal or recurring billing and payment functionality. Make sure you have the appropriate integrations in place too. Don’t forget your chapters in this, if they collect the dues, they’ll have to have access to the technology as well.
With auto-renewals, someone – your association or a third-party – has to securely store credit card numbers and bank account information. We recommend using a third-party partner who is an expert in these activities to ensure PCI compliance and a higher level of end-to-end data security than your association can provide. Make sure the partner is PCI Level 1 compliant.
If you don’t use a third-party partner, the PCI recommended practice for secure data storage is tokenization. Tokenization replaces credit card numbers with a unique, generated placeholder or ‘token’ that makes the actual card number unrecognizable and unusable by outside parties.
Will your members trust your association to securely handle this monthly transaction? You may have members who’ve had a bad experience with automated monthly payments elsewhere, for example, members who belonged to gyms that went out of business or fell victim to bait-and-switch magazine subscription scams.
Be prepared to explain how their bank or credit card data will be protected. State law may require you to do this, but even if it doesn’t, provide security information on or linked from the web page where you offer this payment plan. It wouldn’t hurt to sporadically remind them about your security efforts throughout the year, perhaps in some of the automated notices you send in advance of their payment date.
Once you find out that a worthwhile portion of your membership is interested in an auto-renewal membership plan, it’s time to make a business case to your leadership and prepare for implementation.
Lower monthly dues payments are more appealing to the budgets of many members and prospects.
Many of your members and your membership prospects are consumers of the subscription economy. Think about everyone you know who belongs to Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Audible, eHarmony, Blue Apron, or Stitch Fix. And that’s just a tiny sample of the automatic subscription renewal market.
Associations have been consumers of the subscription economy since the rise and adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms such as association management systems, learning management systems, and other association software. You and your colleagues probably use other subscription-based tools like Dropbox, Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Slack, Asana, or Buffer.
Members already pay for monthly subscription services in their personal and professional lives—why not give them the option to pay for their association membership with the same recurring payments? Just like memberships in the consumer world, monthly dues can be charged via automatic payments to the member’s or employer’s credit card or paid by an electronic funds transfer from a checking account.
If members decide not to renew, they simply notify the association and automatic payments are cancelled. In the meantime, their monthly dues payments are set for auto-renewal—aka “perpetual membership.” It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
The auto-renewal trend is growing in the association community, according to Marketing General Incorporated’s (MGI) 2021 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report.
31 percent of associations now offer automatic renewal and 35 percent of them offer installment plans as an alternative to annual payments.
And, more members are now choosing the auto renew options. EnSYNC’s The State of Perpetual Memberships report says 23 percent of members opt into automatic renewal at associations that offer it.
Members, particularly younger members, benefit from having the option to pay their dues monthly via auto-renewal. But, associations benefit too.
Optimize membership growth and meet members where they are at by easily allowing them to join and renew at all levels of your multi-chapter organization. If you’re looking to give your local chapters the power to accept membership dues, process auto-renewals, and provide members multiple ways to pay, then let’s talk!
