Launching a membership scheme three years ago felt like a no-brainer, says Victoria Pinnington, the director of communications and income generation at the Horniman Museum & Gardens in south London.
“We are deeply rooted in the community here and have a loyal visitor base,” she says. “It seemed like a logical assumption that a membership scheme would work.”
The museum launched a scheme in 2014and a take-up of more than 3,500 memberships in the first year exceeded its expectations. Membership, which costs from £29 for individuals, offers free entry to the museum’s annual family-friendly temporary exhibition, its aquarium and new butterfly house, as well as a discount in the shop and access to member events.
The museum now has more than 6,000 members, which generated around £220,000 in 2016-17. But Pinnington, who joined the institution in 2012 with a remit to grow its audiences and income, says the benefits go beyond this.
“Members are more likely to engage in ouractivities, they spend more in the cafe and shop, we have the opportunity to develop partnerships through offers to them, and they feel a real sense of ownership,” she says. “People come here and feel like it’s their own place, like they belong.”
As museums search for ways to increase their income and audience engagement, many are either setting up membership schemes or considering how to get the most out of existing ones. Fine-tuning processes and improving products can go a long way, but to develop truly sustainable membership schemes, museums need to think about the fundamental question of what drives people to engage with culture.
Driving engagement
Museums and galleries of all sizes are showing an increasing interest in membership. In London, the National Gallery broke with its own tradition by starting a membership scheme in 2014 for the first time in its 190-year history. Also in London, the Courtauld Gallery is collaborating with Somerset House (which doesn’t have a scheme) for a recently launched joint friends scheme.
Among smaller institutions, the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village in Surrey carried out a review of its friends scheme in summer 2016. The scheme, whose benefits include free entry to the venue, exclusive events and tours, and subscription to the gallery’s magazine, has more than 2,000 members, but the institution wants to increase this number, with a focus on families.
Sian Newton, the gallery’s development manager, says feedback from existing friends has been positive. But following the review, the gallery has sought to communicate the benefits of membership more clearly, as well as changing what it offers. This has included holding events at a broader range of times as some people found it difficult to attend daytime events during the week, and the launch of a “friend and guest” membership category, which allows people to bring different guests through the year.
“This offers greater flexibility for our friends, and from our point of view it’s encouraging because more people are visiting,” says Newton.
The Watts Gallery has also renewed its emphasis on the contribution made by friends in its communications with them. Newton says that many members feel a personal connection with the gallery’s transformation from its rundown state (it was placed on the English Heritage At Risk Register in 2006) to reopening in 2011 following an £11m restoration.
“When you speak to some people they will undoubtedly talk about how they remember the time when there were buckets catching rainwater coming through the roof,” she says. “A lot of those people feelvery much part of the family and that they have been on that journey with us. It’sabout emphasising how important theirfinancial contribution is, as well as their support as ambassadors, their input and their involvement.”
Alex Youel, the managing director of consultancy Your Membership Matters, worked on the membership review for the Watts Gallery and advises other organisations on their schemes. Alongside the income it can generate, another factor that drives interest in membership, he says, is a desire for more active engagement with museum content. Membership can help meet expectations of additional insight and access through offers such as exhibition previews and curator’s tours.
“People want to be much less passive in their enjoyment of objects,” Youel says. “They want to be more involved with the objects on show and the themes that they explore.”
Youel adds that membership, beyond catering for people as consumers of culture, is also an opportunity to engage them in supporting the institution’s work.
“Members have self-defined themselves as people who are interested in museums, and therefore are good people to talk to about developing their support,” Youel says.“Perhaps over a period of time they may become donors or volunteers.”
Younger focus
Opinions differ on the best to way to address the wide range of motivations people may have for becoming museum members. At one end of the spectrum is a focus on convenience and ease of transaction, inspired by successful digital companies. Chris Michaels, the digital director of the National Gallery, recently wrote a blog for the innovation charity Nesta in which he suggested that adopting a Netflix-style subscription model, with a low monthly fee that could be cancelled at any time, would make museum membership more attractive to younger audiences.
The likely result, he said, would be that membership would become larger and more diverse, and that institutions would be forced to refresh their public programming more regularly to keep people interested. “It would force them to be alive, every day, and open them to an audience for whom they can seem remote,” Michaels wrote.
A contrasting approach is advocated by the New Citizenship Project (NCP), a social innovation company. The NCP’s Future of Membership initiative stemmed from the principle that successful membership schemes should involve members closely in an institution’s work.
The project, which ran from October 2015to June 2016, ties into the company’s overarching mission of encouraging people to see themselves as citizens rather than consumers. The NCP worked with six membership organisations, including Tate. Activities included workshops and co-mentoring between participants, with coaching and support from NCP. The resulting report said that to develop a more participatory approach, organisations needed a clear purpose, an effective platform for involving members, and to take a more experimental approach to working.
The NCP’s co-founder, Jon Alexander, argues that conceiving of membership as a product is self-defeating and makes it hard for organisations to develop a genuinely supportive relationship with members.
“The transactional model of membership leads organisations to try and generate a series of benefits people can buy from you, that add up to a purely value for money proposition,” says Alexander. “And that ends up creating an industry within an organisation that is often some way distantfrom its core purpose.”
He points to efforts by the Guardian newspaper to involve its readers and members more closely in its journalism, as well as De Correspondent, a subscription-funded journalism project in the Netherlands that takes a similar approach, as examples of participatory membership in action. Within the heritage sector, Alexander highlights the National Trust, which in recent years has shifted away from transactional messaging to include a greater focus on supporting a cause.
Value for money
Evidence about the impact of a participatory approach is limited though and no one denies that transactional elements remain important. In the report, Tate says: “The critical moment for us was realising that this is not about choosing between a transactional focus on benefits on the one hand and altruism on the other, but instead recognising that true value for money has both transactional and emotional components.”
The preferred balance of elements in a membership offer will vary for different audiences. Research by the US company Impacts on members of 118 cultural organisations has identified two distinct groups: “transaction-motivated” members attracted by free admission, exclusive event access and discounts, and “mission-motivated” members, where the appeal of membership is belonging to the organisation, supporting it and contributing to its impact.
In a blog, Colleen Dilenschneider, the chief market engagement officer for Impacts, said that “when we make our memberships primarily about transactions, we neglect the motivations of our most meaningful members”.
And this oversight is particularly unfortunate, given that this group thought that their memberships were better value, were willing to pay more for them and were more likely to renew them.
Emphasising values may be particularly important for institutions that want to attract younger members. Research by Impacts on behalf of a large aquarium client examined differences in attitudes between millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) and those born before 1980. People in both groups were most likely to name free admission as the primary benefit of membership. But beyond this, millennials were more interested in belonging to and supporting the aquarium, while older members were more motivated by exclusive access and discounts.
Deeper commitment
It seems likely that the most effective future approaches to museum membership will market themselves cannily to transaction-motivated audiences while encouraging a progression towards deeper connections.
Since launching the scheme, the Horniman Museum has moved responsibility for membership from its fundraising team to its marketing department, leading to greater sophistication in how it is promoted. Methods including a direct-mail campaign to lapsed members and promotion by front-of-house staff led to a 50% increase in sales in February and March compared with the previous year.
Alongside this, the museum is exploring how it can encourage members to progress to its benefactors scheme, which involves a larger contribution alongside priority booking, exclusive events and acknowledgement on the museum’s website. “We can already see an appetite from some of our members to commit more to us financially and being more deeply engaged,” says Pinnington.
There is a session on museum and gallery membership schemes at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition, 16-18 November, Manchester. Speakers include Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project and Natalie Hanman from the Guardian. Visit: www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Membership at the National Trust
The National Trust, which had more than 4.8 million members at the end of 2016-17, has shifted away from transactional messaging in recent years. “We no longer offer standard discounts on joining the trust, but set a price that should be affordable for most to join,” says Louise McRae, the organisation’s membership development officer. “We are working on raising awareness of the trust as a cause and encouraging people to support us through membership.”
But the trust still thinks carefully about issues of money and convenience. It offers concessionary membership rates for young people and seniors, plus free or subsidised access for certain groups. And since 2014, it has given members the option of paying their subscription fee in 12 monthly installments, rather than as a lump sum (they must still commit for a year). “This has led to a significant growth in our family membership, making it affordable across a more diverse audience,” says McRae.
In 1998, the organisation introduced an annual family membership category for single-parent households, and it hopes to extend this to its life membership scheme. And since 2016, there has been a members’ portal of the National Trust website where people can update their details and contact preferences, and manage their membership.
McRae says that the trust continually reviews its membership scheme to make sure it meets expectations and needs, informed by monthly surveys and in-depth research into specific issues and audiences. Some of the organisation’s programming is for members only, and some is available to paying visitors as well. Priority booking for members for popular activities and events is sometimes offered. The trust also makes targeted offers, such as offering a free pass to members in a particular area who haven’t visited a trust property in a while.
A recent example of programming aimed at a specific audience is the “50 things to do before you’re 11¾” campaign, which launched in 2012. It provides a checklist of outdoor activities, such as skimming a stone and picking wild blackberries, for children under 12. “Over the course of this campaign, we have seen an uplift in the family proportion of our membership base,” says McRae.
Membership – 2016-17
National Trust – 2,310,000*
English Heritage – 918,000
National Trust for Scotland – 351,000**
Historic Scotland – 162,590**
Tate – 128,000
Royal Academy of Arts (Friends) – 100,146**
Victoria and Albert Museum – 76,188
British Museum – 70,000
Royal Museums Greenwich – 25,000
National Portrait Gallery – 15,500
National Museums Scotland – 12,478
National Galleries of Scotland – 12,200*
*household memberships (4,828,187 individuals)
**2015-16
“We are deeply rooted in the community here and have a loyal visitor base,” she says. “It seemed like a logical assumption that a membership scheme would work.”
The museum launched a scheme in 2014and a take-up of more than 3,500 memberships in the first year exceeded its expectations. Membership, which costs from £29 for individuals, offers free entry to the museum’s annual family-friendly temporary exhibition, its aquarium and new butterfly house, as well as a discount in the shop and access to member events.
The museum now has more than 6,000 members, which generated around £220,000 in 2016-17. But Pinnington, who joined the institution in 2012 with a remit to grow its audiences and income, says the benefits go beyond this.
“Members are more likely to engage in ouractivities, they spend more in the cafe and shop, we have the opportunity to develop partnerships through offers to them, and they feel a real sense of ownership,” she says. “People come here and feel like it’s their own place, like they belong.”
As museums search for ways to increase their income and audience engagement, many are either setting up membership schemes or considering how to get the most out of existing ones. Fine-tuning processes and improving products can go a long way, but to develop truly sustainable membership schemes, museums need to think about the fundamental question of what drives people to engage with culture.
Driving engagement
Museums and galleries of all sizes are showing an increasing interest in membership. In London, the National Gallery broke with its own tradition by starting a membership scheme in 2014 for the first time in its 190-year history. Also in London, the Courtauld Gallery is collaborating with Somerset House (which doesn’t have a scheme) for a recently launched joint friends scheme.
Among smaller institutions, the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village in Surrey carried out a review of its friends scheme in summer 2016. The scheme, whose benefits include free entry to the venue, exclusive events and tours, and subscription to the gallery’s magazine, has more than 2,000 members, but the institution wants to increase this number, with a focus on families.
Sian Newton, the gallery’s development manager, says feedback from existing friends has been positive. But following the review, the gallery has sought to communicate the benefits of membership more clearly, as well as changing what it offers. This has included holding events at a broader range of times as some people found it difficult to attend daytime events during the week, and the launch of a “friend and guest” membership category, which allows people to bring different guests through the year.
“This offers greater flexibility for our friends, and from our point of view it’s encouraging because more people are visiting,” says Newton.
The Watts Gallery has also renewed its emphasis on the contribution made by friends in its communications with them. Newton says that many members feel a personal connection with the gallery’s transformation from its rundown state (it was placed on the English Heritage At Risk Register in 2006) to reopening in 2011 following an £11m restoration.
“When you speak to some people they will undoubtedly talk about how they remember the time when there were buckets catching rainwater coming through the roof,” she says. “A lot of those people feelvery much part of the family and that they have been on that journey with us. It’sabout emphasising how important theirfinancial contribution is, as well as their support as ambassadors, their input and their involvement.”
Alex Youel, the managing director of consultancy Your Membership Matters, worked on the membership review for the Watts Gallery and advises other organisations on their schemes. Alongside the income it can generate, another factor that drives interest in membership, he says, is a desire for more active engagement with museum content. Membership can help meet expectations of additional insight and access through offers such as exhibition previews and curator’s tours.
“People want to be much less passive in their enjoyment of objects,” Youel says. “They want to be more involved with the objects on show and the themes that they explore.”
Youel adds that membership, beyond catering for people as consumers of culture, is also an opportunity to engage them in supporting the institution’s work.
“Members have self-defined themselves as people who are interested in museums, and therefore are good people to talk to about developing their support,” Youel says.“Perhaps over a period of time they may become donors or volunteers.”
Younger focus
Opinions differ on the best to way to address the wide range of motivations people may have for becoming museum members. At one end of the spectrum is a focus on convenience and ease of transaction, inspired by successful digital companies. Chris Michaels, the digital director of the National Gallery, recently wrote a blog for the innovation charity Nesta in which he suggested that adopting a Netflix-style subscription model, with a low monthly fee that could be cancelled at any time, would make museum membership more attractive to younger audiences.
The likely result, he said, would be that membership would become larger and more diverse, and that institutions would be forced to refresh their public programming more regularly to keep people interested. “It would force them to be alive, every day, and open them to an audience for whom they can seem remote,” Michaels wrote.
A contrasting approach is advocated by the New Citizenship Project (NCP), a social innovation company. The NCP’s Future of Membership initiative stemmed from the principle that successful membership schemes should involve members closely in an institution’s work.
The project, which ran from October 2015to June 2016, ties into the company’s overarching mission of encouraging people to see themselves as citizens rather than consumers. The NCP worked with six membership organisations, including Tate. Activities included workshops and co-mentoring between participants, with coaching and support from NCP. The resulting report said that to develop a more participatory approach, organisations needed a clear purpose, an effective platform for involving members, and to take a more experimental approach to working.
The NCP’s co-founder, Jon Alexander, argues that conceiving of membership as a product is self-defeating and makes it hard for organisations to develop a genuinely supportive relationship with members.
“The transactional model of membership leads organisations to try and generate a series of benefits people can buy from you, that add up to a purely value for money proposition,” says Alexander. “And that ends up creating an industry within an organisation that is often some way distantfrom its core purpose.”
He points to efforts by the Guardian newspaper to involve its readers and members more closely in its journalism, as well as De Correspondent, a subscription-funded journalism project in the Netherlands that takes a similar approach, as examples of participatory membership in action. Within the heritage sector, Alexander highlights the National Trust, which in recent years has shifted away from transactional messaging to include a greater focus on supporting a cause.
Value for money
Evidence about the impact of a participatory approach is limited though and no one denies that transactional elements remain important. In the report, Tate says: “The critical moment for us was realising that this is not about choosing between a transactional focus on benefits on the one hand and altruism on the other, but instead recognising that true value for money has both transactional and emotional components.”
The preferred balance of elements in a membership offer will vary for different audiences. Research by the US company Impacts on members of 118 cultural organisations has identified two distinct groups: “transaction-motivated” members attracted by free admission, exclusive event access and discounts, and “mission-motivated” members, where the appeal of membership is belonging to the organisation, supporting it and contributing to its impact.
In a blog, Colleen Dilenschneider, the chief market engagement officer for Impacts, said that “when we make our memberships primarily about transactions, we neglect the motivations of our most meaningful members”.
And this oversight is particularly unfortunate, given that this group thought that their memberships were better value, were willing to pay more for them and were more likely to renew them.
Emphasising values may be particularly important for institutions that want to attract younger members. Research by Impacts on behalf of a large aquarium client examined differences in attitudes between millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) and those born before 1980. People in both groups were most likely to name free admission as the primary benefit of membership. But beyond this, millennials were more interested in belonging to and supporting the aquarium, while older members were more motivated by exclusive access and discounts.
Deeper commitment
It seems likely that the most effective future approaches to museum membership will market themselves cannily to transaction-motivated audiences while encouraging a progression towards deeper connections.
Since launching the scheme, the Horniman Museum has moved responsibility for membership from its fundraising team to its marketing department, leading to greater sophistication in how it is promoted. Methods including a direct-mail campaign to lapsed members and promotion by front-of-house staff led to a 50% increase in sales in February and March compared with the previous year.
Alongside this, the museum is exploring how it can encourage members to progress to its benefactors scheme, which involves a larger contribution alongside priority booking, exclusive events and acknowledgement on the museum’s website. “We can already see an appetite from some of our members to commit more to us financially and being more deeply engaged,” says Pinnington.
There is a session on museum and gallery membership schemes at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition, 16-18 November, Manchester. Speakers include Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project and Natalie Hanman from the Guardian. Visit: www.museumsassociation.org/conference
Membership at the National Trust
The National Trust, which had more than 4.8 million members at the end of 2016-17, has shifted away from transactional messaging in recent years. “We no longer offer standard discounts on joining the trust, but set a price that should be affordable for most to join,” says Louise McRae, the organisation’s membership development officer. “We are working on raising awareness of the trust as a cause and encouraging people to support us through membership.”
But the trust still thinks carefully about issues of money and convenience. It offers concessionary membership rates for young people and seniors, plus free or subsidised access for certain groups. And since 2014, it has given members the option of paying their subscription fee in 12 monthly installments, rather than as a lump sum (they must still commit for a year). “This has led to a significant growth in our family membership, making it affordable across a more diverse audience,” says McRae.
In 1998, the organisation introduced an annual family membership category for single-parent households, and it hopes to extend this to its life membership scheme. And since 2016, there has been a members’ portal of the National Trust website where people can update their details and contact preferences, and manage their membership.
McRae says that the trust continually reviews its membership scheme to make sure it meets expectations and needs, informed by monthly surveys and in-depth research into specific issues and audiences. Some of the organisation’s programming is for members only, and some is available to paying visitors as well. Priority booking for members for popular activities and events is sometimes offered. The trust also makes targeted offers, such as offering a free pass to members in a particular area who haven’t visited a trust property in a while.
A recent example of programming aimed at a specific audience is the “50 things to do before you’re 11¾” campaign, which launched in 2012. It provides a checklist of outdoor activities, such as skimming a stone and picking wild blackberries, for children under 12. “Over the course of this campaign, we have seen an uplift in the family proportion of our membership base,” says McRae.
Membership – 2016-17
National Trust – 2,310,000*
English Heritage – 918,000
National Trust for Scotland – 351,000**
Historic Scotland – 162,590**
Tate – 128,000
Royal Academy of Arts (Friends) – 100,146**
Victoria and Albert Museum – 76,188
British Museum – 70,000
Royal Museums Greenwich – 25,000
National Portrait Gallery – 15,500
National Museums Scotland – 12,478
National Galleries of Scotland – 12,200*
*household memberships (4,828,187 individuals)
**2015-16
