The Membership Puzzle Project has watched newsrooms spend months trying to come up with the perfect mix of benefits and pricing tiers for their membership program. 

But while benefits can make the membership experience more enriching, they’re not as important as knowing your potential members deeply and getting the membership value proposition right. This is what hooks potential members and tells them what they’re opting into.

Once you’ve got the value proposition and branding right and you’ve identified a few ways to add value to the membership experience – your benefits – the best thing you can do is launch a first draft your membership program and see how potential members respond. Whether people join, why they say they joined, and what benefits they take advantage of when they do will be more useful than any internal deliberations.

In “Designing a membership program” we walk you through the process of making all the decisions we just mentioned above.

Use this section for: Designing the first draft of your membership program and deciding what changes to make over time. 

In this section we: Walk you through all the branding, benefits, and pricing decisions you have to make when designing a membership program, including the pros and cons of offering swag and how to decide whether a pay-what-you-can model is right for you.

What this section doesn’t include: Complex price modeling. At MPP, we’ve found that a simple combination of market research and audience research can give you more than enough information to get started.

THIS WEEK'S ASSIGNMENT

A membership program is not a set-it-and-forget-it product. It’s important to take a look at the performance and cost of the program regularly and adjust your offering. Some of your benefits might take off, while others are rarely used.

As your membership program grows, some of the more intimate benefits, such as the opportunity to attend editorial meetings, may not feasibly scale, and new opportunities to improve the member experience might arise.

This week’s assignment is to take a look at your membership program and decide whether you should make any changes.

If you haven’t launched a membership program yet, you could try our step-by-step process for designing your program from scratch.

Step 1: Take stock of what you offer your members

Start by making a list of all the benefits you offer, and identifying how you can evaluate whether members find them valuable. Sometimes it’ll be as simple as checking your data. If you’re wondering how valuable your member-only newsletter is, check the open rates. If you offer swag but members have to provide their address to receive it, check how many members actually take the step to share their address or inquire about how to get their swag. 

Sometimes, however, you’ll have to ask.

Step 2: Survey your members 

Krautreporter and Steady co-founder Sebastian Esser recommends a simple approach: send your members a survey with just two questions: what benefit do they value the most, and which benefit do they value the least? It’s easier for your members than asking them to rank all of the benefits you offer, and you’ll end up with more than enough information to decide what to stop offering.

You might want to include a list of your benefits, or link them to your membership landing page, in case they don’t actually remember all of the benefits you offer. (If they can’t remember a benefit that you offer, that’s a good close that it’s not valuable to them!)

Step 3: Make some decisions

Now you should evaluate the payoff for each of the benefits you offer. Are they worth the costs and staff time associated with providing them? A simple value/effort matrix will help you figure that out.

The ranking from your members will determine whether something goes in a high value or low value quadrant. The effort it takes to provide the benefit determines whether it goes in the high effort or low effort quadrant. 

Some questions to ask yourself as you review the matrix: 

• What makes the benefits in the top left and top right so valuable to your members? What does this tell you about what your members value more broadly? 

• What steps can you take to make the delivery of benefits in the top right quadrant less onerous for your team? If you can’t reduce the burden, you should only keep those options for which the value to both you and your members outweigh the costs. 

If you have a tiered membership program, you might also consider moving high value/high effort benefits to a higher tier, as a way of upselling some of your members. 

Something to keep in mind: Your membership program can and should be flexible. Making changes after launch is common, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Designing for humans is hard because people are complex and diverse. It may take you a while to figure out what clicks with your particular members.

If you have to phase out a benefit that people really like, or you have to raise your prices, clear communication about the changes will be key. 

• Zetland went on a road tour outside Copenhagen to get advice on what to change about the member experience

• VTDigger donated cloth masks instead of delivering swag during its pandemic member drive

• Daily Maverick used Uber vouchers to nudge their average member contribution upwards

• The nine questions to ask before you pursue membership
• Steal our step-by-step process for creating your membership value proposition
• The 3 surveys every member-driven newsroom should send
• This is how you make audience participation a newsroom routine
• Test your membership idea with an MVP
• Use the RASCI model to make sure membership work doesn't slip through the cracks 
• How to estimate your membership revenue
• 5 steps to take to when choosing a new tool

It’s time for lift off. 🚀

Months of preparation go into the moment you launch your membership program, which can be a huge opportunity to draw attention and support for your newsroom.

But there are all sorts of details you need to get right in order for your membership story to stay in the spotlight during the launch. Next week, we’ll get into those critical details.