Does Membership Have Its Privileges?
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
-- Groucho Marx
What does it mean to be a member of something? Obviously there are some things of which you’re a member whether you like it or not. Your family. Your ethnic group. The global community.
As to pretty much everything else, you have a choice. It’s up to you whether you want to join Kiwanis, the Army, the Girl Scouts, Delta Tau Chi, the PTA, Sam’s Club, Starbucks Rewards, or Mar-a-Lago. (Well, the last one might be a stretch.)
Trends are showing that people are opting not to join certain things like they used to. Check out these stats:
- Fraternal societies are struggling. The Elks and Shriners have lost 50% of their members since 1980. The Masons have lost 70% since their high point in 1959.
- Country club membership is down 20% since 1990.
- The Boy Scouts are now accepting girls to address a 43% loss of membership since the 1970s. This gender poaching is not helping the Girl Scouts, struggling with their own decline of 27% since 2003.
- More than 60% of all professional associations are experiencing flat or declining membership.
These are gulp-inducing statistics for those of us in the membership business, museums and museum associations alike. That’s why I’m happy to see the museum membership benchmarking survey presented in this issue of Museums Now. It gives us all important data to examine our own membership programs and contemplate whether we are doing all we can to keep our members happy and our membership programs viable.
Whenever I speak to museum people about their membership initiatives, I often hear how much work they are for a relatively small return. (As you’ll see in the survey results, membership accounts for just 13% of the average museum budget in New England.) When I ask why they continue their membership program, the answers I get vary. It’s incremental revenue. It encourages repeat visitation. It gets people on the ladder of giving. It looks good to funders.
Maybe a better question for me to ask is why people become members of their museum. The survey data suggests that museum membership is primarily a transactional relationship. Free admission and shop discounts are significantly the top benefits. Museum membership represents a “good deal.”
This transactionality might be a plus for the bottom line, but I wonder whether it has any material impact on the mission. The ideal member, it seems to me, would be one who not only enjoys their free admission and discounts, but also is passionate about the institution itself. One who identifies with what the museum stands for, who acts as an ambassador, who actually “joins” the museum through their membership the same way someone joins a fraternal organization or faith community.
I often marvel at how sports often engender deep-rooted emotional connections with their fan base. I mean, have you ever gone to a Red Sox/Yankees game? You’ll quickly understand the phrase “rabid sports fan.” Why can’t we cultivate “rabid museum fans” who have a similar level of connection with our institutions? (Minus the game-day acrimony of course.) Museum membership would be analogous to season tickets. Buying the tickets is a transaction, but it’s a transaction that represents a sense of community, identity, and belonging.
Those are the things we’ve been trying to cultivate with our members here at NEMA. Sure, we recognize that there’s a degree of transactionality involved in NEMA membership through discounts to conference, workshops, and the like. But I’m really gratified to hear how many of our members tell us that NEMA inspires them and makes them feel part of a larger community. (In our last NEMA membership survey, “networking opportunities and connections to other museum professionals” and “sense of belonging to the museum community” were among the leading reasons people join us.) This helps sustain NEMA financially and helps serve our mission too.
I’m hopeful that this sense of community will help keep NEMA relevant and stable despite the trends in membership generally. But it’s something we don’t take for granted. For this reason, we have begun a deep dive into the behavior and preferences of NEMA members in order to assess and fine-tune our programs, member benefits, and how we can better serve you and the field. I’d love to get your thoughts on these things; if you’d like to share them, send me an email: dan.yaeger@nemanet.org.
As we head into our 100th anniversary year, my goal is to transform every NEMA member into a “rabid NEMA fan.” Let me know how we can do that!
Dan Yaeger