Imagine you signed up for an annual gym membership in January and paid with a check (or cash for the Mafioso readers).  Now further imagine that you also signed up for the gym’s “healthy eating” monthly email.

What does the term annual connote to you?  What about membership?  Would you expect to have the gym ask you to renew your annual membership?  Sure.  Would you expect them to do it sometime before the membership actually expired and you were no longer allowed access?  Absolutely.

In fact, as a regular user you’d probably appreciate a reminder and maybe even a few.

What about the manager asking you to renew in July?  Doe that seem a bit premature and annoying?

What about the manager asking you to renew 12 times in the course of the year?  What if you renewed in November and got 3 or 4 more requests to renew before January rolled around?

And what if, on top of these requests to renew your membership that seem to be coming fast and furious and without regard to whether you have already renewed or not, you also got solicited with emails (remember you signed up for the healthy eating email) asking you to bump up your membership to the next level to include 1 free yoga class a month.  And let’s suppose you responded to one of these emails, gave your credit card to avoid the nightmare (hopefully) of all the requests to renew your membership and upgraded at the same time.

But the renewal requests from the manager keep coming…

Somewhere in corporate gym land a marketing manager will point out, correctly, that the number of renewals goes up with each request and that in the email channel there was a big increase in the gym membership upgrades compared to last year because of the decision to automatically solicit people who signed up for healthy eating newsletter.

Further up in corporate gym land some VP of marketing who has worked at this gym for many years will lament, again, the lousy (and slowly declining) retention rates and wonder if there isn’t some better way to get people to renew their annual membership and separately or as part of that process, consider upgrade options.

This VP will actually pose the borderline heretical question of whether the renewal process and lack of coordination with the email marketing effort is simultaneously the reason for the marginal increase in membership renewal and the attrition rate.

This same VP, as a final act before leaving for the gym down the road (who does everything the exact same), will put together a plan to do a better job of honoring the social contract with members who sign up for an annual membership by only asking to renew 30 days out from the actual renewal date and making it a top priority to make sure there is no confusion with cross-marketing or data glitches.   As a part of the plan there will be a prominent ‘mea culpa’ letter and email sent to all current (and former) members telling them about the new renewal process and apologizing for having unintentionally created such a crappy experience that diminished and took away from the main, workout experience.

As a postscript in the communication all members will be alerted to a new member feedback system that will make their experiences and preferences a priority.

The plan indicates an anticipated reduction in marketing cost, an increase in net revenue and more word of mouth referrals from happy, highly satisfied gym members – especially those who used to belong to other gyms, including the one down the road, but quit because the renewal process was so annoying.

This plan is ultimately rejected as too risky by corporate.  The VP heads to the gym for one final workout to deal with the frustration before starting her new gig on Monday at the gym down the road…

We have collected thousands of donor comments about membership (and linked it to donor behavior data) and from that work we’ve discovered:

…If you are a charity selling “membership” there is very high likelihood the gym metaphor is the world you are creating for people who trusted your social contract, want to support your mission and are doing so in spite of your marketing/fundraising, not because of it.  Of course, most went to the gym down the road already…