Katherine Hudson / Specialist Editor, Membership

Here at NCVO Third Sector Foresight, we have been thinking about the future of membership for a long time. This thought culminated in a year-long research project run jointly with the RSA on behalf of twelve leading charitable membership organisations. Based on this research, we published a short guide to the most important drivers for membership organisations over the next five years and I blogged throughout the project to try and share what we were discussing.

But we don’t want the...

Some charitable membership organisations increasingly treat membership as a commodity or product to be bought, not a value-based contribution to be given, and their marketing emphasises tangible benefits over ‘softer’ intangible benefits for members.

What are the implications?

For membership organisations in general

• To increase revenue and provide a better experience for members, Voluntary and Community Organisations (VCOs) have adapted commercial practices, segmenting their members and...

Attitudes to authority are changing across society, in what can be termed a ‘decline in deference’. People – especially younger people, used to participating online and having their voices heard and opinions recognised at home and at work – have new, high expectations of participation in all areas of their lives.  New technology is responding to, reinforcing and directing this change.

What are the implications?

For volunteering

• An increasing number of single issue groups and ‘communities of...

First, apologies for the dry title: it feels like the puns have been taken a little too far, for example in the constant references to ‘axes’ across the front pages of all the major newspapers today. 

These give a pretty clear sense of the overall tone of the budget.  But how does that affect voluntary and community organisations, and more important, how can we anticipate and plan for the changes that may come as a result in the way we work, who we help, and who funds us?

Some major...

We had a great session yesterday afternoon at Third Sector Foresight’s latest Leading Lights seminar.  If you weren’t able to make the session, I hope this will give you a taste of what you missed. If you were one of those taking part in a bursting-at-the-seams room, I’d welcome your comments on what most struck you about the speakers and the discussions.  And if you’re interested in reading more, the links below will take you to drivers on key areas on our site.        

Tessy Britton, our...

Matt, Dave, many thanks for your very interesting thoughts.

It’s telling that between you, you point to a tension: is Labour a values-based movement (which by its nature works best in opposition), or a membership organisation with a fee given for a benefit (such as voting rights or a magazine). It is of course both – and this is where tensions come from.

Dave, your points on oppositionalism are interesting, and I think the question here is (in part) what does success look like. You ask...

Some time back, I wrote about the lessons from the fall-out from One Alfred Place’s change of strategy, which was seen by some members as a voiding of the terms under which they joined the Club. We may now be seeing similar patterns at play in political party membership.

Maybe it’s something about the British loving an underdog, but Labour Party membership dramatically increased – with daily recruitment levels up 1000% (though from what must have been very low numbers based on a back of the...

There's a good suggestion made on the Power 2010 campaign. It argues that:

No political Party should be registered with the Electoral Commission unless it has a democratic constitution which can be changed by a majority of its members on the basis of one member one vote.

This suggests an interesting idea - that part of the blame for the undemocratic nature of parliament and people's feelings of a lack of accountability stems from the fact that the membership of these parties themselves is...

What One Alfred Place can teach us about how to treat your membership in the age of social media.

The private members club One Alfred Place is a very nice institution. I’ve had delicious lunches, relaxed teas and friendly drinks there, and admired the congenial, professional atmosphere and the people I’ve met.

But there’s trouble in paradise: the new Chief Executive, Sharon Brittan, has been forced to publicly apologise after emailing members to tell them their memberships have not been...

Barney, Kathryn, I think your comments on the role of the expert are extremely interesting.

An argument I have been making (for example in the forthcoming Future Focus 8 is that membership organisations are - like the old-school newspapers - in a strong position to attract people who are willing to pay. As sources of information grow and grow, we are going to want to know what to trust, and are likely to be willing to pay for such information. As consumers, we are currently in a very...

On the day we have officially come out of recession, and new research on our social attitudes has been published, I would recommend taking a look at the McKinsey interview with the extremely lucid Jim Wallis (you can watch, listen to or read it here on the McKinsey Quarterly website, though you will have to create a free account to do so).  In the light of the current discussions taking place at Davos, he suggests that the question we should be asking about the economic crisis is not ‘when...

We had a great dinner for CEOs of the organisations involved in the Future of Membership project last night, which followed a productive – if exhausting – day of scenario planning for the full project think tank last week.

Over supper, we got into a long discussion as to why we have membership.  It’s a question that’s come up again and again throughout the project – what do we mean by membership?  Often, it really it depends on what each organisation says it is. 

We’ve tried throughout the...

Many thanks for your comment David,which exposes the problem of writing online - namely, one does so on the basis of limited research and then releases it to an audience including people who have written the book on the subject. I've read - and found extremely interesting and useful - your posts on both problems of and designs for personalised media.

I think what I was trying to get across was that as we change our reading habits we need to be aware of the fact that we are reading a...

For a while, my news mainly came from the RSS feeds I chose to come into my netvibes account.  This was a form of personalising the news I received grouped into things more likely to interest me (so tabs for politics, culture, the third sector, technology etc) – still in the main from news providers and journals, but divided up by topic not source. Then I started to use my network on delicious to find my way  to articles that friends and colleagues had bookmarked as being of interest. ...

Thanks for your comment Claire - and your question!

It's a very tough area. I think it's a model - not necessarily the one to go with. I think the thing these trends suggest is that we cannot (as large membership organisations) cross our fingers, shut our eyes and hope it will be ok). It seems to me that there are two main options:

1. Adopt the free membership/paid services model, and accept that you will need to reduce costs if there is a drop in income, but plan for this income to rise again...

Last week I spoke at the NCVO Membership schemes conference on what the future of membership might look like. I raised one of the key things that has struck me in our research to date: the difference between recruitment and retention for membership organisations.  As Colin Rochester puts it in his Making Sense of Volunteering,

“the cocktail of motives that lead people to engage [in the first place] may be very different from the factors that maintain their involvement”

In general – and I’d...

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the ‘freemium’ model that seems to be growing in relevance as people’s patterns of consumption of information and products, and their willingness to pay for them. 

If you are interested in this topic and have a spare few minutes over the weekend, you might like to take a look at this slideshow (warning - there are 263 slides). Since we're all time poor, I thought I'd highlight that of particular interest to membership organisations are slides 200, 216 and 217...

The apparent threat (or opportunity) that social technology presents to membership organisations is summed up in the subtitle to Clay Shirky’s zeitgeisty book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations. If ‘everybody’ can organise action by themselves (or rather, together), what possible reason is there for organisations to exist?

The first answer is, of course, that ‘everybody’ is not coming quite yet. Older people in particular – precisely those who,...

Simon Jenkins wrote persuasively in yesterday’s Guardian about the future of the paper and of the newspaper model in general.  I read it online, for free, here.  It’s also in print, but that would have cost me 90p [the fact that I had to look this up exposes the last time I felt the need to buy a daily paper] and it’s this problem – "Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?" – that he’s addressing. 

And the answer he provides is simple – “ensure that "the...

GP Sarah Wollaston was yesterday elected as the Conservative candidate for the Totnes seat currently held by Anthony Steen.

But it was not so much her election as the manner in which it took place that is interesting: Wollaston was elected through a postal ballot open to everyone on the electoral register for the constituency.

A back of the envelope (groan) calculation suggests that around 16,500 people voted, in other words just under a quarter of those eligible to do so.  Whilst therefore...

Last night saw the launch of Open Left , Demos’ counter to its Progressive Conservatism project (outlined here by Natalie).

Much of the discussion seemingly hinged on language – James Purnell MP noted the faultlines in his party around questions of choice, and an important theme was the need to reclaim the language of the left (this was seen, particularly by Will Hutton, as an important counter to the BNP), particularly notions of fairness and an accurate and precise sense of what...

Trust has to be earned, and re-earned

Third Sector reported yesterday that incoming RNIB chair Kevin Carey has questioned the efficacy of current charity law, asking instead for a new definition of social gain.

In a concern which seems to particularly hinge on whether trustees should be eligible to be paid, he asks:

Who says charities should have extra controls in case we hoodwink the public when we have a long record of trustworthiness that far exceeds other sectors?

To me, this called to mind ...

Update:

Future Gov have now posted Emer Colman's excellent presentation (and not just because of the Wire reference) on the future shape of local government. Take a look here. Slides 2 and 7, both comparing 'traditional' to newer, more communicative, forms of government, are particularly interesting/useful.

Yesterday I attended Reboot Britain, this year’s NESTA – funded successor to 2gether08.  The event looked at “the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that a networked, digital world offers to overcome them” (from http://www.nesta.org.uk/reboot-britain/).

We are all familiar with the problems – and with many of the solutions.  But there was also the odd new discovery, namely (for me) MixedInk, the White House’s tool for understanding population responses to policy.  This...

Further to the above, CooperativesUK, the umbrella body for cooperative groups, has announced a rise in the number of members of cooperatives "by 4.5% to 11.3 million people (one in five of the population)", alongside a 5% year-on-year rise in profits.

While a lot of financial growth seems due to strong presence in the grocery market, there has also been a development within the financial market, through the merger of Co-operative Financial Services and Britannia Building Society. Since this ...

One other question - is Twitter up to the increase in traffic? This article in techcrunch points out that twitter has had to disable some of its features in order to keep up with demand for the twitter search functionality in a day of big high-profile obituary news. It will be interesting to see whether twitter is robust enough to deal with the high expectations of its users and potential users. But as this editorial in the same blog suggests events are increasingly being reported second...

The Future of Membership project will undertake new research into what membership means and what motivates people to become members. It will map the different challenges, purposes and models of membership, and develop strategic scenarios for the future. The project will run until April 2010.

The project is run jointly by NCVO, the RSA and a group of membership organisations. Outcomes of the work will be shared online on this website, as well as informing a forthcoming Future Focus guide.

Take...

Less blue, more rainbow?

The Independent today summarised its poll which shows the Conservatives as having lost a great deal of ground to a spread of minority parties due to the increasing mistrust borne out of the expenses scandal (more details of the survey are here). This would increase the likelihood of 'No Overall Control' councils.

In terms of Cabinet-level reorganisation, it will be interesting to see whether Darling can keep hold of his job, given the recent exposure of his expenses...

Good news! Cooperatives UK has just reported a big rise in the number of registrations of new cooperatives registered this year (as reported in this Third Sector article).

Cooperatives (legally defined by that bastion of cooperation, Wikipedia as ‘a legal entity owned and democratically controlled equally by its members’) are one extreme of membership organisations (at the other end of the continuum would be a traditional company or charity model where membership is only paid lipservice). ...

As I mentioned in my comment on Megan’s blog post I too think that the value of social lending will continue to grow.

Rohan and everyone at NESTA Connect offered some interesting events around this question earlier this year and the results of their work can be found on the webank website – recommended! I was particularly interested in how (as with many online social networks) there was a heavy debt to traditional models (see for example, the ROSCA-based Kubera): this seems again to be an...

This budget is troubling, because it offers a short-termist psychological response to recession rather than a rational longer-term answer.

In practice this means a flurry of cliches, with short termist attitudes of battening down the hatches and firefighting taking precedence over the longer-term view. Continued low-level investment in infrastructure (a stitch in time saves nine…) is ignored in favour of expensive emergency interventions . This is most glaring in the real-term drop in...