How to set membership fees

Start from what the fee has to cover

Write down the real costs for a year:

• The room, if it is not free with breakfast.
• Food and drink, if you cover it rather than members paying on the day.
• Speakers, if you pay them.
• Insurance, a website, and whatever you run the group on.
• Your own time, if this is a business rather than a hobby. Be honest about this one.

Divide by the number of members you can realistically hold, not the number you hope for. That is your floor. What you charge above it is a judgement about value, not about cost.

What groups typically charge in the UK

There is a wide range, and it depends far more on format than on region. Broadly, independent monthly or fortnightly groups tend to sit at the lower end, structured weekly referral groups at the higher end, and national branded networks higher again because the fee includes the brand and the support.

The most useful research is local: go and visit three groups within twenty miles, ask what they charge and what it includes, and notice how full their rooms are. Price against them, not against a national average that includes things you do not offer.

Separate the three kinds of money

• Membership fee. What somebody pays to be a member, whatever they attend. This is the fee that should cover your costs.
• Meeting fee. What people pay on the day for food, usually paid to the venue directly. Keeping this separate makes your membership fee look like what it is.
• Joining fee. A one off when somebody joins. It covers the work of getting them set up and, more usefully, it makes joining a decision rather than a whim.

Visitors should usually pay the meeting fee and nothing else. Charging visitors a membership style fee is the fastest way to have fewer visitors.

Monthly or annual?

Annual is better for the group: the cash arrives, the commitment is real, and you have one conversation a year instead of twelve. Monthly is better for the member: it is a smaller decision and it suits new businesses.

Most healthy groups offer both, with a modest saving for paying annually, and let members choose. Quarterly suits groups whose members are seasonal. None of that has to be uniform: members can sit side by side on different cycles as long as whatever you run the group on can cope with it, which is why NetworkingBadger never assumes an annual cycle.

Say what the fee buys, in the member’s words

“£30 a month” invites the question “for what?”. “£30 a month, which is your seat as the only plumber in a room of twenty five business owners who meet every week” does not. Write the sentence, use it when people ask, and use it again at renewal.

Collecting it without chasing

Chasing is the worst part of running a group, and it is almost always caused by the same three things: no record of who is due, no reminder before the date, and no habit of asking on the day it falls due.

• Record a renewal date for every member, whatever the cycle.
• Send a reminder before it, not after. People pay late mostly because nobody told them in time.
• Record the payment the day it arrives, so the list is true.
• Have one person responsible for it, not “whoever notices”.

NetworkingBadger does the first three for you: renewal dates per member on any cycle, reminders that go out before the date, and payments recorded in a couple of clicks or matched against a bank statement by email address. We never take your members’ money and we never take a percentage of it. It goes to you, exactly as it does now.

Raising the fee

Groups leave it far too long, then raise it a lot and lose people. Better: review once a year, on a set date, raise it modestly when you need to, and tell members six to eight weeks before with the reason in one sentence. Almost nobody leaves over a small, explained, annual change. Plenty leave over a surprise.

What about people who cannot pay?

Decide your policy before somebody asks, because it will happen. A short payment holiday for a member in trouble costs you very little and is remembered for years. What damages a group is a case by case fudge that other members notice.

Once the money side is running smoothly, the next thing to look at is why members leave in the first place: how to stop members lapsing.