Stop promising value to everyone

Membership and sector-support organisations often promise to serve everyone equally. It sounds generous. In practice it hides the hardest strategic choice, and leaves members unsure why they’re paying.

Membership organisations are in a squeeze.

Most sector support and membership organisations are charities, or social enterprises. The number of people giving to charity has fallen to its lowest level in nine years, funders report grant applications up 30 to 50%, and rising employer costs added an estimated £1.4bn to the sector’s bills. Every subscription, membership fee and support contract is now being looked at harder. Membership bodies feel it too in other ways, with the traditional model of lifelong membership under increasing strain and loyalty declining across generations.

Here is an example of the problem. A respected national membership body wasn’t in decline – its renewal rate was healthy and income was rising. But recruitment had stopped outpacing the members it lost each year, and its strategy promised equal value to every member regardless of size, type or location. However, half of its members were in just one city. The promise of value for everyone was hiding a real choice between broad reach and deeper value for its core.

That’s the trap many membership and sector-support organisations fall into. A member value proposition that tries to serve everyone ends up persuading no one in particular.

At Always Possible, we treat strategy as a set of explicit choices. That means testing the evidence on who joins, who leaves and why, then making the trade-offs visible and building an offer, communications and operating model the team can actually deliver.

What we’re seeing in practice

Strategy is mostly about what you won’t do

Michael Porter’s well-known line that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do applies to membership bodies as much as to businesses.

Broad relevance and deep value for a core group can both be right, but rarely at the same time and with the same resources. The trade-off should be explicit and agreed, not buried inside a generic promise.

The members who leave know things the members who stay don’t

Renewal rates tell you how many people left, not why. The most useful evidence often comes from recently lapsed members and from prospects who looked but never joined.

Was it awareness, relevance, price, an unclear offer or simply nobody asking? Each points to a very different fix.

A proposition is only as good as the team that delivers it

A sharper offer often fails because nobody owns it day to day. After restructures especially, smaller teams inherit the same channels, events and newsletters.

Good strategy work ends with an operating model that fits the headcount and budget, and a clear list of what to stop, simplify or strengthen.

2023

Case study

Big Locals Together: life after funding

Big Locals Together is a national membership charity formed by more than 100 Big Local community groups. Its core funding from Local Trust was due to end in 2026, and its volunteer leadership needed to decide what the organisation was for, who it served, and how it could pay its way.

Always Possible ran a six-month, three-phase project to turn that uncertainty into choices. We facilitated a Theory of Change to pin down the organisation’s value, researched comparable bodies, competitors and potential collaborators, and benchmarked subscription income. We then modelled four operating structures and financial scenarios, showing how staffing, member services and communications would need to develop at each stage.

The result was a business plan the client called their “Bible”, delivered ahead of schedule to meet urgent fundraising deadlines. It set out clearly where to compete and where to collaborate. The plan was used to secure trust and foundation funding that let the charity employ its first member of staff in 2023, and it gives a roadmap for growth beyond 2026.

100+

local groups in the membership

different operating structures modelled

rounds of member input, from survey to national conference

Questions worth asking

If we could only serve one group of members brilliantly, which would it be?

Do we know why people left last year, or only how many?

Where does our promise of value for everyone fall apart in practice?

What would we stop doing to make our offer deliverable with the team we have?

Talk to us about strategy.

We help membership bodies, charities and sector-support organisations make the choices behind a clearer value proposition, then build the communications and operating model to deliver it, across the UK.

Meet the team

How we work with clients