Are you building for renewal or replacement? A strategic exercise

Before your membership acquires another member, ask yourself the following:

• Do you know how many members left in any given period, not just how many joined?
• How much of your time, budget and organisational focus is spent acquiring members versus retaining them?
• If your renewal rate doubled, would you still need to acquire as many members next year?
• If each of your existing members referred one new member this year, would acquisition still require the same resource next year as it does today?
• Do you know the lifetime value of your average member?
• What percentage of your members are actively engaging with your membership?
• How many members leave for reasons that could have been prevented? Are those reasons actively being worked on?
• If every current member renewed for one more year, what would that be worth to your business? What about if they each renewed for the coming three years?
• Who in your organisation truly owns retention? 
• Which departments contribute to influencing retention and how?
• If you couldn't sell another membership for the next six months, what would you be focusing on instead?
• If your current acquisition and retention rates remain the exact same as they are today, how many members would your organisation have 12 months from now? Would it have increased, decreased or stayed the same?
• How does the answer to the last question impact the organisation's revenue?

The answers to these questions often reveal the strategy you're actually running, and whether or not your focus is placed where it should be.

Now imagine retention became the single metric your organisation optimised for. How would your answers to the following questions change?

• Would the way in which you define the value of your membership change?
• What would the profile of your ideal member look like?
• Would your marketing and messaging be refined in any way?
• Would your member onboarding be reshaped?
• How would your renewal process evolve?
• What role would alumni members play in your growth strategy?
• Would your pricing strategy still look the same? 
• How would you incentivise sales differently?
• How might your customer success or member experience team be structured differently?
• What role would referrals have in your strategy?
• Would community become a bigger investment than marketing?
• Where could you personalise more of the member journey?
• How could gamification strengthen member engagement and loyalty?
• Would you measure success by new members, or by members still thriving three years later?
• Which initiatives would be your highest priorities?
• Which projects would no longer seem important?
• Which KPIs would your teams be rewarded against?
• What would your board ask for in its monthly reporting?
• Which member data would become essential to collect?
• Where would your technology investment go first?
• What conversations would happen more often across your leadership team?

Businesses optimise for what they measure. 

If acquisition is your primary metric, you'll build an acquisition-first business. If retention becomes your primary metric, you'll make fundamentally different decisions about where you invest, how you design your member experience, how you measure success, and ultimately how your member base grows. Those aren’t just different strategies, they’re different businesses.

Acquisition is additive, retention is multiplicative. Sustainable membership businesses are built on the latter.

That's exactly what I'll explore in my next essay, where I'll introduce the Retention Flywheel - a practical way of designing every part of your membership around increasing retention, referral and lifetime value. Before reading it, take the time to answer these questions honestly. Your answers won't just tell you how well you're retaining members - they'll tell you whether your organisation is actually designed to retain them in the first place.