Joint membership arrangements inevitably will make a member have to choose.

The joint membership model I worked with was an initiative that our leadership placed on me to try and drive growth internationally. They entered into a MOU (memorandum of understanding) with an organization from another country that was similar to our U.S. national org. We offered a combined membership that provided discounts to join both individual memberships in one transaction. The many reservations and objections I raised about the model proposed fell on deaf ears. So I did my best to make it work.

There were a multitude of challenges, but the major ones were:

  1. Splitting up the payments – once a new member joined under the Joint membership, it was difficult to get the dues payment as we had to deal with exchange rates and wire transfer fees. The membership couldn’t be activated without a payment. I tried to get around that and it ended up messing up some of our automated processes in the AMS.
  2. International fulfillment – we already had processes in place to fulfill benefits to international members so that wasn’t a problem. The issue was the cost. We charged more/higher dues rates for international members to cover these expenses but the offer we made in the joint membership was discounted from the standard dues rate so we lost a bunch of money just fulfilling these benefits.
  3. Overwhelmed members – these joint members not only received benefits from both organizations they also received onboarding activities, member communications, and marketing messages from both. This made for very full in-boxes and complaints. It impacted the member experience and members realized that this wasn’t a true joint membership. It was two separate membership experiences once the initial transaction was completed.
  4. Renewal competition – this was the true tale of the tape on whether the joint membership worked or not. All of the joint members received renewal notifications from both organizations. The two separate renewal systems were on different timings and the members were confused on why they were getting so many communications and what they were about. The renewals were at the regular rates so they lost their discounts. Most of them opted to renew only their country’s membership because that was more relevant to their needs.

The bottomline is that a true joint membership model would co-mingle enrollment, onboarding, benefits fulfillment, and renewal systems to provide a quality and simplified membership experience. That’s like building a whole new membership model and relying on others’ systems to make it happen. That wasn’t feasible for us and I worked hard to justify the need to shut it down and move on.

It works well as a marketing campaign as long as you don’t setup the expectations for the members that it will be a “joint” effort beyond the promotion.

The concept leaves both organizations competing for dues dollars and one usually wins and one loses. It ends up becoming a “member custody” battle where the member is asked to choose which parent (organization) to go live with. Don’t get into that type of arrangement in the first place when it comes to growing your membership program.