Membership Retention Rate: How Associations Can Retain More Members

Your membership base provides benefits that are much more than financial—their continued support drives awareness and outreach for your cause. Keeping them connected and engaged should be a top priority, which is why tracking your membership retention rate is so important!

Your members are some of your organization’s most loyal, committed supporters. But that commitment wanes if you don’t continuously engage with them and show that their membership has value. It takes consistency to nurture and strengthen your member relationships and ultimately improve your membership retention rate.

How to Calculate Your Membership Retention Rate

Before you can identify any factors that may negatively impact your retention rate, it helps to calculate your retention rate first.

Your membership retention rate is the percentage of people who renew their memberships yearly. To calculate your membership retention rate, divide the number of renewed members by the number of members you had last year. Multiply the resulting number by 100, and you have your member retention rate! 

For example, the Agloe Nature Center had 300 members last year, and 175 of those members renewed their memberships this year. To find their retention rate, you’ll divide 175 by 300. Then, you’ll multiply by 100.

175/300=.5833

.5833×100=58.33

The Agloe Nature Center’s membership retention rate is 58.33%.

How to Improve Your Membership Retention Rate

Once you’ve calculated your membership retention rate, you can evaluate how to improve it.

To get to the bottom of what impacts your membership retention rates, look at how your organization relates to your members personally. Specifically, examine your membership engagement strategies, value, and impact.

Pay special attention to the following areas. If they’re out of whack, it can be harder to reach new members, engage existing ones, or reconnect with lapsed constituents—all factors that can impact retention.

Member Engagement is Critical to Retention

You probably hear the word “engagement” frequently, but it can be challenging to define what it means for members.

An engaged member does more than pay their dues and make occasional donations. They participate in your community, attend events, and act as an ambassador to your organization. The more engaged members you have, the higher your retention rates will be. 

To determine how this works for you, ask these questions about your strategies:

• How are you engaging your members?

• Are you targeting them with information that’s valuable and pertinent to them?

• Are your communications customized to speak to their specific needs? 

Engaging your members won’t just help your retention rates year to year, it’ll also help you retain members for the long term. For nonprofits that also solicit donations, membership programs can actually be critical to not only retaining donors by encouraging them to increase their giving over time.

In the Neon One’s 2025 Generosity Report, we looked at the effects of all kinds of generous behaviors, from memberships and event attendance to volunteering, pledges, and recurring gifts on almost 100,000 everyday donors over a 5-year period. Needless to say, they were pretty staggering.

To learn more about how memberships can increase donor value over the long term, download the report today!

I Want to Read the Generosity Report

What Value Are You Providing to Your Members?

When you think about how you add value for your members, consider the membership perks, resources, and offers included in your packages.

• When someone pays for a membership, what do they get in return? Do they receive access to members-only events or other perks?

• Will you send members educational resources or branded merchandise?

• Do their membership dues support important work in your community?

Your membership retention rates will be higher if your constituents feel their membership is valuable.  

For example, consider an organization for educators focused on improving literacy rates. One proven method of addressing literacy—especially in children with learning challenges—is approaching reading as a science. An organization that wanted to provide value to its members could host a series of webinars around teaching reading as a science and provide resources that educators can use with their students.

Since this association’s members receive lots of high-value content, they’re more likely to renew their memberships in the coming year.

Show Them How You’re Making an Impact

While “value” refers to the perks, benefits, and advantages inherent in your membership program, “impact” refers to the big-picture changes members make possible.

Here’s an example: Membership in our literacy organization is valuable because educators receive much-needed educational resources. Membership has an impact because it can help uplift other educators and improve overall literacy rates. 

There are many ways to communicate the impact that members make possible by supporting your organization. Impact reports are a good example. The educational organization example we used above could create a yearly impact report that shares information about how it helped improve literacy rates and reduce student absenteeism. 

You can take some steps to make your impact reports compelling to your constituents:

• Break your report’s data down to a granular level, showing how each specific member’s contributions have helped the cause. For example, if a member’s annual dues pay for literacy training for one teacher, that would help the member understand their impact.

• Take a real-time data approach, allowing your members to see current organizational data through a regularly updated website. In the case of the example literacy organization, they could create a dashboard that shows real-time updates on how many students’ literacy skills have improved because of your members’ support.

Both types of reports show your members what their support is doing right now to help advance the causes they care about. They connect members directly to the outcomes that are only possible because of their support.

3 Tips for Using Technology to Support Member Retention

Technology can greatly support driving engagement, value, and impact for members. A nonprofit CRM with membership management tools helps you create automated campaigns that feel highly personal.

If you’re in the market for a powerful tool to help you engage and retain your members, look for a solution that allows you to…

1. Review Your Data

Many organizations stick to the basics and focus solely on collecting member information. That’s a missed opportunity! Review the data that’s most important to your organization and focus on tracking that, too.

For example, the educational organization mentioned earlier may want to collect information about where educators work, whether they’re employed in a public or private school, and their members’ school districts. Their ideal database would include standard personal information fields and the ability to create custom fields that suit their needs.

2. Create a Personalized Membership Renewal Experience

You should be able to build membership forms that feel personalized for each member in your base.

When you ask a member to renew, they should be able to click over to your renewal form, see their current or lapsed membership level, and renew or upgrade their membership without re-entering their contact and payment information.

Look for a membership management tool that will enable you to send renewal reminders, invite lapsed members to re-enroll, and make the renewal process as simple as possible.

3. Automate Workflows

We often tout the benefits of automating workflows because they can save time and money. But there’s also another benefit—member goodwill.

Members expect a response when they make a donation, attend an event, or support your organization in other ways. Automating processes like sending receipts, thanking members for their additional support, and sending impact updates helps ensure your members get the information they need in a timely manner.

Members want to be acknowledged for their support, and you want to acknowledge them. But when there are a lot of emails to send and little time, simple thank-you letters or follow-ups may be overlooked. Automation tools built into CRMs ensure that receipts, impact reports, membership renewal letters, and other messages go out as soon as the member takes action.

Combining timely communications, impact reports, and valuable perks and benefits creates an outstanding member experience that drives retention. 

With a CRM that allows you to create custom data fields and workflows, you can improve your relationship with members by driving value, impact, and engagement. Those are the critical components that will improve your membership retention rate.

Drive Engagement and Impact With Neon CRM

Strong relationships between organizations and their constituents lead to high membership retention rates. Methods such as creating experiences that prove your value and impact while engaging members have proven successful.

Managing these activities is a tall order, but a powerful nonprofit-focused CRM can help. We’d love to show you how! Neon CRM for Associations provides the personalization, automation, and flexibility you need to improve your membership retention rates. Want to learn more? Connect with us!

Schedule a Neon CRM for Associations Demo