Membership Insights Audit
Find out what your membership data can answer, before you invest in more of it
Most membership organisations already hold a lot of useful data. The difficulty is knowing whether it can answer the questions that help you run and develop the organisation.
The Membership Insights Audit reviews your current reporting, how you measure membership and the data behind it. We'll show you what you can answer now, what else is possible with data you already have, and where there are gaps.
£4,000 + VAT
Why better insight matters
Better evidence makes for better decisions
Most organisations can report the headline numbers: how many members they have, how many joined and how many renewed. Those numbers only take you so far when you're deciding what to do next.
Where is growth coming from and where are you losing ground? Are new members engaging early enough to experience the value of membership? What happens to engagement over the course of a membership? Are there patterns of engagement associated with stronger retention, or signals leading up to lapse?
Better evidence helps you investigate questions like these, decide where to focus effort and investment, and see whether the changes you make have worked.
It also supports a better conversation with your board. Reporting can move beyond what happened to provide evidence about what sits behind the numbers, what needs attention and where there may be opportunities to improve performance.
The difficulty is that membership reporting is rarely set up to provide this depth of understanding. Useful information may be spread across your membership platform, events, learning, email, website and community systems. Some of it may already be in reports; some may never have been brought together.
The Audit
What we look at
1. What are you reporting now?
We start with the reporting you already use. What do you measure, how is it calculated, what history and segmentation do you have, and where is the process manual or difficult?
This tells us what the organisation can see today and gives us a chance to look properly at the definitions behind familiar measures such as acquisition, renewal, retention, lapse and growth.
2. How does membership work in your organisation?
Measures only make sense in the context of your membership model.
We look at membership types and grades, join and renewal cycles, statuses, progression, organisational and individual membership, eligibility, grace periods, lapse and return.
Layercake has a core model for measuring membership performance, developed through our work with membership organisations. We apply that model to the way your membership works and agree the definitions and calculations with you.
Retention is a good example.
Who was actually eligible to renew? How should a change of grade be treated? When does somebody become a lapsed member?
Getting those definitions agreed means everyone is working from the same numbers for the same reasons.
“Getting to a common understanding of what our key membership measures mean for our organisation has made a huge difference. When we talk about retention, growth or engagement, we're now talking about the same thing and working from the same evidence.”
3. What do you need to understand?
We work through the questions you want your data to help you answer.
You may want to understand where growth is coming from, whether new members are engaging early enough, or how engagement develops through the membership lifecycle. You might want to know which activities are associated with stronger retention, whether important differences are hidden within the headline figures, or whether there are engagement signals leading up to a lapse.
These questions help us identify which measures matter, how they need to be broken down and what evidence would be needed to answer them.
4. Can your data answer those questions?
We then work back to the underlying data. What is needed, do you already collect it, where does it live and can it be connected reliably?
For some questions, everything needed may already be available.
Others may require existing data to be brought together or structured differently.
Sometimes there will be information you simply don't collect yet.
This gives us a clear boundary between what you can do now and what would require further work.
What you get
What you'll have at the end
We'll document the Audit so you have a clear specification for improving your membership insight.
For each area we cover, this will show:
- the questions you want to answer and how they could help the organisation;
- the measures needed, with agreed definitions and calculations;
- the segments needed to understand differences within the membership;
- the underlying data and where it comes from;
- what your current reporting can already answer;
- what could be answered by making better use of existing data; and
- where additional data or changes to your systems would be needed.
| Question | Measure | Definition | Segments | Data required | Source | Current position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where is growth coming from? | Net growth | Joiners minus lapses in the year, as a share of members at the start of the year | Grade, membership type, region | Join and lapse dates, grade history | Membership platform | Current reporting can answer |
| Are new members engaging early enough? | First-year engagement | Share of new members with at least one engagement activity in their first year | Join cohort, grade | Event, learning and email activity linked to member records | Events, learning and email platforms | Better use of existing data |
| Are there engagement signals leading up to a lapse? | Pre-lapse engagement | Change in engagement in the period before a member's renewal date | Grade, length of membership | Engagement history by member; reason for lapse | Events, learning, community; lapse reason not recorded | Additional data needed |
We'll also set out the changes we recommend and the order in which we'd tackle them. We'll take you through the work in a findings session so that the reasoning behind the recommendations is clear.
The Audit may show that relatively small changes to existing reporting would make a useful difference. It may uncover data that is already available but isn't being used. Or it may establish that some questions can't be answered reliably without changes to data capture or integration.
From Audit to Baseline
Building the Membership Reporting Baseline
The Audit is the discovery stage of our Membership Reporting Baseline.
The Baseline takes the definitions, measures, segments and data identified during the Audit and puts them to work. We bring the relevant data together, calculate the agreed measures and analyse what has been happening across the membership.
That might show how different membership groups are growing or declining, how first-year engagement develops, the shape of engagement over the membership lifecycle, differences between members who renew and lapse, and patterns that deserve further investigation.
The result is an evidence base from which you can plan and against which future performance can be assessed.
You don't have to commission the Baseline from Layercake. The Audit stands on its own and gives you a documented specification that can be taken forward by your own team or another supplier.
Find out about the Membership Reporting BaselineMembership Insights Audit
£4,000 + VAT
Tell us a little about your organisation, your current reporting and what you're trying to understand. We'll arrange an initial conversation to confirm the scope and get started.