What is a returning member?
A returning member is someone who was previously a member of your organisation, ceased their membership at some point, and has since rejoined. Different membership organisations have their own terms for this — returning members, readmissions, reinstatements, rejoiners — but they’re all describing the same underlying journey: someone leaving and later coming back.
Why track returning members separately?
Because they don’t fit neatly into either of the two categories most membership metrics assume. They aren’t straightforward new-member acquisition, because they already have a history with the organisation. They aren’t continuous retention either, because there was a genuine gap in their membership.
Lumping returning members in with new members overstates genuine first-time acquisition and can make your acquisition rate look stronger than it really is. Separating them out gives a clearer, more honest picture of where membership growth is actually coming from — first-time joiners, or people the organisation had already lost and managed to win back.
How to calculate returning member rate
Divide the number of returning members during the period by the number of members you started with, then multiply by 100.
Example: an association starts the year with 10,000 members, and 250 former members rejoin over the course of the year. Divide 250 by 10,000 and multiply by 100, and the returning member rate is 2.5%.
New vs returning members
Distinguishing new members from returning members improves the quality of both your acquisition and retention analysis. A high proportion of returning members can suggest that people who leave often come back — which says something different about your value proposition than a membership base made up almost entirely of first-time joiners who never look back once they leave.
It’s also worth understanding why members who returned originally left in the first place, where that data is available — it can point to gaps in the member experience that a good win-back campaign is currently papering over. See the acquisition rate calculator for the genuinely-new-member half of this picture, and the growth rate calculator for how both feed into your overall membership total.