Royal Society of Biology: Member Renewal Campaign

Individual members include practicing scientists, students at all levels, professionals in academia, industry and education, and non-professionals with an interest in biology.

The Royal Society of Biology was experiencing a challenging membership period. A small but growing proportion of members were not renewing in a timely fashion each quarter, with lapsing membership becoming more significant. This was not being fully offset by new members joining. Therefore, action needed to be taken to encourage pending and overdue members to renew and also to understand better the reasons for this decline.

Following a successful Chord pilot, RSB commissioned Chord to deliver a quarterly campaign to support its retention strategy and address the decline in member renewals.

Chord initially developed a comprehensive campaign brief for client approval, to meet the needs of the campaign. The brief is in effect a service level agreement. It includes clear campaign objectives, reporting and administration requirements and frequencies, a call guide, email templates and much more. It is also a resource that is continuously developed and ensures consistent briefing across the Chord team. This helps ensure that calls are kept fresh, renewal objectives are met and importantly, members’ needs are placed at the heart of every touchpoint.

In total over four quarterly phases of the campaign, Chord was asked to contact 3,374 members.

The primary objectives of the campaign were to:

1. Engage with members to encourage them to renew by effectively communicating and reinforcing membership benefits and also assist with any questions.
2. Gain insight by capturing and reporting on valuable information about why members had not yet renewed.
3. Enhance the quality of contact data by verifying member contact details, including email address, work or home address and alternative phone numbers (particularly mobiles).
4. To take payment by card or direct debit.

A number of secondary objectives were also agreed, including:

• Sending tailored emails to members following up telephone conversations, or when contact had not been possible. These emails included a web link to mySociety, the RSB members’ portal for members to renew themselves at their own convenience.
• Referral to the RSB membership team when questions asked by members fell outside the scope of the campaign.
• A dedicated phone line provided by Chord, for members to call back and receive immediate help.
• Leaving tailored voicemails for members that were difficult to reach, with specific signposting and a call to action.

Integration with the RSB Membership Team

To ensure complete transparency of Chord’s activity and complement the work of the RSB Membership Team, Chord also:

• Updated call outcomes directly on RSB’s CRM in addition to Chord’s campaign database. This enabled reporting to be provided and follow up actions diarised.
• Renewed members directly via ‘mySociety’ and also recorded details of members who renewed directly via the Worldpay payment gateway.
• Recorded if members intended to renew or were considering renewal.
• Captured details for negative and other outcomes, including reasons for non-renewal etc.
• Reported daily and quarterly on progress, key performance indicators and statistics.
• Implemented secure processes and procedures to ensure UK GDPR compliance.

In addition, reasons elicited from the following were referred back to the RSB membership team to follow-up:

• 406 members expressed their intention to renew
• 141 members were still considering renewal

To achieve this, Chord:

• completed 64 telemarketing days
• made 6,328 calls
• had 1,383 direct conversations with members
• left 2,670 voicemails
• sent 5,037 emails

In general, members were receptive and grateful for the reminder to renew

9.45% of member contact data records were updated by Chord, keeping personal data accurate and up to date, in line with Article 5(1)(d) of the UK GDPR.