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Every association should know their retention rate is a key metric in evaluating the success of their membership.  However, if you haven’t been tracking your retention rate on membership websites yet, now is the time to take action!  Tracking your retention rate allows you to see how well your current strategies are working and what changes need to be made to get the most out of your efforts.  These measures will help an association easily calculate their member retention rates.

 

The first step in calculating your member retention rate is to determine the members you have now, or how many members you have at the conclusion of your test.  When doing the calculation, we will refer to this as current members.

 

The next step is to determine how many people have become part of your organization during the time you started keeping track.  These will be identified as new members on membership websites.

 

In order to calculate your member retention rate, you need to know how many members you had in the beginning prior to any members signing up.  This number will be used at the end of the equation to divide the difference of current members and new members.  Some opt out so that needs to be accounted for when figuring how many current members an association has at a given time.

 

To calculate your retention rate, take the current members you have and add the new members that signed up, minus the ones that opted out.  For instance, if you have 200 members in the beginning and 30 signed up, but 12 opted out.  It would be 200 + 30 – 12 = 218.  Now, take 218 minus the new members (30) which equals 188.  Lastly, divide 188 by 200, and multiply by 100.  So, 188/200 x 100 = 94%.

 

One of the most critical aspects of an organization is the retention rate of members.  Some organizations struggle with this metric and it can be easily measured.  However, calculating your rate can be difficult without basic knowledge of how it works and what you should do moving forward.