Who's tracking their membership churn?

[Alex Hillman]

As the business aphorism goes, it's a lot easier to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new one. 

I know there are a variety of systems out there that people are using, I'm wondering if anyone is actively keeping track of things like churn and member lifetime value? 

I know that most people are more focused on attracting new members, but I wonder who is tracking member lifetime lengths, and how?

-Alex

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indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Jacob Sayles]

Fun stuff!  Yes, we track this stuff in Nadine and have some staff facing stats pages that show us some basic data.  I'd love to dive deeper and I'm always trying to recruit data nerds that want to help develop new views into our historical data.  One page we have now lists how long everyone has been a member and it's pretty fun to see how long some of our members have been here.  I hesitate to expose this as a member facing tool as I don't want it to be misunderstood as "rank".  We don't even highlight what kind of members people are as all members are equal in our eyes.  Also staff pages can be ugly and clunky and still expose the data.  That said we are looking into member facing data pages both based on their own usage and the community as a whole.  

Lifetime value... that's all sorts of complex to calculate much less communicate... 

Jacob

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[Glen Ferguson]

I recently started calculating average monthly recurring revenue, average member lifetime, average lifetime of past members, member lifetime value, % renewal rates (which is the opposite of churn, but its a more emotionally positive metric) and cost to acquire new members.

How? A lot of sweat and tears plugging formulas into spreadsheets.

I was nudged into measuring these metrics after running across a blog post about subscription websites and another post about Google AdWords that the first post linked to.

Glen

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[rachel young]

We've tracked member usage since almost day 1, which was 4yrs ago, so we can see how long a member has been here, when their anniversary date is, and what their usage patterns are. including when they change membership levels and to what level when. We also track when a person came in for a tour so we can see how long it took them to sign up.

With the tracking document we can then also predict busy days or months, when a member is likely to be on vacation, if they paused their membership with some consistency, etc. but also we can see when someone checks out (a significant drop in usage) and then mark their official last day, so we do have that attrition data.

I added weather and temperature last year, but have been diligent since Jan 1 of this year, in addition to significant events and promotions for the space (Coworking Day, #FiverFri, member potlucks, movie nights, boardgame nights, pub nights, meetups) and significant things in the city or neighbourhood (elections, transit woes, festivals, local and international tech and marketing  conferences,  demonstrations, construction inconvenience, etc) so that I can compare usage to weather and civic disruptions or events. I have a hypothesis for weather vs usage that I'm hoping I'll  able to prove, but as I said I've only been diligent this calendar year and I'd like to get more than 3mos before I consider it proven. Winter in Canada isn't fair to judge member usage or tour frequency.

And since we're a small space, I do this with Google spreadsheets. It's also a shared document with my community managers which indicates who are key holders, contact info, and emergency contact info.
r.

[Alex Linsker]

I track churn and am fascinated in ways we might reduce it.

For example, raising rates for future members only (as long as people stay members, they keep the rate they signed up at) seems to work well. Changing rates of current members up or down seems to cause severe churn.

Can seasonality be offset by vision/expectations of leaders/activities? I'd love to know.

The question is also: what themes cause members to quit, or to stay?

[Barbara Sprenger]

Alex, using Deskworks, our software for managing cowork spaces, the Membership Report automatically gives you join date and current status, can include active and/or inactive and deleted members. The report can be pulled as a .csv (or a pretty pdf), so it's easy to see (or graph or auto-count) your membership trends. Also easy to add a termination date, so you can measure membership term lengths. In fact, thanks! I think we'll put that on the development schedule right now!

[Cristina Santamarina]

We do have churns and lifetime reports on Cobot:

A) Members leaving: We show how many members leave each month, and you can jump to past months easily to see how they went:

B) Lifetime average is shown for each month - so it is also easy to see how this changes over time.

Hope this helps! 

[Alex Linsker]

I have a google spreadsheet with equations that tracks the start and end date etc.

What themes have ya'll noticed with how to get members to stay longer? and what gets members to quit in groups?

[Craig Baute - Creative Density Coworking]

We use a simple spreadsheet to track length of memberships and averages. It's simple and it works.

[Andrew Conley]

Hi Gang!

My space, which is relatively newer, tracks our monthly chum as well as collecting data on why people leave to see what we may be able to do to enhance the user experience.

That said, we are working on a new mobile app to help with the community building aspect of our space. It is called MyTri.be. We are hoping that this will do 2 things:

(1) easily and quickly get new members into the middle of what's going on. They will have a member directory with skills and interests and a posts board for seeing what ideas/projects people are collaborating on or thinking about/brainstorming about.

(2) allow your current members to have a quick way to post ideas and vet them/gather steam/form teams before they are certain that they want to get their hands dirty in the project. 

If you're interested in this or know of other good ways to help your community collaborate, let me know!

Andrew