Posted 03 January 2023

Every person that doesn’t get to the end of your union’s online join form is a potential new member lost. But have you ever calculated what that costs the union? The maths is simple:

Average cost of monthly membership x 12 months x Average years of membership

For example, if members pay £13 a month and stay part of the union for 10 years, your union will lose £1,560 every time a potential new member gives up before getting to the end of your online join process. If 20 potential members fail to reach the end each month? That’s £31,200 of lost membership fees every single month.

How much more money could your union make by improving the online join experience?

We can frame this question another way: What would a small improvement in our online join process mean for your union’s income?

Using the same maths, if improvements to your online join process can lead to an extra 20 members joining each month, that’ll mean an extra £31,200 of lifetime subs generated every single month!

Thinking in completion rates

A useful way to measure how well your online join process performs is with its completion rate. What percentage of applicants who start an online application actually get to the end? You should be measuring this with analytics tooling like Google Analytics or even better, the more privacy-friendly Plausible.

If your current online join has a completion rate of 40% (meaning 40% of people who start an application go on to finish it) and you currently sign up 200 new members a month, you only need to increase the completion rate by 4% to net those extra 20 members (and the £31,200 in future subs) each month. Even a 1% improvement in completion rate would mean £7,800 each month for your union.

Join Together’s online join forms have an average completion rate of 60% across a range of unions and industries. Our entire focus is sweating the details to maximise the chance that everyone starting an application to join your union will get to the end.

How many more members would your union sign up if your online join form performed this well? How much additional subs revenue would you be generating to support members, run more impactful campaigns and deliver better services?

Stop leaving money on the table. Speak to us today about improving the online join process for your union.