Posted 03 September 2025

In the past, after talking with some unions about member retention and how people leave, we sometimes wonder if the secret lies in making it easier to do it.

The answer we get back, usually without pause for breath, is a swearier variant of “HELL NO!”

But let’s think it through.

When you call someone to cancel your mobile contract or gym membership, you know what’s going to happen. Once you’ve found the number, waded through their phone tree and sat on hold for a while, you’re forwarded to a “retention team”, who will try and sweeten the deal to keep you as a customer. They’ll give you a month free, move you to a lower tier, allow you to “pause” your membership and so on.

For unions, it doesn’t – and usually can’t – work like that. Members tend to “quiet quit”. They’ll stop their direct debit or deduction at source payment, fall into arrears and, after a while, the union will spot this and remove them from membership. And unlike private companies, most unions don’t have the same financial retention tools at their disposal - there’s no “surplus” or “profit” to give to the member as a kickback for staying in. With unions, these sorts of things are generally only available to members whose circumstances have changed, rather than those who want to leave.

Some unions have retention programmes that kick in at this point. “Did you change bank?” “Did you change job?” “Did you really mean to cancel?” “Did we do something wrong?”. These questions and communications can help to “rescue” some members from leaving. It’s widely known in customer service that how you deal with these moments can actually be a way to forge a stronger relationship between a customer and a company, and the same can be true for unions too.

But what if you went the extra step and made it easier for people who really want to leave, to actually leave? What if you created an online service where they could do it in just a few steps? Why could that be helpful?

Here’s why you should have a formal digital cancellation service:

1. You create that “customer service” moment where you can re-assert the benefits of membership, talk about why continuous membership matters, and reconnect members with the value of a union in their workplace and sector.
2. In the process, you can ask and learn more about why people are cancelling, allowing you to systematically fix problems that might occur upstream.
3. If they’re switching union, you can learn where they’re going and why.
4. You can try to engage a member more deeply. Why hasn’t this been working for you? What else should we be doing? What can we learn from what you tell us?
5. You can automatically change a membership to match someone’s changed circumstances (e.g. they went part-time or are going on parental leave).
6. If your rules and finances allow, you can try a one-off offer. “Here’s three months free, let’s see how the summer goes and we’ll be in touch in due course.”
7. You can get permission to contact them further down the line. “Don’t want to stay a member, but still want to hear what’s happening in your industry?”. People who say yes are ripe for rejoining in the future.
8. You can start to standardise the leaving process so you can track and optimise it. You’ll know way more about why people quit, when they do, and what you can do to keep them. It’ll teach you so much about your union as an organisation.
9. You can automate aspects of your response, smoothing out the process of chasing members who have fallen into arrears, improving the quality of data you hold and being better prepared for ballots. Over the medium and long term, this will reduce costs for the union.

The key to retention for unions is happy members. It’s inevitable that some will leave, but a good cancellation process, one that encourages the sharing of information about why the member is quitting, gives you a chance to keep more people in membership. This is far better than allowing for passive “quiet quitting” even if, on the surface, “making it easier for members to leave” sounds counterproductive. If they stay in the industry, a happy member is far more likely to rejoin in future (understanding how many people leave, then rejoin later is very useful data).

Join Together is looking for 2-3 unions looking to improve retention to experiment with this approach. We’ll work with you to get a benchmark for how people currently leave your union, design and implement an excellent digital cancellation service and trial it, reporting on outcomes at regular intervals.

If you want to work with us on this, please get in touch.