The Membership Project

I really hope this posts in the right place of this site as I'm finding it a little hard to navigate!

 At any rate I wanted to add some thoughts from the RSA's perspective about what we'd like to see from this project.

 I suppose the trend that all this discussion is trying to capture is the journey from 'membership' organisations to 'movements', and what that means for the nature, structure, purpose, and business models of existing membership organisations. No mean feat to cover all of this and as someone with a thinktank background the breadth of the issues being asked here makes me a little nervous.  read more »

Following on from my last post, it might also be interesting to look at how membership is changing by looking at membership data - so, membership numbers and who members are, length of membership etc. etc. Organisations will not want to share this data without clear benefits - so we could help them to benchmark themselves against other similar organisations. Certain analysis could be available only to participating organisations, whilst other analysis could be published more widely. We could use a pledgebank model to encourage enough organisations to sign up.

A good way to help people think about what the future might look like, say in 10 years, is to ask them to look backwards over the same period - the point is to emphasise how fast things can change. So... if we want to tell stories about what membership may look like in 10 years time, it might be nice to publish some stories about how membership has changed over the last 10 years. I'm thinking about a set of case studies based on in-depth qualititative interviews with a range of membership organisations. Perhaps after taking them through a reflective process we could also help them think about the drivers shaping the future (using the membership game?) and write help them write some stories about what that might look like.

Hi all

I'd like to think about ways to turn all the excellent ideas generated in this project into something that membership organisations can use as a way into thinking about the future. One way to do that could be to publish an introductory pocket guide to the future of membership. We have an existing series of these things, they are called Future Focus, and having spent a long time working out the best format and style we think they work really well. Each one sets the scene then takes the reader through six drivers - 'forces or trends that could positively or negatively shape the future of your organisation'.  read more »

One of the main ideas here is to develop a market place of products and services, as well as ideas. In an open, collaborative, spirit I think we need people to offer a mix of some paid-for and some free stuff. No heavy pitches - at least not without some good free take-aways! We'll also be encouaging people to put up product-sevices-project idea that could be developed with others. From this rich mix we should get some remixing, and ideas for funding bids. So - who has something to offer?  read more »

One of the main lessons from open collaboration projects is that for people to work together you need to break the work down into managable chunks, or work packages. Here are some big chunks that would be conventional parts of a project:

Research

• Literature
• Bloggers and other media
  
• Interested organisations

Events

• NCVO membership conference April 22
• Get-together of contributors
• Bigger event for organisations
• Joining in other people's events

Managing this site  read more »