Case Study: Membership Overhaul
About the Organization:
The Client is a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to serving the needs of legal professionals in Greater Cleveland. A voluntary membership organization, our members include attorneys and judges, law students, paralegals, and other business professionals. Together, we serve as the collective voice of our legal profession, both bench and bar. The Client has an operating budget of approximately $3 million and is home to nearly 5,000 members.
The Challenge:
The Client came to Pricing for Associations as they were strategizing their membership to evolve from including a base level of products along with a la carte options to purchase above and beyond that into an all-in-one inclusive membership where members knew that everything except for annual conference was included in their membership for the year.
In doing so, they wanted to ensure that they were leading with the right value propositions and that they were packaging everything correctly, that their marketing collateral clearly spoke to the value, and most importantly that they were setting the right price so that they wouldn't lose money by moving to all-in-one. But at the same time, that they wouldn't charge necessarily the face value of the membership, because that would be way too expensive for members. Pricing for Associations was able to work with them through a one-day intensive so that we can clarify their value, packaging, marketing, collateral, market research, and pricing.
Our Custom Solution:
To overcome this challenge, Pricing for Associations customized our proprietary framework to determine the right answers for our client. Our framework always blends the science of data-driven decision-making and the art of pricing and value psychology to confidently lead our clients in their pricing and value strategy.
Step 1. Kick-Off Call
We began by meeting with the Client’s leadership to set an intentional agenda for our one-day intensive. This allowed for us to make sure that we are hitting on everything that they needed feedback on as they develop their strategy while we also added things that they hadn't considered to discuss so that we were confident that they would walk away with the right knowledge, strategy, and tools.
Step 2. One-Day Intensive
We leveraged technology to meet with Client over two half-day intensives. We began the first half-day by covering the value that was in the current membership, the value that would be in the new membership, the primary value drivers for members to switch to the enhanced membership, and data analysis around the distribution of current members and the a la carte options that they were paying for. We also began to review their proposed pricing structure for the new membership to give best practices and tactics around pricing psychology to optimize profit while making sure that the price made sense for members.
On our second half-day, we continued our discussions around pricing as well as a series of 5 market research surveys that Client could conduct over the first year to ensure that they are meeting the needs of their members from a value perspective as well as ongoing market research that they can conduct over the coming 3-5 years. We also discussed benchmarks and KPIs around what they should be looking for in the market research results to tell them if they're on track or, if not, scenario planning other levers around value and price that they should be considering.
We closed out our time together by having a further discussion on marketing collateral, sales timeline, email marketing, and finalizing a conjoint analysis survey that they could conduct within that same week to test the prices and ensure that it would be received well by their members.
Step 3. Follow-Up Support
Pricing for Associations provided seven days of follow-up support to Client to address any questions or new ideas that their team had so that they can have confidence and comfort in executing the strategy and the tactics that we created during our intensive. This time allowed us to answer additional questions that came up, review the conjoint analysis survey results from the survey that we created during our intensive, and overall it gave peace of mind to the team as they prepared to roll out this new membership over the coming five weeks.
The Winning Outcome:
When Client came to Pricing for Associations, they had a tentative price and projection of what percent of the members would convert to members of this newly upgraded membership. Through our data analysis and the market research that Client had conducted in the months leading up to our intensive, Pricing for Associations was able to slightly adjust their pricing, leading value drivers, and projections to enhance their revenue and profitability while keeping in step with members receiving the value that they need at a price that was a no brainer.
The Client expects at least a 60x ROI on their investment within the first 12 months with more recurring revenue to come for many more years.
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