4 Things You Can Do Now to Improve Membership for the Coming Year

With acquisition campaigns to run, events to manage, customers to serve, and renewals always looming, it’s easy for big-picture membership planning to fall by the wayside. But a little strategic groundwork now can make 2026 your strongest membership year yet.

The good news? You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. These four optimization project ideas will help you build momentum heading into the new year, and each one sets you up to hit the ground running when January arrives.

1. Clean up your membership data

Why this matters for 2026: Your renewal campaigns are a chance to start the year fresh and lay the foundation for meeting, or even exceeding, your membership goals. But your campaigns are only as effective as the data behind them. Every duplicate record, bad address, or data discrepancy chips away at your efficiency, costing time, money, and potentially affecting the member experience.

If left unchecked, messy data can create a ripple effect:

• Duplicate records may result in members receiving multiple notices.
• Incorrect addresses prevent your messages from reaching the intended recipient.
• Inaccurate name formats or relationship linkages can make messages feel impersonal, or even worse, can confuse or frustrate the reader.
• Incomplete transactional data can leave money on the table by preventing you from making the right ask.

When your team can’t trust the data, segmenting members effectively and personalizing outreach becomes much harder, and staff end up spending more time on manual fixes than on strategic work. A little year-end data cleanup now will set you up for a smoother, stronger renewal season in 2026.

What to prioritize: Start with the issues that directly impact your renewal campaigns, including:

• Deduplicating member records
• Optimizing household or familial relationship tracking
• Auditing expiration dates and payment-tier alignment
• Standardizing name formats and contact information
• Purchasing data appends for invalid addresses
• Importing missing activity data from other transactional systems.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Even tackling the top three data quality issues in your system will make a meaningful difference.

Think of it as setting a clean foundation for everything you’ll build in 2026. When your renewal campaigns launch, they’ll reach the right people with the right messaging—and your team will trust what they see in reports.

Getting started: Block out time in the next 4-6 weeks for a focused data cleanup sprint, whether you tackle it internally, bring in temporary support, or work with a consultant like JCA who offers data cleanup packages.

2. Audit your systems to uncover silos

Why this matters for 2026: Before you set ambitious membership goals for the new year, you need to know whether your technology can support them. The best time to discover if your systems can’t handle integrated campaigns or unified reporting is while planning—not three months into a campaign when you’re already behind.

Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar: your ticketing system doesn’t talk to your CRM. Your online giving platform lives in its own world. Your email marketing tool requires manual exports and imports. And somewhere in the mix, there’s a spreadsheet that three people update independently.

Technology silos don’t just create inefficiency, they fragment your understanding of your members. That family who buys season tickets, donates annually, and volunteers at events? They might look like three separate households in disconnected systems. Planning effective strategies is difficult when you can’t see the full picture of member engagement.

What to assess: Map out your current technology ecosystem. List every system that touches member data—your CRM, website, ticketing platform, email tool, event management system, everything. Then honestly evaluate:

• Where does data flow smoothly between systems, and where does it require manual intervention?
• What solutions are redundant or provide duplicate functionality?
• What member insights are you missing because data lives in silos?
• Where is your team wasting time on workarounds?
• What would be possible if your systems talked to each other?

This isn’t about committing to expensive new software. It’s about understanding your current reality so you can make informed decisions about where to invest in 2026.

Getting started: Dedicate a few hours per week to this audit before the end of the year. Involve the people who work in these systems daily, they know where the pain points are. Document what you learn, prioritize your biggest opportunities, and create a realistic roadmap for improvement. Whether you do this internally or bring in expertise (JCA’s Technology Roadmap assessments can help), you’ll enter 2026 with clarity and an actionable plan to move your organization forward in the new year.

3. Research your membership pricing strategy

Why this matters for 2026: If you’re planning to adjust membership pricing or launch new tiers in 2026 (as many organizations are, given rising operational costs), you’ll have a much higher success rate basing those decisions on data instead of guesswork.

For organizations with fiscal years starting in summer or fall, now through early spring is an ideal window to conduct research and planning, giving you sufficient time to implement changes at your FY start. Research now so you can implement confidently when the time is right for your organization.

How do you know if your membership levels are priced right, and offer the right benefits? Most organizations rely on some combination of gut feeling, historical precedent, and competitive benchmarking. But your members’ actual preferences and willingness to pay might surprise you—and those unknowns could be costing revenue, hurting renewals, or decreasing acquisition opportunities.

Maybe that premium level you’re proud of doesn’t offer the benefits members actually care about most. Maybe you’re underpricing, leaving money on the table that members would gladly pay for the right perks. Or maybe the sweet spot for a new membership tier is completely different from what you’d assumed.

What to research: Think about the membership decisions you’re facing in 2026. Are you considering:

• Raising prices for membership across the board?
• Adding a new membership tier?
• Changing the benefits mix?
• Increasing your admission price, or changing your overall pricing structure?

Rather than making these decisions in a vacuum, research your members’ preferences and use that data as a guide. We can help you with a conjoint analysis—a research method that provides robust results by simulating real decision-making. In conjoint, we survey current and potential members and ask them to choose between different membership packages with varying benefits and price points. Through this process, we learn what actually drives their decisions, not just what they say they want.

Getting started: If you have research capacity internally, you can run pricing tests yourself. If not, this is an area where specialized expertise really pays off—methods like conjoint analysis require careful design and specialized analysis to yield actionable insights. Either way, start planning your research now. Whether you’re preparing for a calendar year, mid-year fiscal start, or later fiscal year launch, you’ll be ready to implement optimized pricing when the time is right, backed by evidence rather than assumptions.

4. Understand what drives member loyalty

Why this matters for 2026: Retention is cheaper than acquisition, but only if you know which members to focus on. Understanding behavioral patterns lets you build targeted retention strategies instead of scrambling to save members after they’ve already lapsed.

For example, do you know: Which members are most likely to renew next year? Which segments are trending toward lapsing? Who are the best candidates for an upgrade? What patterns separate your most engaged members from those on the fence? Which members are most likely to respond to an email campaign, a phone call, or a direct mail piece?

Most organizations can answer these questions anecdotally (“Our exhibition members tend to be loyal”) but struggle to back it up with data. And without that analytical foundation, your retention strategies are essentially guesswork—expensive, time-consuming guesswork.

What to analyze: Dig into your transactional data from the past 2-3 years. Look for patterns across multiple dimensions:

• Attendance frequency: How often do different member segments actually visit?
• Price sensitivity: Which members consistently upgrade vs. those who stick with basic levels?
• Retention patterns: What distinguishes members who renew year after year from those who drop off?
• Programmatic crossover: Do members who attend specific program types stay longer?
• Donation behavior: How does giving correlate with membership retention?
• Engagement levels: Which touchpoints matter most for long-term loyalty?

This analysis isn’t just descriptive—it’s predictive. Understanding these patterns helps you identify at-risk members before they lapse, recognize opportunities for upgrades, and design marketing campaigns that speak to specific behavioral segments rather than treating everyone the same.

Getting started: Pull your membership and transaction data for the past few years and start looking for patterns. If you have analytics capacity on your team, this is a perfect project for Q4. If not, consider bringing in analytical expertise to help you uncover insights you might miss. JCA’s Member Behavior Analysis is designed exactly for this purpose.

The key is conducting this analysis during your yearly planning period, to give you a playbook: here are your most valuable member segments, here’s where they’re headed, and here’s how to keep them engaged. That way, your membership team can be proactive from day one.

Take Action Now

Start researching and planning for any of these initiatives now, and you’ll gain valuable momentum and early insights to carry into the new year.

Here’s what starting now looks like in practice:

• Clean data means your next renewal campaigns hit inboxes instead of bouncing back
• A technology roadmap means you can confidently budget for the right tools and improvements
• Pricing insights mean you can roll out new membership with confidence whether you’re launching in January, July, or any other month
• Behavioral analysis means your retention campaigns target the right people with the right messages at the right time

So here’s your challenge: Select the one area from these four that will have the biggest impact for your business in the coming months.

If you need support as you get started, that’s what we’re here for. JCA specializes in helping museums, attractions, and cultural organizations tackle exactly these challenges with practical, budget-conscious solutions designed for nonprofits. Whether it’s data cleanup, technology planning, pricing strategy, or behavioral analysis, we can help you make 2026 your best membership year yet.

Ready to start planning? Let’s talk about which of these strategies makes the most sense for your organization.