Membership

Please read The Campaigning Handbook by Mark Lattimer for more details.

Membership can be a very important income source for campaigns. It can be a long term, stable and flexible funding base. As well as providing income, having ‘paid up’ members to your campaign sends out a powerful message about the amount of support there is for your campaign (especially when compared to certain other methods of evidencing support for your campaign, such as signatories on petitions).

Let’s look in turn briefly at different types of membership income.

Subscriptions and donations

You can set this at any level that you think people might be willing to pay and can afford! Whether it’s £2 per month or £200 per year you will need to consider what, if anything, you can give back to members. It might be no more than giving them the confidence that you are working hard to achieve your campaign goals, but it might mean having to provide member benefits, such as invites to events, receiving newsletters etc.

Let’s look at an example:

The Cuba Solidarity Campaign has a membership scheme. They have a member offer, whereby if you sign a friend up to the campaign, they will be sent a book about Che Guevara. They will also be sent a member’s back that contains four issues of the campaign magazine. They charge £15 for one year’s membership. Have a look at their membership form to get an idea of what kind of information they collect.

Direct mail

This is another important way of getting income from both members and non-members. To do this well you really need to have a good understanding of who your (potential) supporters are. Depending on their profile (e.g. age, gender, income etc) you will need to communicate with them in different ways. And depending on the diversity of your audiences (e.g. a campaign about school bullying might want to target both young people and parents), you might need to ‘segment’ your communications, so that you have slightly different content, tone and ‘asks’.

‘Rattling tins’

It might not be the most efficient form of fundraising, but street based collections are another method to consider. They can be useful in raising your profile, and giving you direct, face-to-face contact with potential supporters.

However, the most successful street-based collections tend to be for well known ‘household name’ charities, and a campaign that doesn’t have a high profile may struggle with this approach.

If you are going to do street-based collections you will need to get permission from your local council, even if you are a registered charity. You would normally have to apply at least a month in advance of the proposed collection date. If you are a charity, and if you plan to collect in numerous parts of the country at the same time, you can apply to the Charity Commission for an exemption order – so that you don’t have to apply to each individual local authority for permission.