How to Run a Membership Renewal Campaign (Step by Step)

Why renewals deserve a campaign

For most professional associations, renewals bring in most of the year's dues. New members matter, but with a typical renewal rate in the 80s, the people who already belong are where most of the money is.

The web designer Luke Carter makes a related point about businesses in general in a recent video: a busy cafe stays busy because its customers keep finding reasons to come back. For an association, renewal is the once-a-year moment when each member decides whether to come back.

So a typical association loses around one member in six or seven every year, and closer to one in four of the members who joined last year. Some of that is unavoidable: people retire, change field or move away. A good share is not. In Marketing General's 2021 report, as Higher Logic summarised it, 29% of associations named "forgot to renew" among the reasons members lapsed, and lack of engagement led the list at 50%. Forgetting is the easiest of those to fix, and engagement is the one a campaign can speak to.

A renewal calendar

The calendar below is for a member whose membership ends on a given date. If everyone renews on the same date each year, run it once for the whole association. If memberships run from each member's join date, it runs continuously, one member at a time, which is where automation earns its keep.

None of these dates is a law. Associations in Marketing General's benchmarking report a median of about five renewal emails per member, in the 2023 edition as Wild Apricot reported it, and grace periods anywhere from none to three months. Pick a schedule you can keep up every year, and keep it.

Run the campaign in six steps

1. Know who is due, and who joined this year

Start with a list: every member whose renewal date falls in the next three months, with their email address and whether they joined in the last year. If that list takes an afternoon of matching a spreadsheet against bank deposits, fix that first; our guide to collecting dues online covers it. Mark the first-year members. They get the same reminders as everyone else, plus a little more attention.

2. Lead with what the year delivered

Before anyone sees an amount, send a short note about the year: the events held, the CLE or CPD hours offered, what the association did on members' behalf, who joined. Three or four lines and a photo is plenty. Associations name lack of engagement and of perceived value as the commonest reasons members lapse, so remind members what they did get. For first-year members, make it personal: name the event they came to, or the committee that would suit them.

3. Send reminders with one link

Each reminder should say the amount, the date and what renewing includes, and carry one button that renews in a minute. No password reset, no form asking for details you already hold. Send it in the association's name, and keep it short enough to read on a phone between meetings.

Judge each send by how many members renewed after it. Mailchimp's benchmark for non-profits shows a 40% open rate and a 3.27% click rate, and Mailchimp itself warns that Apple's mail privacy changes make open rates unreliable.

4. Offer automatic renewal, and warn before you charge

Automatic renewal by card removes the reminder problem for everyone who takes it. In Marketing General's 2023 edition, as Wild Apricot reported it, 37% of associations offered automatic credit card renewal. Tell members before each charge, with the date and the amount, and make turning it off easy, so that nobody is surprised by their bank statement.

Cards expire, and an expired card fails without anyone noticing. One association told Associations Now in 2013 that about a quarter of the cards it held were expired or invalid. Warn members whose card will expire before their next renewal, while there is still time to update it.

5. Ask in person during the grace period

After the renewal date, give a grace period, keep access on, and send one more notice. Then hand the list of people who have still not renewed to a person. A short email from the membership chair, or a call from a board member who knows them, gets answers that no reminder will: the employer stopped paying, they changed jobs, they meant to and it slipped. Some will renew on the spot, and the reasons the others give are worth writing down.

6. Close the loop, and ask why

When the grace period ends, send a clear note that the membership has ended, with a link to come back. Jennifer Sims, then membership manager at ACUI, told Associations Now that "your last renewal communication should be a dropped-member notice." Add one question: what would have made you stay? Then work out your renewal rate (members who renewed, divided by members who were due) and compare it with last year's.

When a by-hand campaign is the better choice

Sometimes the right campaign is a treasurer with a phone list. If your association has fifty members and the treasurer knows all of them, a personal email to each, followed by a call, will beat any automated sequence. Automation helps most when there are more members than one person can keep track of, or when memberships renew throughout the year.

If your national or state body collects the dues, it also sends the invoices, and your chapter's job is different. Send the year-in-review note, and make the personal follow-up to chapter members who lapse. Those are the parts a national body cannot do as well as you.

Whichever you choose, keep the tone right. A renewal reminder from a professional association should read like a note from a colleague.

How Veldun handles it

On Veldun, renewal reminders go out on their own, 30, 14 and 7 days before a membership lapses, to every member who is not on automatic renewal, in your association's name. Nobody reviews them before they go, and there is no switch to turn them off. Our guide to collecting dues online covers how they work and how members pay. The rest of the season looks like this.

On a membership level set to renew automatically, dues renew by card, and members are emailed 14 days before each charge with the date and the amount. They can turn automatic renewal off from their dues page. Members whose card will expire before their next renewal are warned in time to update it. After the renewal date, a grace period you set keeps their access on. When it ends the membership is suspended, and the member can still renew themselves. Veldun does not send a win-back email after that, so for step 6, send an email to members whose membership is suspended. A season of renewal reminders takes 7 minutes of admin time on Veldun; we estimate an hour and 45 minutes doing it by hand.

Sources for this guide

The renewal rate is from Marketing General Inc.'s 2019 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report article on its own site. Later editions' figures come from vendor summaries of MGI's reports, because MGI publishes the full reports behind a form: Higher Logic for the 2021 lapse reasons, Wild Apricot for the 2023 email count and automatic renewal, and MemberJungle and i4a for the 2025 and 2026 renewal rates, which differ slightly. The grace period practice and expired cards are from Associations Now (1 August 2018 and 4 December 2013). Email benchmarks are from Mailchimp (last updated December 2023) and Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks. The cafe comparison is from Luke Carter's "Websites Are Dead. Build THIS Instead" (24 October 2026). Each was read on 26 October 2026.