Renewing Members: Your Essential Guide

As an Executive, one of the most important roles you have in any year is working with HQ to grow the party in your area.

Local parties can do that in two ways:

• By talking to their At Risk members and encouraging them to renew their membership
• By recruiting new members

If you’re able to help do that, you’ll get more money as part of your quarterly local party rebate to help your campaigns.

HQ helps local parties do that by:

• Running national campaigns to get contact details for people who share our values.
• Asking people we can contact to join the party regularly.
• Running a comprehensive campaign of renewal activity including emails and letters.

This really matters. Members & supporters are vital to our efforts to win elections - and without winning elections, we can’t change our country for the better.

Renewing your local members

In Lighthouse, you can find a report called "Members who need to renew" - this is a list of members who will stop being members within the next 90 days - you can check exactly when their membership will lapse by looking at their “Lapse Date”.

This will tell you everyone who is At Risk of Lapsing (hence why their status is "At Risk" on Lighthouse!).

What we need you to do is to call these members.

The most effective way to get a member to renew is to talk to them and make sure they feel heard.

On the HQ side, we’re making sure they get lots of reminders to renew - an average member will get 28 emails and 4 letters over a 120 day period, so you don’t need to do extra emails or letters from your local party.

If you can call these members, you’ll make a huge difference.

If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve put together some guidance on how to do this in the Boost Guide. Find the Boost Guide here.

The Boost Guide is a comprehensive guide to engaging with members, written by Liberal Democrats for Liberal Democrats. It contains loads of helpful tips and tricks to help you make the most of your members.

How does someone renew?

Members can renew in 3 ways.

• Online. They just need to complete this online form (or the local party form - if you’d like the bonus payment!) and they can do it quickly and easily online. They’ll need their membership number to renew.
• By phone. HQ can renew members over the phone. All they need to do is call us on 020 7022 0988 between 9.30am and 5.30pm, Monday to Friday.
• By post. They can either post in the form we send them, or they can download a renewal form here.

Also, if you can persuade members to renew online via Direct Debit, it will increase your bonus payments substantially.

Direct Debit is environmentally friendly and cheaper for the party to process. So, when you approach your at risk members about renewing their membership, please ask them to renew online by Direct Debit.

Additional info

You can learn more about some of the topics mentioned in this article here:

Lighthouse

Connect

Membership Engagement

GDPR