We went 5 years without raising our rates and I consider it on the short list of our bigger mistakes. When we announced our rate change, many members said, “it’s about time!”.
When we announced the change, I made it clear that if it put stress on anybody, to come talk to me. I was so, so, so worried that people would be resistant or upset. In the end, exactly one person approached me about her concerns…and a few months later ended up UPGRADING her membership. So it might’ve been more of a “money is tight this month” concern than an actual price change concern. A couple of “middle-ground” options you can offer that worked well for us: 1 - allow people to hold onto their old rates for X additional months where X = the number of months they can prepay at the old membership rate. We had several members prepay for 3, 6, and 12 months (one for 36 months) at the original rate. We made it clear that after the prepayment, their rate would go up to the new one. They were happy with that. 2 - make it so that if people upgrade/downgrade, it’s to one of your new rates. Depending on how much people change their membership rates, this can help equalize things. Costs go up. Your members will understand this. And maybe more importantly, if your members knew you were committing “financial suicide”, I bet they’d be pretty upset about it. -Alex ------------------ The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself. Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://listen.coworkingweekly.com On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 6:46 PM, oren.salo...@gmail.com <oren.salo...@gmail.com> wrote: > Does anyone have experience updating the pricing of memberships? > Specifically, I'd like to know if anyone has a guiding philosophy on how > pricing changes affect the rates of existing members. Do they keep their > old rates or do you bump them up with the pricing change? Any guiding > theories for why you would or would not? > At Dallas Fort Work, we have a policy of not raising members' rates, so > whatever rate they sign up at they keep forever. > We just moved into a new facility and expect a rather large influx of > members as we've grown in sq. footage and moved to a much denser part of > town. My bookkeeper suggests that I can only continue this policy for > existing members and that it'd be financial suicide to offer this on a go > forward basis for everyone, especially because our introductory pricing at > the new facility is dramatically reduced for the first 6 months. > Any thoughts, feelings, or salutes would be much appreciated :) > Oren > -- > Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Coworking" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
