I'd love to hear the rationale for phasing out membership. Do share!
Marissa Pherson
Marissa,
At least for us, Membership has offered access to shop tools and workstands (after completing our Shop Class series), loaner bikes and parts, 15% off new parts, and free access to our Traffic Skills riding class.
More details here!
As part of our currently underway, grant-funded strategic planning process, we've decided to suspend and likely phase out the loaner bike/parts system, and prior to that, we made the decision to make access to our shop and tools public, since we were ALWAYS making exceptions to the 'members only' rule to allow people to work on their own bike with our tools.
With regard to shop use, our working policy that will be revamped over the next couple months is that we allow people to check out tools and a stand for $5/hour and we assess fees if they need specific assistance, such as $5 to show a shop user how to install a derailleur.
The snafu comes when someone thinks they don't need help but then they do, since we have a finite capacity to assist people with everything else going on. We're currently encouraging appointments during lower traffic times for 'assisted shop use' and otherwise operating on a first-come, first-served basis. We may end up restricting shop use hours in one way or another as we're currently understaffed and don't derive much income from shop use.
Regarding the income derived from membership, ours was always fairly low - maybe 2% of our operating budget based on my memory. We're instead planning to shift towards a 'donor level' system. I personally like Bike Depot's system
here, though they refer to theirs as membership levels and have 'members only' benefits that we plan to forego, instead encouraging people to give what they can at some predetermined levels, or at their own level, but illustrating at least a theoretical connection between the amount someone contributes and what that amount can support in the context of our programming. Our current board tends to feel strongly that there is an element of exclusivity in our current arrangement that we want to get away from, including potentially changing our name, but that's another story... :)
Hope this helps!