How to build a business case for membership investment at your club

TL;DR

• Membership deserves its own platform, and you can prove it with the numbers your board never sees: fans who drop out of checkout, renewals that lapse and hours lost to manual changes.

• Leadership will ask about risk, and the good news is you can keep your ticketing platform and add a membership platform alongside it, with launch in around three months.

• DMCCA's new subscription rules start in January 2027, so the journeys that sell and renew memberships need a review anyway.
  

Membership probably landed on your plate alongside ticketing or commercial. You can see the join journey is clunky and you know renewals slip every summer, but when you take it to leadership, membership often isn't treated as a revenue stream in its own right, so it keeps underperforming.

That's the problem this guide helps with. Most membership schemes are underfunded because nobody can show what the current setup is costing the club, and leadership can't back what it can't see.

Below, we cover what tends to hold membership back, the questions your board will ask and a five-step way to build the numbers, with a one-page template at the end you can copy into your own paper.

What holds membership investment back?

Usually it's not that leadership doubts membership. There's no easy way to give it the platform it deserves, and while it runs through ticketing, the losses stay hidden. These are some of the things we've seen slow clubs down, and you may recognise a few.

You have no funnel data

Many schemes run on a ticketing platform that doesn't share raw sign-up data. You can see how many members you sold, but you can't see how many fans started and dropped out or where they left, which makes it hard to show the size of the leak.

Several teams need to say yes

Membership can touch ticketing, digital, technology and CRM teams, and each may need to sign off. Even with a champion in the membership team, you'll usually need a clear business case the others can get behind.

Building it in-house can be harder than it looks

If your club has its own developers, building a membership journey on top of a payment provider can seem like the obvious route. One club we worked with planned exactly that, before realising that selling memberships was the easy part. Managing every renewal and subscription change afterwards was the real work.

What should your membership business case cover?

Your board will ask some of these questions. Others they won’t think to ask, because the answers are hidden in the current setup, and those are often the ones that make your case.

Show the revenue you’re losing today

Start with renewals, as you'll already have this: compare last season's members with this season's renewals and multiply the gap by your average membership price. Checkout drop-off is harder to see if your ticketing platform doesn't share sign-up data. Ask your provider for basket and order reports, check your web analytics for visits to your membership page, or use an industry average and say it's an estimate. Either way, the missing data becomes part of your case.

Show the upside of fixing it

Give a realistic range that leadership can test. Our Premier Club benchmark, which runs over 200,000 memberships, sees sign-up conversion rise 11% and payment approvals between seasons rise 19% after moving to a platform built for memberships.

Explain how it’s different from your ticketing platform

Ticketing is built to sell finite seats at peak demand, while membership is a recurring relationship that needs renewals, payment updates and self-serve changes. A membership platform doesn't replace ticketing. It sits alongside it and handles the parts ticketing wasn't designed for. We cover the difference in more detail in membership platforms vs ticketing systems.

Show what your current setup is costing you

Add up the staff hours spent on manual renewals, changes and refunds, plus postage on packs fans may not want. Then look ahead: if memberships grow, will you need to hire more people to keep up? At our benchmark, members now handle around 16,000 cases a season themselves through self-serve accounts.

Show why the risk is low

Change is less risky than most leaders expect, because your ticketing platform can stay in place while membership runs alongside it as a separate layer.

Set out the timeline

A typical launch takes around three months, timed so you’re live before your next renewal window.

5 ways to gather the numbers for your business case

These five steps show where to find the numbers to back it up, and what each one tells your board.

1. Count the pages in your join journey

Start at "Add to basket" and count every screen until the order is confirmed. Many club schemes take five pages or more, and each one is another chance for a fan to give up, especially on mobile.

Why it matters to the board: a shorter journey is the cheapest conversion gain available, because it sells more to fans you're already paying to attract.

How a membership platform helps: it cuts the steps to join, with express payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and lets fans buy before they create an account.

2. Find where your funnel leaks

Map what you can see at each stage, such as visits to your membership page in your web analytics, baskets and orders in your ticketing reports, and completed sales. Where you can't see a stage, note it, because those blind spots are part of what you're asking the board to fix. Where you can, the biggest drop between two stages is where to focus first. Things worth checking include a compulsory account login, a booking fee that appears late and complicated steps for assigning memberships to family members.

For illustrative purposes only. These figures do not reflect any club's data.

In this example, 60% of fans who add a membership to their basket never buy one. That's 12,000 fans. Assuming an average membership price of £40, that's £480,000 left in baskets each season, and winning back even a quarter of them would be worth £120,000.

Why it matters to the board: it turns "the checkout is clunky" into a figure in pounds.

How a membership platform helps: you can see every step of the funnel in one report, and abandoned baskets flow into your CRM so you can follow up with fans who didn’t finish.

3. Put a number on renewals

Compare this season's renewals with last season's members, then look at why fans lapsed. Without auto-renew, every member has to act to stay, and with card-only payments many renewals fail simply because a card expired over the summer. We explain how to fix that in card or Direct Debit.

Why it matters to the board: a fan who meant to renew but didn't is revenue the club had already won once.

How a membership platform helps: offering Direct Debit alongside cards, and letting fans update their payment details before renewal, means fewer renewals fail.

4. Show the cost to serve

List every change that needs a person today, such as renewals, changes of owner, address updates, refunds and cancellations, and multiply by the time each one takes. Then add the cost of posting welcome packs to renewing members who may not want another one.

Why it matters to the board: moving these changes to self-serve frees your team for the work that needs a person, and means you don't have to add headcount as memberships grow.

How a membership platform helps: with a self-serve account area, fans can change their card or address, turn auto-renew on or off and cancel without calling your team.

5. Prove which marketing wins members

Check what you can track today. Tagged campaign links and your email platform will show which channels send fans to your membership page, but for many clubs the trail stops once fans move to the ticketing site, so you can't see who actually bought. Put that gap in your case, because without it you can't tell which spend to keep and which to cut.

Why it matters to the board: you can show which marketing spend turns into members and move budget to what works.

How a membership platform helps: built-in analytics follows each fan through to purchase, so you can see which campaigns, channels and placements bring in members.

Why make the case now?

The UK's new subscription rules start in January 2027 and next season's renewals are only months away, so the timing works in your favour.

The DMCCA subscription rules

In August 2026, the government brought the start date of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act subscription regime forward to January 2027 (TLT). It covers most auto-renewing consumer subscriptions, so if your club offers auto-renew or plans to, the rules include:

• Clear key information before a fan signs up, including what they pay and when it renews

• Reminder notices before renewal payments

• A 14-day cooling-off period after certain renewals

• Online cancellation, without unnecessary steps or a phone call

The CMA will enforce the regime, which means any club moving to auto-renew needs journeys built for these rules on day one, including online cancellation with save offers.

Your next renewal window

Most clubs run renewals ahead of the new season. Working back from that date, a decision this winter is what makes it possible to launch before renewals, while waiting until spring costs you another season of data and lapsed members.

What does a modern membership setup look like?

It sells on a short journey, renews without manual effort and lets fans manage their own membership. Use this table to show the board the gap between where you are today and where you could be.

How to reduce the risk of change

Keep your ticketing platform, add membership alongside it and launch in time for renewals. That combination answers most of the risk questions leadership will raise.

Keep what works

Your ticketing platform carries on selling seats while a membership platform runs the scheme as a separate layer, checking each fan against your existing fan record so nothing about matchday changes. It can also connect to the CRM, payments and fulfilment tools you already use.

Plan around a short, fixed timeline

A typical rollout takes around three months. It starts with an in-person workshop to design the membership experience with your stakeholders and carries on with regular demos, so your team sees progress every week.

Point to a club that has done it

The board will want proof. Our benchmark club used to run memberships through its ticketing platform, with four people managing around 200,000 memberships by hand. After moving to a platform built for subscriptions:

• Sign-up conversion rose 11%

• Payment approvals between seasons rose 19%

• 98.6% of the 28,470 membership changes in the first 11 weeks were made by fans themselves

Keep improving after launch

Going live is where the optimisation work begins. Ask any provider how they'll review the funnel with you, spot where fans drop out and help you fix it. If the move itself is your biggest worry, our guide to switching membership platforms without disrupting your members walks through it.

A membership business case template you can use

Copy this into your board paper, fill in your own numbers and keep it to a single page.

The problem

In one sentence: what is our current setup costing us?

Where we are today

• Members this season:

• Renewal rate compared with last season:

• Pages in the join journey:

• Fans who start joining but don't finish (estimate):

• Staff hours a season on manual changes and renewals:

• Extra hires needed if memberships grow:

The opportunity

• Revenue recovered if checkout conversion improves by X%:

• Revenue recovered if renewals improve by X%:

• Hours saved by moving changes to self-serve:

The cost of doing nothing

What we lose if we run next season the same way.

Risk and how we reduce it

• Ticketing platform stays in place

• Rollout of around three months, before renewals

• New subscription rules from January 2027 covered

The ask

Approval for a scoping workshop, with a decision by [date].

Notice the size of the ask. Asking for a workshop to size the opportunity is an easier yes than asking for a full budget in the first meeting, and it gives you real numbers to bring to the next one.