Family and household memberships: one fee, several people

Some organisations are joined by individuals. Plenty of others are joined by households, whether or not their pricing admits it. A badminton club where a couple plays together, a congregation where the whole family attends, a residents' association where the unit is obviously the house rather than the person - in all of these, charging per individual makes families do arithmetic at the door, and the arithmetic usually ends with one person joining and the rest quietly attending anyway.

A household tier fixes that, and it is one of the few pricing changes that reliably increases both revenue and goodwill. It is also the tier most often designed badly, in ways that create record-keeping headaches nobody anticipated.

Decide what a household actually means to you

The word does more work than it looks, and the definition you pick shapes everything else. There are three common answers and they are genuinely different.

Two named adults plus dependent children is the most common, and it maps to what most people picture. It is easy to explain and reasonably hard to abuse.

Everyone living at one address is simpler to state and much harder to police, and it can quietly cover an extended household of eight - which may be exactly right for a residents' association and completely wrong for a sports club where each person consumes court time.

A fixed number of named people who need not be related avoids the definition problem entirely and works well where the real constraint is capacity rather than kinship. "Up to four named members" is honest about what you are selling.

The right choice depends on what each extra person actually costs you. If a second family member costs you nothing - a newsletter, a seat in a hall that was not full - be generous. If each person consumes a coaching slot, a meal, or an insurance registration, count heads and say so.

Pricing it: the multiplier that works

The instinct is to charge double for two people, which defeats the purpose - if a household tier costs the same as two individual memberships, nobody buys it and you have added a row to your price list for nothing. The instinct in the other direction is a token discount that leaves you resenting families who use everything twice.

In practice, something between 1.5 and 1.8 times the individual rate works for most organisations. It is a visible saving that makes the household option obviously worth taking, while still recognising that two people are more work than one. Where a second person genuinely costs you nothing, go lower. Where they consume a real resource, go higher and be transparent about why.

Children are usually the easy part: include dependents at no extra cost if they do not consume a separate resource, and charge a small junior rate if they do. What you should avoid is a sliding scale with a different price for every family size. It is fair in theory and unusable in practice, both for the person explaining it and the person maintaining the records.

The record-keeping problem nobody warns you about

This is where household tiers go wrong, and it is worth thinking through before you launch one rather than after. One fee, several people, and now a series of questions your records have to answer.

Who is the member of record - the person who paid, or all of them? Who receives the renewal notice, and does everyone else get told? If one person in the household emails to ask a question, can you see they are covered? When a couple separates, which of them keeps the membership, and can you make that change without an awkward conversation? If your organisation votes on things, does a household get one vote or several?

None of these are hard, but all of them need an answer before somebody asks, because the alternative is a treasurer improvising a policy at the worst possible moment. The workable version is usually: one primary member who is billed and who holds the record, every other person in the household listed by name with their own contact details, and a clear line on votes - typically one vote per adult, or one per household, decided in advance and written down. Systems built for membership, including ours, handle this as a bundle with a coordinator, which is worth checking for if you are choosing a system.

What changes when families are members

Two things are worth knowing before you introduce this tier, because they change how your organisation feels.

The first is good: household members are noticeably stickier. A membership that two people use is far harder to cancel than one that a single busy person keeps meaning to get value from, and the renewal conversation is different when someone else in the house would notice it stopping.

The second is a genuine tradeoff: your member count and your household count stop being the same number, and you have to decide which one you report. A club with 120 paying households and 190 individual members will be tempted to use whichever figure flatters it that week. Pick one for your public number, one for your capacity planning, and keep them straight in your own head. Our piece on the numbers worth watching covers why that consistency matters more than the size of either figure.

Introducing it without annoying existing members

If you already have couples paying two individual fees, they will do the sums the moment you announce a household rate, and they will notice they have been overpaying. Get ahead of it: tell them directly, offer to move them at their next renewal, and thank them for the years they paid the higher amount. Handled well this is a small gift that buys real loyalty. Handled by saying nothing and waiting to be asked, it is a slightly sour discovery that someone will mention at a meeting.