If you’re one of the many local parties who have grown in membership, you will have benefitted from vastly increased service fees since the introduction of the Membership Incentive Scheme in 2013. This scheme gives local parties 20% of all subscriptions if their membership grows at all in a quarter. For those which grow by more than 10 members, that jumps to 40%.
From the beginning of next year, the amount you get will reduce slightly. From an email sent by Sal Brinton to local parties this week:
Local parties with net growth of between 1 and 10 members during a quarter will be qualified to receive 18% of all their membership subscription fees paid during that quarter (which includes the 3% payable to all compliant local parties)
Local parties with net growth of more than 10 during a quarter will be qualified to receive 33% of all their membership subscription fees paid during that quarter (which includes the 3% payable to all compliant local parties)
All compliant local parties will be qualified to receive 3% of all their membership subscription fees paid during that quarter.
That is still pretty generous, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the more members you recruit or retain before the end of the year, the more money you will get.
So, this is the time to recruit your cousin who goes all gooey-eyed when Tim Farron (or more likely Justin Trudeau) appears on the telly or your work colleague who complains that the Government’s response to terrorism curbs freedoms or your friend who’s worried about the future of the planet.
Your local party will have received a list of lapsing members. Why not volunteer to call on them to encourage them to rejoin before the end of the year?
The bigger your local party is on 31st December, the more money you will get to fight whatever elections you are facing in 2016.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Labour MPs revolt
Edward Street of old #dundeewestend
Tens of Thousands
A Puffin Books profile of Joan Aiken
"Could you be the one to help a care leaver?"
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Mike Peters
Simon R
Steve Trevethan
Peter Martin
nigel hunter
3 Comments
The higher level of rebates for Parties showing growth was a good innovation (last year?) although now reduced a bit.
But who took the original decision some years ago to cut the rebate for all parties down to a tiny 3%, wasn’t it obvious that this would provide a severe disincentive to recruitment? It is always easier to get people to agree to help (in various ways) than to actually join so why bother chasing membership hard if there is so little return to the Local Party?
It was 5% for parties that didn’t grow at all and that’s now been cut to 3% for 2016. The idea of the incentive scheme is to make effort at recruitment and retention and growth really, really pay. I’m not sure how you can say there’s no incentive to recruit when you can get 15% more for even growing by 1 person in a quarter.
Not what I said Caron. I welcomed the relatively recent rebates of significant proportions of membership money for Local Parties who grow their membership.
What I asked was ‘who took the original decision some years ago’ to have a rebate of just 3% now and as you note 5% previously? There are intermittent surges (as in May/June) and -more often -intermittent sharp drops in membership levels due to national events. But mostly Local Parties memberships, high or low, have that because of local activity so why was it thought a good idea to only let a flat rate of 5%, now 3%, of membership money be retained by Local Parties?