Membership Matters is an Indigo Share: Hot Topic, sponsored by Line-Up and Substrakt.
The research ran from December 2025 to February 2026, consisting of two surveys that saw over 60 organisations take part. Thank you to everyone who took part.
Membership Matters provides cultural organisations with insight into what audiences most value about arts memberships. It also explores the current arts membership landscape, highlighting why organisations have membership schemes and their pain points in delivering on their aims.
The key findings from Membership Matters were:
1. Membership schemes are complex and potentially confusing to audiences with numerous tiers of benefits, ranging costs of up to £10k per year, and a wide variety of membership scheme names.
2. Organisations want to build support by offering a closer relationship with 71% wanting to encourage philanthropic giving and offering benefits such as member-only events (72%) and bespoke/exclusive communications (70%).
3. There is a disconnect between audiences and organisations where 86% organisations have membership schemes to provide an additional source of income, yet 70% of audiences would value free or discounted tickets. Resource-heavy benefits of internal discounts, member-only events and bespoke communications are very low priority for audiences, and almost half of organisations say that lack of internal resource is a key challenge.
4. Organisations do meet audience expectations on early access and priority booking where this is the most offered benefit, by 92% organisations, with 71% audiences saying they would prioritise this benefit when considering a membership.
5. Loyalty anxiety is a barrier to membership where 57% respondents said they are worried that they wouldn't make use of a membership to justify having it - despite that 68% of respondents are highly engaged arts and cultural attendees (6+ times a year) and only 1% of respondents will never consider an arts memberships.
Methodology
Cultural organisations in the UK, including theatres, arts centres, festivals, cinemas, concert venues, touring companies, and museums and galleries were invited to participate in the Membership Matters research. Both the organisation and audience surveys were open to all cultural organisations in the UK, and were free to participate in.
For the organisation survey, organisations were asked questions to gain a wider picture of what memberships they offer, their purpose to the organisation and the challenges they face when it comes to delivering membership schemes.
The survey ran from December 2025-January 2026, with responses from 57 cultural organisations.
For the audience survey, organisations were each provided with a unique link to send out to a recommended sample of around 3,000 of their previous attenders. They were also provided with a link to see the results from their own organisation in real time, and the results from all organisations were then aggregated to form the baseline data set.
The survey ran in January-February 2026, where 9,382 complete responses were gathered from 59 cultural organisations.