Membership

[Silver Fox]

Where on the site can you see how many "stamps" you have, have trawled it this evening and its not obvious...(to me)

I just called the TO about this as my daughter just buys occasional tickets but doesn't have her own login, just relies on Dad to sort that stuff out, and apparently when you buy a one off ticket you'll get an email telling you how many stamps you've got. Obvs wait and see it in action but sounds like it might work

[Sutekh]

If you buy 7 tickets for the same game is that sufficient to earn you a free one?

[Dave the rave]

If you buy 7 tickets for the same game is that sufficient to earn you a free one?

Not if I'm reading it right.

How it works:

For every match ticket purchased (one per fixture), you'll receive a stamp.

The sentence is open to interpretation but I'd say you only get one stamp regardless. I've just bought 3 for Saturday's game.

[Clyde1998]

Thinking perhaps there’s other ways of doing this sort of thing. Norwich, for example, get their casual fans to pay £25 to annually register for home and/or away “clubs” which entitles fans in each club to buy tickets for home/away games based on how regularly that fan has attended home/away games previously.

Could be a good way to get revenue into the club at some point in the future. The old membership one-time fee basically killed off any regular income for the club through this manner. We seem to get at least 3,000 non-season ticket home fans per Saturday match. I don't know how many unique visitors we get each season, but say 20,000 people pay a £10 annual membership fee - that's an additional £200,000 for the club.

However, would you negatively impact on the number of people buying tickets? Tickets are already £25-27 for an adult, which is arguably too high to get people into the ground on a semi-regular basis already when compared to the capacity of the stadium. If you're only going to couple games a season, effectively adding £5 to the ticket price per person is probably going to deter folk.

I think we're in a stage where we need to maximise attendances: get more people going to games regularly; get new supporters. The secondary income (food, drink, merchandising) may well compensate for the lack of a membership fee over the course of the season. The long term impact will help the club in future seasons.

What could work is a membership scheme that's not directly tied to buying tickets, although it could still provide priority to tickets (a step down from season ticket holders). Perhaps a monthly subscription of £5 which provides discounts on tickets/merchandising; access to certain club events; entry into prize draws. This would be something existing season ticket holders may be interested in - increasing the potential pool of people paying the membership fee and providing revenue beyond what a simple membership fee for tickets would achieve.

[Linden Jones' Tash]

Thinking perhaps there’s other ways of doing this sort of thing. Norwich, for example, get their casual fans to pay £25 to annually register for home and/or away “clubs” which entitles fans in each club to buy tickets for home/away games based on how regularly that fan has attended home/away games previously.

Could be a good way to get revenue into the club at some point in the future. The old membership one-time fee basically killed off any regular income for the club through this manner. We seem to get at least 3,000 non-season ticket home fans per Saturday match. I don't know how many unique visitors we get each season, but say 20,000 people pay a £10 annual membership fee - that's an additional £200,000 for the club.

However, would you negatively impact on the number of people buying tickets? Tickets are already £25-27 for an adult, which is arguably too high to get people into the ground on a semi-regular basis already when compared to the capacity of the stadium. If you're only going to couple games a season, effectively adding £5 to the ticket price per person is probably going to deter folk.

I think we're in a stage where we need to maximise attendances: get more people going to games regularly; get new supporters. The secondary income (food, drink, merchandising) may well compensate for the lack of a membership fee over the course of the season. The long term impact will help the club in future seasons.

What could work is a membership scheme that's not directly tied to buying tickets, although it could still provide priority to tickets (a step down from season ticket holders). Perhaps a monthly subscription of £5 which provides discounts on tickets/merchandising; access to certain club events; entry into prize draws. This would be something existing season ticket holders may be interested in - increasing the potential pool of people paying the membership fee and providing revenue beyond what a simple membership fee for tickets would achieve.

Interesting what happens in other places - Marseille in Ligue 1 had an 'global online community' that you could join for a small annual fee (€5) - this gave 10% off merch, some priority to tickets & video/digital content & exclusive invites to events & activities

This was evolved into a €25 annual fee for pretty much the same...

Now it has evolved again and there are different tiers - standard for €25 & premium €59 - similar sort of benefits, just different levels of early access etc.

Apparently there were 90,000 members at €25 a year - €2,250,000 additional revenue.

If that is the model that is going to be followed - tiered membership with exclusive digital content & activities etc, it will be interesting how they price and tier it for a club like Reading FC