What Membership Organisations Can Learn from Spotify About Member Engagement
Updated: 6 days ago
At first glance, Spotify and membership organisations may not seem to have much in common.
But both face a similar challenge: how do you give people a reason to keep coming back?
Membership organisations may offer events, training, industry insight, resources and member benefits, but members will not always discover or engage with everything available to them. Spotify offers an interesting lesson.
By making discovery and relevance part of the experience, it gives users reasons to return and find something new alongside the content they already enjoy.
For membership organisations, there are some useful lessons in this approach for keeping members engaged throughout the rest of 2026. Key Points
Engagement is not always about offering more. Making it easier for members to discover relevant opportunities can be just as important.
Relevance gives members more reasons to return. Understanding what members engage with can help organisations make future communications and experiences more useful.
Value should be experienced throughout the year. Regular touchpoints, relevant opportunities and practical benefits can help keep membership front of mind beyond renewal and major events.
Why Member Engagement Drops Between Events and Renewals
Membership organisations can offer valuable events, training, resources, industry insight and benefits, yet members may not engage with everything available to them regularly. The challenge is not always about creating more.
Sometimes, it is about helping people discover what is already relevant and valuable to them. Spotify makes discovery part of the experience. Alongside the music people already know and enjoy, it helps them find new artists, songs and playlists based on their interests and listening habits.
Membership organisations can take a similar approach. Rather than expecting members to search through everything available, organisations can make relevant opportunities easier to discover through a member mobile app and give members more reasons to return throughout the year.
Four Things Membership Organisations Can Learn from Spotify
1. Make Discovery Part of the Experience
Members do not always know exactly what they are looking for. Just as Spotify helps users discover music they may enjoy, membership organisations can help members find events, resources, training and benefits they may not have actively searched for.
The easier it is to discover something relevant, the more likely members are to engage with it.
2. Relevance Matters More Than Offering More
Not every member will value the same things. Rather than simply adding more services, organisations should focus on helping members find what is most relevant to them.
Even small steps, such as highlighting useful opportunities based on interests or previous engagement, can create a more relevant experience. Member engagement tools can help automate this without adding to the team’s workload.
3. Give Members a Reason to Return
Engagement should not depend solely on major events or renewal. A useful resource, upcoming event, industry insight or relevant benefit can all give members a reason to reconnect throughout the year.
Creating regular moments of value can help keep membership relevant between the bigger moments. Our guide to association email engagement best practices shows how savings-led messaging can support this.
4. Learn From What Members Engage With
The events members attend, resources they access and benefits they use can provide useful insight into what they value.
Organisations can use this information, for example through member engagement analytics, to understand what is working, identify opportunities that may be overlooked and make future communications more relevant. The goal is not to collect more data, but to make better use of the insights already available.
How Member Benefits Create Everyday Engagement
Professional development, networking, events and industry insight may be central to the membership experience. But engagement does not have to be limited to these larger interactions. Practical member benefits can provide another reason for members to engage more regularly.
Savings on everyday spending, travel, technology, entertainment, leisure and wellbeing can give members opportunities to experience value between events, training sessions or other professional activities. This can be particularly valuable because the benefits may become relevant at different times. A travel offer may catch a member's attention when they are planning a holiday. A technology discount may become useful when they are considering a new device.
The opportunity is to make these benefits easy to discover when they matter. Like the wider membership experience, value is more powerful when members do not have to go searching for it.
Conclusion: How to Keep Members Engaged All Year
Spotify shows that keeping people engaged is not always about giving them more.
It is about helping them discover the right things at the right time. The same principle applies to membership organisations.
For the rest of 2026, organisations should consider three important questions:
Are we making it easy for members to discover relevant opportunities?
Are we giving them regular reasons to engage throughout the year?
Are we using what we know about member engagement to make future experiences more relevant?
The organisations that keep members engaged will not necessarily be those offering the most. They may be the ones that make it easiest for members to discover, access and experience the value already available to them. Because when members regularly find something useful, relevant or valuable, they have more reasons to keep coming back. Give members more reasons to engage. Parliament Hill helps professional and trade associations and other membership organisations make relevant benefits easier to discover and use. See how others do it in our customer stories, or book a free demo with our team to see how it could work for your organisation.
About author
Christina Loukissa is the Growth Marketing Lead at Parliament Hill, where she helps membership organisations grow, retain, and energise their communities through targeted perks and benefits strategies.
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