Welcome changes to the Liberal Democrat membership incentive scheme

Although I’ve written mainly in recent weeks about the benefits of a registered supporters scheme (run with the right principles), growing party membership is important too.

A key part of the turnaround in Liberal Democrat party membership levels, which predated the 2015 and 2016 surges, was a new incentive scheme that provided a direct and significant financial incentive to local parties to ensure their membership went up.

The problem more recently, however, has been that instead of being an incentive for local membership recruitment and retention activity it has become a payment to local parties rather divorced from their actual levels of membership activity. That is because so much of the recruitment and retention work is being done via the party centrally and yet benefits the incentive figures for the local party. Its role as an incentive for local activity, therefore, has greatly diminished.

So it’s great to see a reformed version of the scheme being rolled out, details of which went out to local party officers today.

The crux of it is that local party payments are now made only for members actually recruited locally (which can include online via a special web address). What’s more, if the member is retained through a second and third year of membership, then additional payments go to the local party for that too. Which means local parties are incentivised not only to recruit additional new members through their own activity, but also then to ensure those members stick with the party through the early years which are the peak time for members lapsing.

Along with the reforms to the federal levy going to party conference in the autumn, this is the sort of not-exactly-glamorous fixing of the party’s financial plumbing that will pay very real, if behind the scenes, benefits.

UPDATE: When reading the details, I’d assumed the new system is being introduced for the next quarter. It’s actually being introduced for the quarter we’re already part way through. It’s a fair complaint from some activists that they should have been given advanced warning so that the could plan any changes in their activity (e.g. to using the new web address), rather than having the system changed on them retrospectively for what they have already done this quarter.