Your Opera Has Fans. Does It Have Members?

A membership website for an arts organization is a WordPress site that turns your audience, donors and fans into logged-in, recurring members with their own pricing, content and renewals, and we build them on WordPress and MemberPress. It replaces the spreadsheet, the ticketing export and the donor database that currently don’t talk to each other.

Every opera has a third act where the plot you thought you were watching falls apart. For a lot of arts organizations, that third act is the membership list. Somebody asks “how many of our subscribers also gave last year?” and three people open three different tools and come back with three different numbers.

I’m a web guy, not a development director, so take the money side of this with a grain of salt. But I’ve sat in enough of these conversations to know the website is usually where the patchwork shows.

The patchwork problem

If you already have something, it probably looks like this: a ticketing system that knows who bought seats, a donor database that knows who gave, an email tool that knows who opens things, and a website that knows nothing about any of them. Maybe there’s an old membership plugin somebody installed in 2017 and nobody dares update.

If you’re starting from nothing, you have the opposite problem. You have a mailing list, a donate button and a lot of goodwill, but no way for a person to say “yes, I’m in, here’s my card” and have the site remember them.

Either way, the fix is the same idea: one place where a member exists as a member. They log in, the site knows what they’ve paid for, and what they see changes to match.

Why recurring members, not just ticket buyers

Here’s the part where I stay in my lane and point at people who study this for a living.

SMU DataArts, which tracks financial data for arts and cultural nonprofits, reports that organizations in the sector remain more dependent on contributed revenue (gifts, grants, sponsorship) than on earned revenue like tickets and membership fees. That’s a lot of weight sitting on a few funders and a few good seasons.

And giving itself leaks. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which benchmarks donor behavior across the nonprofit sector, put overall donor retention at 42% for 2023. That’s all nonprofits, not just arts groups, so don’t read it as your number. But it tells you what a typical donor relationship looks like when nothing is keeping it warm.

A membership is the thing that keeps it warm. It’s a small, predictable payment that renews on a schedule, tied to a reason to come back: early access, a recording, a rehearsal, a thank-you that arrives before the next ask. Single-ticket sales swing with the season and the weather. A base of members smooths that out, and every member is someone you can invite to give more.

What the platform actually is

We build these on WordPress with MemberPress, and we have a service page and a MemberPress expert page if you want the formal pitch. We also compared it against six alternatives in our membership builder roundup, including Paid Memberships Pro, which is a good pick for tight-budget nonprofits.

Here’s what MemberPress does that matters for this kind of organization, per its own feature list:

• Multiple membership levels, with groups that handle upgrades and downgrades between them
• Recurring billing through Stripe and PayPal
• Access rules that restrict pages, posts, categories and files by membership
• Drip content and timed access, including expiration
• Coupons for promotions
• Gifting, as an add-on, for “give the gift of membership” campaigns
• Corporate Accounts, so one organization can buy memberships and manage sub-accounts
• Member profiles, directories and forums (their ClubSuite add-ons)
• Integrations with ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Zapier

It also has reminder emails you can trigger before a subscription renews or after it expires, which is most of what “renewals” means in practice.

The arts-specific pieces

MemberPress is the engine. The arts stuff is what we wire around it.

Member-only content. Livestream archives, program notes, rehearsal clips, artist interviews, education material for teachers. Access rules decide who sees what, and drip rules can release a season’s worth of content over time.

Ticketing. MemberPress doesn’t sell tickets, and I wouldn’t ask it to. Your box office system stays the box office. What we build is the connection: members see their pricing and early-access windows on the site, and the first question we ask your ticketing vendor is whether there’s an API or a login hand-off we can use.

Donor and CRM data. Membership status, renewal dates and engagement should land in whatever you use for email and fundraising, so the people on your development team aren’t working from a stale export. We covered how that looks in practice on a membership we rebuilt around engagement scoring (a sound healing library, not an opera, but the ActiveCampaign and WP Fusion plumbing is the same idea).

Directories, for associations. If your members are other people and organizations (a regional arts alliance, a guild, a chorus network), a searchable member directory is often the reason they join at all.

Accessibility. Captions on member video, readable contrast, keyboard navigation. For arts audiences, plenty of whom are older, this isn’t optional.

Already have a system? Don’t burn it down

The scary version of this project is “export everything, rebuild everything, hope.” It doesn’t have to go that way.

Start by listing what works. Maybe your ticketing system is great and just needs a better front door. Maybe your payment processor already holds the recurring cards, and moving those cleanly matters more than anything else. Members who get billed twice, or not at all, don’t write you a nice note about it.

Then we map the old membership levels to new ones, import the member records, carry over renewal dates and move the recurring payments with as little disruption as the payment processor allows. Anything that works stays. Anything that’s duct tape goes.

Keeping the site healthy afterward matters more than people think. A member login that breaks the week before the season announcement is a bad week, which is why we pair these with maintenance and, where it makes sense, automation for renewals and reminders.

What should you actually offer?

Here are five tiers that tend to work for performing and visual arts organizations. The price ranges are illustrative, meant to give you a starting shape, not industry benchmarks. Your audience, your city and your costs set the real numbers.

• Digital Member (about $5 to $15 a month). Streaming access, archived performances, program notes. Good for people who live far away or can’t attend often.
• Friend (about $60 to $150 a year). Member pricing, early access to ticket sales, behind-the-scenes email, and a reason to feel part of it.
• Patron (about $250 to $1,000 or more a year). Everything above, plus open rehearsals, previews, meet-the-artist events and recognition. Fewer people, much higher value.
• Student or Young Professional (about $15 to $40 a year). Low price, same access to member pricing. These are your future Patrons, so treat them like it.
• Institutional or Corporate (about $500 to $5,000 or more a year). Bulk memberships for a company, school or association, with sub-accounts for the team. This is what Corporate Accounts is for.

Add a gift option around the holidays, and you’ve got a campaign that costs you almost nothing to run.

A word of caution: start with three tiers, not five. It’s easier to add a level later than to explain to people why there are so many.

Where to start

If you’re sitting on a patchwork, tell us what you have and what’s driving you nuts. If you’re starting fresh, tell us who you want as members and what you’d give them. Either way, start here or book a call. No pitch deck required.

What would your members get that they can’t get as a regular ticket buyer? If you can answer that in one sentence, you’re already most of the way there.