Redeveloping membership with the National Autistic Society

The challenge

The National Autistic Society has a moonshot vision of a society that works for autistic people. They recognised that this is not something they can achieve alone, and so set off on a journey of exploring how their membership model could evolve to enable more people to contribute to the mission.

Our approach

We always seek to design processes that are accessible and enjoyable for those who are part of them. For this project, rather than large group workshops, we built our engagement around small group conversations and innovative text-based workshops (hosted via Discord) to create a range of opportunities for autistic people as well as autistic and non-autistic friends, supporters, carers and professionals, to come together and shape a new membership.

Through interviews, group conversations and background research, three ‘routes’ for membership were co-created and shared back with the charity’s wider audiences for further input. Through this process, supporters shared hundreds of ideas, some of which we brought through into the next phase of work. From this first phase, we produced a new membership purpose: More people supporting each other to live the lives they want - as well as a collective vision and theory of change.

Rather than redeveloping and launching an entirely new model overnight, we worked with the team to ‘prototype’ new membership products alongside members and supporters themselves. This included evolving the membership welcome journey, creating member-led self-organised spaces and equipping members to take action. We equipped the team with facilitation and design thinking skills, enabling them to test these innovations with members, reflect on their learnings and iterate further.

Impact and learning

This project reinforced our belief and expertise in designing inclusive processes. The use of Discord acted as a precursor to our more recent work in digital democracy, and offered a new way of seeing our role as facilitators.

It also taught us a lot about membership innovation within social cause organisations.

Large charities, rightly so, have large campaigning and fundraising functions. This makes sense, because charities need to raise money to fund their work, which often is about leading campaigns on the change they want to see. However, we find that membership - which serves both of these functions, whilst often sitting within fundraising teams - can get stuck in the middle.

Membership is of course a fundraising tool, but it can and should be much more than that. This is an idea that we have explored further in our recent work on the Making the Most of Membership.