đź—ş Roadmap
We boiled down all our community feature requests into four categories.
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Existing features that we need to do better job of highlighting.
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Simple & solid improvements that we can work on right now.
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Great feature ideas that we’d like to explore with you all in more depth.
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Complex ideas that might be difficult to tackle at our current size.
Existing Highlights
These features all currently exist, but we need to do a better job featuring them, helping with implementation, and surfacing industry-wide behavior to contextualize performance.
Addressing payment failures
The scourge of subscriptions everywhere! Eventually, your member's card will expire or something else will go wrong and their payment will fail. We currently send them 3 email notifications to try and get them to update their payment details.
Customizable Landing Pages
Match your brand fonts/colors! Embed your tickets and membership checkout directly into your website. White-label the whole thing to fit seamlessly into your existing site design. Same for transactional notifications like the ones above, including even sending messages from your domain. We’re creating a demo section of this very website to show this off, but you can see screenshots below.
Custom Finance Exports
You can export any custom transaction period from your payouts (like monthly, for example, for closing your books) and if the data set is too large, we’ll now send you an email with the data, so the window doesn’t time out while collating.
Offer annual discounts
You can set this up in the advanced settings of your membership tiers.
It can be a great incentive!
Store Mailing Addresses
You can do this by setting up our “subscription box” features. Let us know if this is something you need.
Track member signup source
This breakdown is automatically tracked in your performance report, but to get accurate data you need to use the various links available under the Share panel (newsletter, website, socials, etc).
Ticketing, Upgrade, and Profile are tracked automatically.
Email deliverability above industry standard
Based on your feedback, you’ll all be shocked to know that our transactional mails currently perform above industry standard, with an open rate of 57%.
When fielding support inquiries about missed notifications, it’s typically a misspelled email or someone who hasn’t sufficiently searched their inbox. Every once in a while we’ll have a sending delay, but 99.9% of the time delivery issues are simply people not searching their inbox. That said, we do have some ideas below on how to be even better!
This is the open rate for ticket receipts (the lowest performing transactional message type).
Duplicate Charge Prevention
We already have in place a system that blocks IPs from triggering multiple purchases in a browser, but in the rare someone is using a tool that blocks such safety mechanisms, we’ve now developed a monitor that more proactively flags any potential duplicate purchases.
Solid & simple ideas in progress.
We’re working on these right now, as they’re pretty straightforward to design and build, and are clearly important to you all. Thank you for helping us prioritize!
Transaction Zap
Image a 6th trigger here called New Transaction.
We currently offer the ability to stream your member and ticket-buyer data to other platforms for analysis (CRM, Airtable, Quickbooks, etc), but this only gives you so much activity detail. By adding the Transaction Export to Zapier, you can create a feed of your community’s entire behavior, like tickets purchased, discounts used, life-time-value, and more.
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Offer the ability to switch tickets between tiers / events without having to contact support@withfriends.co
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Checkout from multiple tiers without needing to do it twice
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Refine the user interface to eliminate rough edges, making the app more intuitive and attractive, thereby enhancing user experience and potentially attracting more customers.
We have a laundry list here to work through, but feel free to send us screenshots 🙂
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We’re going to work on surfacing the reports you need more easily in the dashboard and via notifications.
Great ideas to explore with you
I’ve listed my thoughts on each of these requests below. They all seem like great ideas, but expansive conceptually, and so I’d love to more explicitly define these together.
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You all wanted a lot more tools for exploring member data. I hear you. You want comprehensive, detailed, relevant, advanced, flexible, real-time, integrated, sophisticated, and diverse information in profiles, reports, insights, metrics, and various data formats. This will simplify & make accessible management, engagement, and analysis of your membership programs. These are the kinds of words you all used, and I want the same thing. We love data.
Specific examples I got were:
Complete giving history per member
Member activities (tickets, discounts)
Transaction history
Financial metrics
Calculating LTV of members
It so happens that all these examples will be available with our new Transaction Zap. If you know how to whip up a pivot table, you’ll be able to build yourself a dashboard that updates in real-time once that is live - but for those of you who find spreadsheets confusing, I’d love to help set up a custom dashboard for you with exactly the data you’re looking for.
By doing that, we can sketch out the perfect set of reports to roll out to everyone who isn’t reading this.
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We get frequent requests to make the donate-only button more prominent.
This isn’t necessarily hard to do, but based on the conversion data we see on the Join page (and when people use our Contribute shortcut to direct link to donations), we have a strongly held belief that by focusing on Memberships first, and only offering Donations second, the Event Organizer makes more money.
…but there may be design approaches we haven’t tried yet, and we’re open to innovate here.
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We strongly believe that the simplest membership programs are the most successful.
This means a short list of benefits that are easy for the member to understand, use, and take very little time for the Organizer to produce. More complex benefits can be hard for members to follow, and can make the program feel like too much work. That said, we’d love to explore more benefit ideas and see if there are any experiments we can explore here together!
We heard an idea about “Couple Memberships,” which is something The Whitney Museum here in New York offers (my wife and I actually have this membership there). Is that a good idea? You tell me.
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You all would like the ability to intervene more proactively for any lapsed payments. Currently there is a list of lapsed payees in the monthly payout report each month, but we can probably surface that better and find ways to more proactively give you that information, in case you know the member well enough to call them, or want to set up your own notifications via Zapier. Maybe we can develop ways for you to update someone’s payment details if you connect with them over the phone. Let’s talk about it.
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Withfriends is never going to be a “robust” event management system. We’re a memberships platform first, that’s what is valuable about us, and ticketing essentially functions as an automated benefit and upsell mechanism. We’re perfect for simple ticketing needs. This is why we built our integration with Eventbrite, for those with the kind of ticketing needs a public company can address.
That said, we would love to understand what are the kind of concert metrics you’d like to see. Like with member data, it’s possible that these are already achievable with the release of our Transaction Zap, and we’d love to talk with you about building out a prototype of the data you’re looking for. If it’s Solid & Simple, we can probably build it!
Complex At Scale
Finally, these are the other ideas that came up that are a bit harder for us to address with our current team size, if they really make sense for us to prioritize at all. I’ve noted my rationale or other approaches for each one, but always open to other perspectives!
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As Withfriends continues to grow, and you all put on larger events and manage larger membership programs, we need to build more robust ways of tracking page loading. Our signup rates are above industry average, but we need ways to benchmark performance so you all can be confident when an issue is the platform or an internet connection.
There are a few areas where our system is known to strain under high-traffic scenarios or across larger periods of data; ticketing scanning, payouts, and discount reporting. For payouts we resolved the functionality by having the system process data in the background and email you when it's done. For the other two scenarios this will take a much larger investment of resources or creativity to address.
This currently only affects a smaller number of organizers in an even smaller number of scenarios, but we want to be great for them as well as the majority of other users.
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As mentioned above, it isn’t entirely obvious that Withfriends has delivery issues out of scope with the rest of the internet. We use a variety of services that are designed to keep our servers friendly with the inbox giants, and will continue to work to stay on top of this quickly changing landscape (Gmail is rolling out new regulations for email deliverability as we speak).
One idea is to give you a resend button for notifications, and maybe you are cc’d when that goes out. So you can see it get delivered, and you can reply to the community member as needed. This is similar to what we have on the support side, and how I resolve inquiries, except ours is a massive inbox with every transaction message. You wouldn’t want to be cc’d on every message, so maybe we can do it on demand.
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Conceptually, I think about full CRM functionality (beyond those automated by our platform, like ticketing discounts, events attended, or shipments) as something beyond the scope of our platform. There is a world of tools for “Donor Management,” that helps you stay in touch with your biggest supporters. What makes Withfriends special is that, instead, we focus on the community members that have less to give, but are potentially worth even more in aggregate. This is the community that wouldn’t have gotten the hands-on attention your track with a CRM, and what makes us one-of-a-kind.
That said, we’d love to better understand what you all are looking for, and if it’s as valuable for the member paying $2/month as the one paying $2,000/year, then we might build it!
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At the end of the day, our job is to be the Memberships block in the incredible structure you’re organizing for your community. This is what makes us unique, so the strategy that will bring you the most value from our small team is to build integrations whenever possible.
Better to send data to Quickbooks then build competing finance software. Better to integrate with Eventbrite that rebuild a ticketing platform at that scale. Better to give you embed tools for Squarespace than develop competing website development software. Better to push member activity to Mailchimp than develop competing newsletter design software.
All of those tools are best-in-class for what they do (Finance, Marketing, Web Design), but none have tools for Events Organizers to manage Memberships, or simple methods for integrating ticketing with memberships.
We love software of all kinds, and love helping to set up systems that can give your the freedom and flexibility to excel, so keep sharing more about what the overall structure you’re organizing looks like, and we’ll help you find the most robust (or simple) set of tools for the job and make sure your memberships fit perfectly.
Thanks for reading!
You deserve an award. Thanks for all your curiosity and support. If you have any thoughts on the above, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email, give us a call, or book a meeting. We work hard because we think what you’re doing is inspiring, and we want to help you thrive however we can.
