The Game of Membership

At Hart Square's last company day of the year, last Friday, we played "The Game of Membership" for the first time. I have been developing the game over the last 6-months, on the basis that as a practice of Business Change Consultants, working with membership organisations, we all have a deep intellectual understanding of how they work, but little direct experience of applying that knowledge. To put it another way, whilst we have all written functional requirements for membership systems, none of us have experienced the frustration of managing an event and having lapsed members sign-up, or the anxiety of the annual renewals process. The game was therefore designed to deepen our collective empathy for membership clients, and help us gain some experiential insights.

The game imagines a fictional membership organisation - The National Association of Tractor Enthusiasts (NATE), and positions the players into key roles: Head of Finance, Head of Membership, Head of Events and Head of Member Communications. Players cooperate to run their organisation, running a programme of events and communications campaigns aimed at making their members happy to ensure that they renew their membership and help recruit new members by word of mouth. We played the game with three teams in parallel, with bragging rights going to the team that had the most members at the end of the game.

I'll leave my colleagues to comment below to say how they found the game, but watching on as the facilitator it was fascinating to hear teams getting a new perspective on familiar processes like finance and member comms, as well as seeing the range of strategies employed and the successes (or failures) that were created!

Thanks to Alan Perestrello for supporting me to develop the game, and for the whole Hart Square team for embracing the game. If you are reading this and think you or your team would benefit from greater empathy for your colleagues or clients then do get in contact myself, Alan or Joyce Harmon !