The national Libertarian Party’s Bylaws Committee is reporting out a proposal to increase national party annual dues from $25 to $50.
The rationale is that dues were last fixed in 2006 at $25/year, and since then there has been much inflation.
As is not noted in the motion, if prices have gone up, then contrariwise member services provided by the LNC have fallen a great deal. In particular, the monthly LP News tabloid has ceased to be published.
The rock band Radiohead sold their album Radiohead Pay What You Want online and made more then what they would have from a record label.
https://binodpanda66.medium.com/radiohead-case-study-pay-what-you-want-pwyw-strategy-622569d29ac8
I think that the LNC dues should be a minimum of $1 so you have to get your credit card out and than you enter what you think the price should be.
For context: prior to the 2006 convention, dues were set by the whim of the LNC.
I support having the amount set in the bylaws. However, context is important when discussing a proposal to increase the dues, and I doubt anyone on the Bylaws Committee will include this information in whatever report is published for delegates.
It used to cost between $8-12 a year to service a non Lifetime member (including 4-6 issues of LP News & renewal letters). Pretty profitable for a $25 return. Now consider there’s hardly any mail dropped nor LP News so it costs virtually zero to service a member for $25. So in other words as George hints the “benefits” have gone down related to the cost of membership.
The advantage of $25 is it is an easy threshold to bring folks in – then normally you would send those same folks solicitations for more money. In fact the ave member joined or renewed at about an ave of $48 just a few years ago then would give an average of about $30 a year in addition to the cost of membership. Now there was also n effort to convert these folks to monthly donors – who a few years ago gave an ave above $150+ or more annually – then they too gave additionally.
Raise dues to $50 a lot less folks will join or renew & the ave amount total you get from each active member of a year goes down. Also the number of active donors will go down. The costs in turn will go up – because for $50 folks will want something in return. . It is a self fulling prophecy of failure. But then again, that is kind of what this LNC keeps aiming for.
There really is no “national party”. Parties exist at the state level. The LNC should fund its activities solely from contributions. That would be the libertarian way.
The “members of the Libertarian Party” are the hundreds of thousands who have registered Libertarian in those states where permitted to do so. (Does anyone anywhere claim the number of Democrats are only those donating to the DNC?). Perhaps “dues” should be zero and LNC rely on “donations?”. I know the “pledge” complicates things but the other political parties manage to raise significant amounts of money withhout a pledge.
There appears to be an idea that the sole point of dues is to raise money. For a political party, this idea is mistaken. You may contrast with the Obama campaign, in which $3 was requested as a donative, because once people have made a donation the sunk cost fallacy means that the fish has usually been hooked. With electronics, for $3 you can manage sending a weekly or monthly electronic newsletter that only sometimes asks for money.
Increasing dues to match inflation isn’t the correct way to assign party dues.
The correct way is to maximize revenue less the cost of raising revenue. If that number can be maximized by reducing party dues to $1, then party dues should be dropped to $1, regardless of what inflation has done. There are three numbers that need to be taken into consideration: the price, the number of people willing to donate at a given price, and the cost of getting people to donate at a given price. Note that inflation is not one of the numbers to take into consideration. Finding that number would require experimentation or surveys and data crunching. It would take a lot more effort than just “because inflation”.
There is also some value in getting someone to donate below cost because doing so can create an emotional connection between that person and the party which can manifest in an increased likelihood of voting for the party, being an activist in the party, or increasing future donations. That’s why groups give things like student discounts. Anything below cost would have to be limited, of course, and the potential benefit analyzed. But, that would take a lot of data.
An idea whose time has come.