Whether you closed for a renovation, a storm, a seasonal break, or something longer, reopening is the best membership sales window you will get all year. Pent-up interest is high, local press is paying attention, and former members are already thinking about you. The catch is that a closure leaves your membership data in a messy state, and selling into a messy base produces awkward conversations at the desk and wasted marketing dollars.
The work splits into two parts: clean up what the closure did to existing members, then sell to three distinct groups who each need a different pitch.
Settle the closure question before you sell anything
The first thing a lapsed member will ask is, “What about the months you were closed?” Decide your answer before reopening day, not at the register.
Common approaches:
- Extend everyone who was active during the closure by the length of the closure. Generous and simple to explain, but it pushes renewal revenue later.
- Offer an extension only on request. Less revenue shift, but it rewards the members who complain and creates inconsistent records.
- No extension, but a renewal incentive such as a bonus guest pass or a gift shop discount. Works best for short closures.
If you extend, do it in Altru on the membership records themselves rather than tracking exceptions in a spreadsheet. Build a membership query for everyone whose membership was active on the first day of the closure, review it, and update expiration dates as a group if your Altru setup supports that, or by hand with a consistent note if it does not. If you are unsure how a bulk date change will interact with your renewal rules or upcoming renewal notices, test it on a few records first or ask Blackbaud support before touching the whole list.
Split your audience into three lists
Reopening marketing fails when one message goes to everyone. Use queries to build these separately:
1. Current members
Their job is to come back and bring people. Give them first access: a members-only preview day, early reservation times if you use timed entry, or a guest pass. Do not ask them to buy anything yet. A member who visits in the first two weeks is far more likely to renew later.
2. Members who lapsed during or just before the closure
This is your highest-value list. Many of them did not choose to leave; their card simply expired while your doors were shut. Pull constituents whose membership expired in a window starting a few months before the closure and ending on reopening day. The message is “welcome back,” not “you lapsed.” If you extended active members, consider honoring the same credit for these people when they rejoin within a set period.
3. Past visitors who never joined
Ticket buyers from the year before the closure are a warm list. Pull constituents with admission revenue in that period and no membership. Lead with what is new since you reopened, then make the membership math clear: how many visits it takes to pay for itself.
Before you send to any of these lists, run a duplicate and bad-email check. Lists that sat untouched during a closure tend to have stale addresses and duplicate households, and nobody wants a returning member getting three different welcome-back emails.
Make the desk the main sales channel
Reopening crowds are your best membership prospects, and most of them are standing at admissions. A few things help:
- Credit today’s admission toward membership. “Upgrade today and we’ll apply what you paid for tickets” is the single easiest pitch for front desk staff. Decide whether you handle this as a discount at the point of sale, a refund-and-rebook, or a same-day upgrade, and confirm in a training environment exactly how your Altru daily sales setup records it so revenue and membership history come out right.
- Give staff one sentence, not a script. Something like “A family membership pays for itself in two visits, and today’s tickets count toward it” is enough.
- Retrain returning and new staff on transaction types. After a long break, people forget the difference between a renewal, a rejoin, and a new membership. Mistakes here create wrong expiration dates and break “member since” history.
- Track it. Add a source code or appeal for reopening sales so you can report on desk conversions separately from online ones.
Check your online path before the announcement goes out
Your reopening email will send a spike of traffic to your membership web forms at once. Before it goes out, buy a membership yourself on a phone, renew as a lapsed test member, and confirm the expiration dates, prices, and confirmation emails are correct. Prices and levels that were set up before the closure are easy to overlook, and an outdated level or wrong price on reopening day costs more than the time to test.
Time-box the offer
Open-ended “welcome back” offers lose urgency. Give the reopening offer a clear end date, often the first month or the first season, and say so in every message. Then plan a second touch for people who opened the first email but did not buy, and a final reminder a few days before the deadline.
Measure the right things
After the first month, look at:
- How many lapsed members rejoined, compared with the size of that list.
- New memberships sold at the desk versus online.
- Members who visited in the first weeks, since those are your strongest renewal prospects next year.
Those numbers tell you whether to push harder on the desk, the lapsed list, or the visitor list for the rest of the season.
Quick answers
Should we discount memberships to celebrate reopening?
A modest, time-limited incentive usually works better than a steep price cut, which can train members to wait for sales. Bonus guest passes or credited admission tend to protect your price.
Do we have to extend memberships for the closure?
No, but decide and publish a policy. Inconsistent case-by-case answers frustrate members more than a clear “no extension, but here is a thank-you.”
