Never hurts to peek, but it's not always obvious what the best/right thread
is either (or what terms were used to find it) so I'm happy to point you in
the right direction.

While you're looking at your numbers, I might make a couple of suggestions
based on things that I've learned over the last year and have turned up
valuable insights in our own data:

*1 - Compare membership plans to membership plans.* If you look at *all*
members, you don't get to see how churn varies depending on the membership
level. In our case, full time membership generally has the highest relative
churn compared, which I've always found fascinating.

*2 - Compare monthly cohorts. *This one is trickier to pull off without
some software to back you up. I use http://firstofficer.io which pulls
subscription data right out of Stripe automatically, always giving me up to
the minute reports including monthly snapshots, but my FAVORITE graph is
this one:


This is a retention graph, organizing retention data by the month that a
group of members joined.

Once I have a graph like this, I can look at growth patterns and then see
which months brought us members who stayed for a long time, vs months who
brought us members and were gone within 1, 3, 6, or 12 months.

*My favorite pattern: months surrounding periods where we grow fast tend to
have the worst performing long-term retention. *

Historically, those "boom" months were driven by the seasons
(January/February, August/September/October).

At the end of the day, this stuff doesn't change what we do: we still focus
on relationships between coworkers. But we can deduce that if someone joins
during a "boom" month it's possible that they're joining in exuberance and
weren't going to stick around no matter what we do...but it's also possible
that they came looking for relationships and the existing coworkers were
overwhelmed with all of the new faces and not as many of the personal bonds
that make a difference to our retention were formed.

With that information, we can make choices and be strategic. For some, we
can actively work to improve the causes for retention proactively. For
others, we can try to catch those *statistically-about-to-churn* members
and look for ways to help them get the value they might not be getting...or
at the very least, prepare better for that 3-month later churn window.

-Alex


------------------
*The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.*
Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com
Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Melissa Walford <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Should have search prior posts before posting. That helps. I will post
> additional information and questions after we take a look at our numbers.
>
> Thanks
> Melissa
>
>
> On Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 2:19:48 PM UTC-7, Alex Hillman wrote:
>>
>> Before this goes too far...there are many different and
>> not-quite-compatible ways to calculate churn and turnover. I just dug up
>> this previous thread from about 18 months ago about how difficult it is to
>> compare these rates:
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/coworking/Atp74gnKr98/F-zCvgyH79wJ
>>
>> Like we talked about in that thread, you've got to compare the same
>> things, over the same period. Are you comparing members, or revenue? Or
>> membership lifetime? Averages, over how many months? How do you handle
>> upgrades and downgrades? Tricky tricky :)
>>
>> So...what exactly are you tracking, and how are you calculating it?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------
>> *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.*
>> Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com
>> Listen to the podcast: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/podcast
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Melissa Walford <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> We are curious what other co-working spaces turnover rate is? We have
>>> month-to-month memberships at our space. We have always seen some turnover
>>> and we were wondering how it compares to other spaces.
>>>
>>> Any information would be great!
>>>
>>> Melissa
>>> Green Spaces Denver
>>>
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>>
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