The renewal that failed on the day was rarely the member’s fault

When a renewal fails on the day, the member usually gets the blame. They forgot. They let the card lapse. They never opened the email. Look closely at a season’s worth of failed renewals and a different picture emerges: most were avoidable, and the avoidable part sat with the society’s systems, not the member. If your committee is about to review autumn renewals, this is the lens to bring.

“Forgot to renew” is a system failure wearing a member’s name

Marketing General Incorporated, a US agency that runs an annual benchmarking survey of associations, asks executives why members do not renew. In the 2024 edition, drawn from 696 associations, “forgot to renew” was the third most common answer at 29 per cent overall and 36 per cent for individual membership organisations, behind only lack of engagement and lack of value [1]. MGI’s commentary on the 2026 edition says the survey has “consistently identified ‘forgot to renew’ as a key reason” [2]. The same research shows first-year members renewing at a median rate about ten points below the membership as a whole [1][2].

Take the word “forgot” seriously and it tells you something uncomfortable: a member who intended to renew and did not is a member whose renewal journey had a hole in it. We see the same handful of holes everywhere.

The card that expired in July

A saved card is only as good as its expiry date. Stripe lists insufficient funds, incorrect card data and suspected fraud among the most common reasons an issuer refuses a payment, and notes that issuers categorise most declines as generic, so the exact reason is often unclear [3]. Adyen’s list is similar, with “Expired Card” and “Not enough balance” sitting alongside a plain “Refused” that carries no further explanation [4].

The expired-card problem has a partial fix many societies do not know they already have. Visa and Mastercard operate account updater services that pass a replacement card’s new expiry date or number to the payment provider, so a stored card can keep working after the physical card is reissued [5][6]. Stripe describes this as widely supported for cards issued in the United States and variable elsewhere [5]; Adyen’s real-time variant retries the payment immediately with the updated details [6]. For an international society, some members’ cards will update themselves and others will not, and you cannot tell in advance which [5]. So a reminder asking members to check their saved card before renewal is not redundant. It catches the ones the networks miss.

The payment the bank wanted to double-check

If your members are in the UK or the European Economic Area, a renewal charged to a saved card while the member is absent can be refused because the issuer wants the cardholder to authenticate. In the UK this sits under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 and the related technical standards on Strong Customer Authentication, which the Financial Conduct Authority says have applied since 14 September 2019 [7]. Stripe’s guidance is blunt about the practical effect: exemptions for merchant-initiated payments “aren’t guaranteed, and off-session payments might still require authentication by the bank” [8]. Adyen reports the same outcome as a specific refusal reason, “Authentication required” [4]. You cannot stop a bank asking. You can make sure the failed charge produces an email with a link straight to a page where the member can approve it, rather than a generic “payment failed” notice.

The reminder that went to an address that no longer exists

Academic members change institutions, and the institutional email they joined with stops working the week they leave. Your reminder, receipt and password reset all go to an inbox nobody reads. ORCID, which exists to track researchers across exactly these moves, tells registrants using an institutional address as their primary email to add a personal one as backup so they “can still use your ORCID record if you lose access to your primary email” [9]. A society should take the same precaution: ask for a second address at joining, and treat a hard bounce on a renewal reminder as a trigger to message the other one.

The login nobody remembers

In our experience, many members touch the society’s website once a year, at renewal. Expecting them to remember a password set twelve months ago is optimistic, and the W3C has now said so in a standard. WCAG 2.2 success criterion 3.3.8, Accessible Authentication (Minimum), at Level AA, requires that a “cognitive function test (such as remembering a password or solving a puzzle)” is not the only route through any step of authentication; its guidance states that “remembering a site-specific password is a cognitive function test” [10][11]. A one-time link sent to a known email address satisfies the criterion and, in our experience, removes the commonest reason members abandon a renewal halfway. If your renewal page still greets a member with a login box and nothing else, change that first.

We made the same argument recently about congress registration.

The receipt the finance office will not accept

Some of your members pay from a department budget, a grant or a research centre rather than their own pocket. Those payments fail differently. The member is willing; the institution’s process is not. A finance office may need an invoice addressed to the university before anything is paid, a purchase order number on the receipt, or a document naming the member and the membership period. Whether a formal tax invoice is required depends on your country and your society’s tax status, so ask your treasurer or accountant rather than assuming.

The fix is structural, not clerical. Offer an “invoice my institution” path at renewal that generates the document on request and holds the membership active while payment works its way through. A renewal that fails because a volunteer treasurer had to hand-type an invoice three weeks later is a design failure, and one that recurs every year.

Retry first, then ask

Many card declines are recoverable [12]. The major payment providers will retry a failed subscription charge automatically: Stripe’s Smart Retries schedules attempts over a window you choose, with a recommended default of eight tries within two weeks, and the card networks limit how often a single charge may be reattempted [3][12]. Adyen’s Auto Rescue does the equivalent, retrying within a rescue window and stopping where a decline is permanent, such as a closed account [13]. Some declines cannot be retried at all: Stripe lists lost or stolen cards, an incorrect number and a requirement to authenticate among the hard declines that need a new payment method first [12].

That gives you the shape of a sensible sequence. Retry quietly first. If the decline is hard, or the retries run out, send the member a short message saying what happened with one link to fix it. Keep the membership active for a defined grace period while that plays out, and minute the length of that period so the next treasurer does not have to guess.

Before your next committee meeting

If you followed the six-week plan we set out in August, this is the audit that follows it. Pull the list of renewals that failed in the past twelve months and sort them by cause: card declined, authentication required, email bounced, member never logged in, institutional payment pending. Most of the volume will sit in two or three buckets, and each has a fix you can approve in a single meeting. The two-year treasurer test applies too: if the only person who knows how a failed renewal is chased is about to step down, write it down now.

For what it is worth, Membersites runs renewals as automated workflows against the member’s saved payment details, with reminder sequences, automated receipts and a self-service portal where a member can update their own card, email address and institution without asking anyone. If you would like to compare notes on how your renewal journey is behaving, we are happy to have that conversation.

References

1. Marketing General Incorporated. 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report. Marketing General Incorporated, 2024 (copy hosted by the Association for Research in Otolaryngology). https://aro.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The_2024_Membership_Marketing_Benchmarking_Report.pdf. Accessed 12 October 2026.
2. Rossell, Tony. Why People Join, Renew, and Leave: A Behavioral Approach to Membership Marketing. Membership Marketing Blog (Marketing General Incorporated), August 2026. https://membershipmarketing.blogspot.com/2026/08/why-people-join-renew-and-leave.html. Accessed 12 October 2026.
3. Stripe. Card declines. Stripe Documentation, n.d. https://docs.stripe.com/declines/card. Accessed 12 October 2026.
4. Adyen. Refusal reasons. Adyen Documentation, n.d. https://docs.adyen.com/development-resources/refusal-reasons/. Accessed 12 October 2026.
5. Stripe. How cards work: Automatic card updates. Stripe Documentation, n.d. https://docs.stripe.com/payments/cards/overview. Accessed 12 October 2026.
6. Adyen. Account Updater; Real Time Account Updater. Adyen Documentation, n.d. https://docs.adyen.com/online-payments/account-updater and https://docs.adyen.com/online-payments/account-updater/real-time-account-updater. Accessed 12 October 2026.
7. Financial Conduct Authority. Strong customer authentication. FCA, n.d. https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication. Accessed 12 October 2026.
8. Stripe. Strong Customer Authentication readiness. Stripe Documentation, n.d. https://docs.stripe.com/strong-customer-authentication. Accessed 12 October 2026.
9. ORCID. How do I register for an ORCID ID? ORCID Support, n.d. https://support.orcid.org/hc/articles/360006897454. Accessed 12 October 2026.
10. W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Success Criterion 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum). W3C Recommendation, 2023. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#accessible-authentication-minimum. Accessed 12 October 2026.
11. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Understanding Success Criterion 3.3.8: Accessible Authentication (Minimum). W3C WAI, n.d. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/accessible-authentication-minimum.html. Accessed 12 October 2026.
12. Stripe. Automate payment retries (Smart Retries). Stripe Documentation, n.d. https://docs.stripe.com/billing/revenue-recovery/smart-retries. Accessed 12 October 2026.
13. Adyen. Auto Rescue. Adyen Documentation, n.d. https://docs.adyen.com/online-payments/auto-rescue/. Accessed 12 October 2026.