The Member Motivations Study is an initiative of FIVESEED in collaboration with the University of Chicago's Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. The study is led by Principal Researchers, Rosie Siemer and John List.

To participate in the study, you must be a Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer and enroll here by July 31, 2025.

Enrollment takes less than 10 minutes and is currently open to US-based nonprofit museums and visitor-serving cultural organizations, including art museums, history museums and historic sites, science centers, natural history and anthropology museums, botanic gardens, arboreta, children’s museums, nature centers, zoos, and aquaria.

The Member Motivations Study™ includes two distinct phases of research:

Phase 1 focuses on “message optimization” in which we will test different value propositions, and different ways of expressing those propositions, to meet two objectives:

(1) Identify ways to strengthen each proposition by examining message elements for effectiveness in terms of attentional capture, memory salience, emotional response, and comprehension.

(2) Identify which propositions appeal most to which audiences in the context of organization type and discipline.

Phase 2 of the Member Motivations Study™ will focus on an “experimental” approach to test which value proposition is most effective in converting members, with the hypothesis that prospective members who receive a social identity framed appeal will be more likely to join than those who receive the control (transactional) appeal.

The Member Motivations Study™ will provide actionable insights for your organization. By participating, you will help us to deliver leading-edge, national research on member motivations to the broader field.

The participation fee is $14,850. This fee includes the following services and deliverables:

- $500 in incentives for survey respondents

- Survey design, programming, hosting, and implementation

- Fulfillment of incentives

- Survey analysis and reporting

- Up to 20 hours of professional Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation services, including study email and Cloud page templates, configuring of study journeys, loading of audiences, and conversion tracking

- Experimental design, implementation, analysis, and reporting.

For questions or more information about the study participation fees and billing schedules, please contact Rosie Siemer at rosie@fiveseed.com

Organizations participating in Phase 1 will be responsible for:

• Providing a contact list of nonmembers in Excel format to our data partner;

• Providing the name and email of a contact person at your organization who can verify the authenticity of the survey for any respondent with concerns;

• Providing your organization's logo, high-resolution images, and other background information as requested to support the study;

• Sending out an email to nonmembers announcing the survey;

Organizations participating in Phase 2 will be responsible for:

• Granting access to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other systems, as needed, to our implementation partner;

• Processing and fulfillment of any memberships sold during the study period;

• Providing the name and email of a contact person at your organization who can verify the authenticity of the study for any respondent with concerns;

• Supplying your organization’s logo, high-resolution images, and other background information as requested to support the study;

• Providing an email contact list of visitors, lapsed members, and other non-members as specified by the Principal Researcher;

• Tagging new members who are acquired via the study in your database with a unique identifier;

• Providing membership sales and revenue results by level and source as specified by the Principal Researcher for analysis.

Tentative Timeline*

Now—August 31, 2025: Enrollment of participating organizations.

September 2025: Onboarding. The Principal Researchers will provide detailed instructions on how to prepare to send the survey to your nonmember visitor and lapsed member lists.

October 2025: Survey deployed.

November—December 2025: Survey analysis.

January—March 2026: Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey implementation.

April 2026: Field experiment deployed.

May—August 2026: Experiment analysis and reporting.

September 2026: Study findings shared with all participating organizations.

October—December 2026: Study findings released to the broader field.

* Timeline is subject to change.

The benefits to your organization include:

- Gain a better understanding of the real reasons why people become members.

- An invitation to participate in a virtual readout to discuss the study findings with Principal Researcher, Rosie Siemer.

- Compare your results alongside peer organizations.

- First-in-line access to the study findings.

- Up to 20 hours of professional full-service implementation of the study-based Salesforce Marketing Cloud journeys and templates to use and adapt going forward—at no additional cost!

We will need some basic information about your organization such as your organization’s discipline(s), number of membership households, the name of your email marketing platform, and non-member/visitor email list size.

Yes, at this time only US-based nonprofit cultural organizations are eligible to participate.

Phase 1 of the Member Motivations Study™ will utilize a survey of your non-member visitors and lapsed members to explore messaging.

Phase 2 will utilize Salesforce Marketing Cloud to accomplish the goal of implementing a field experiment to test different membership value propositions and will also include a survey.

No. While participants can expect to have new members join due to the nature of the field experiment, the purpose of this study is to test different value propositions and better understand why people become members. The findings from this research will help cultural organizations implement more effective membership acquisition campaigns in the future.

A field experiment uses the scientific method to examine the effect of an intervention in the real world. For this study, we will be using an A/B/n test to determine which membership value proposition produces the highest clickthrough and conversion rates.

Utilizing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we will apply randomization to observe a difference between a treatment and a control group. By conducting a field experiment, the Member Motivations Study™ will help museum and cultural leaders understand what works in membership marketing, and most importantly, why.

Absolutely! We want to be sure that this research does not disrupt your planned membership/marketing activities. Our research team will work with you to determine deployment dates that fit within the study period and align with your organization’s communications calendar.

Not at this time. Due to the limitations of the study scope, all participating organizations will be required to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Each organization will be required to distribute the survey to a list of your nonmembers and lapsed members. We will provide detailed instructions for how and when to deploy the survey.

Yes, we will require a minimum number responses to generate valid findings. For more information about sample size requirements, please contact rosie@fiveseed.com

Yes! As long as your organization meets the minimum requirements for email sample size and we have a large enough cohort of participating organizations, we will provide comparisons by discipline, size, and/or admission type.

Our research team will provide all survey design, content, and creative needed for the study.

As this is a scientific study, no changes will be permitted to the survey, content, or creative to maintain consistency in messaging across all participating organizations and ensure the validity of the results.

The survey announcement is an advance notification to your email list alerting them to the upcoming invitation to participate in a survey. This announcement helps to boost response rates.

Study fees will be invoiced on September 1, 2025 with NET 30 terms.

If you would like to discuss an alternative billing schedule or payment terms, please contact rosie@fiveseed.com.

Yes! We understand that you may have budget constraints. Please contact rosie@fiveseed.com to discuss splitting the fee across two fiscal years and/or deferring payment until next fiscal year.