School Literacy Network: Making renewal something that just happens

Sector: charity-led education, membership site

School Literacy Network offers tiered memberships (Basic, Essential, Premium), supporting teachers and school leaders with classroom resources, training, and expertise. Like a lot of growing membership organisations, their focus is on the content itself, not the systems behind it.

The challenge

As membership grew, the emails behind it hadn’t kept up. Renewal reminders were running on WooCommerce’s default setup; the same message regardless of the tier. Onboarding and re-engagement were partly handled via Mailchimp automation; new members and long-standing members received an identical “welcome!” email. There was no way to flex reminders around a price change, or to reach members who’d quietly lapsed.

None of this was down to bad decisions. It’s what happens when a small team is focused on the work that matters most to its members, and the systems underneath are left running on autopilot.

What changed

Onboarding now branches by tier. Basic, Essential and Premium members each get their own version of a single automated journey instead of three disconnected sequences. It only fires for genuinely new sign-ups, so renewing members are no longer getting a “welcome!” email years into their membership.

An evergreen renewal sequence starts 42 days before each person’s individual renewal date, giving enough time to act, including for members who need sign-off from someone else, or who simply miss the first reminder. If it runs its course with no action, the account moves automatically into a dedicated win-back sequence: a last push before it’s downgraded or scheduled for deletion, recovering accounts that would otherwise have been written off for good.

The price increase needed a different kind of workflow: a one-off campaign that ran alongside the evergreen sequence rather than replacing it. It combined three static emails sent to all clients with a triggered sequence built around each member’s own renewal date. That triggered sequence phased out as the standard renewal automation came fully online, so for a window the two ran in parallel; members renewing well before the deadline saw more of the incentive sequence than those renewing just after, who got a mix of both, while anyone renewing later only ever saw the generic renewal journey.

The free tier changed too. Rather than handing new sign-ups a fixed set of five resources, free members now earn credit to spend across a growing library; choosing what’s actually useful to them, and coming back for more instead of using their five picks and drifting off. Renewing annually (even at no cost) is what keeps that credit topped up, which gives SLN something valuable in return: a live signal of who’s genuinely engaged and worth nurturing toward a paid tier, on a library that only grows; nothing ever needs replacing, so far less admin than managing fixed allocations by hand.

Underneath all of it sits a tagging system that tracks exactly where each member is; new, renewing, lapsed, free, paid, so SLN can pull a precise segment at any moment and run a targeted campaign against it, instead of messaging the whole list the same way.

The results

Onboarding engagement jumped once it reached only new members, and became a true welcome journey:

Worth noting: the old figures reflect a sequence that was firing for new members as well as renewing ones. So not a reflection of the content itself.

• Paid-tier renewal has held at 77% overall since January, with the price increase campaign doing a lot of the early lifting on it.
• The evergreen renewal sequence took over from April, and in its first three months alone it’s already converted 24 of the 64 members it’s reached directly (37.5%).
• Win-back, live from the same time, recovered members who’d otherwise have lapsed for good: of 14 accounts contacted, 5 came back (4 through standard renewal, 1 via a coupon incentive).

The takeaway

None of this required cleverer copy. It required paying attention to timing; reminding people at the right moment, not too often, not too rarely, and building the plumbing so that happens automatically, whether it’s someone’s first renewal or their fifth.

It is not the most glamorous work, but it’s the difference between a membership that leaks quietly at the edges and one that holds.