Renewal is decided in the room, and measured in a spreadsheet that cannot see it.

The renewal question nobody can answer

Membership organisations are measured on retention, and events are the main thing membership buys. So the question that matters every year is whether a given member is getting anything out of the programme, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

What gets recorded is attendance. Attendance is a poor proxy: the member who comes to everything and speaks to nobody is on the same line of the spreadsheet as the one who found a supplier, a customer and a board contact. The first one is a cancellation waiting to happen and the data says they are your best member.

The gap is not a reporting problem, it is that the thing worth measuring happens between two people in a room and leaves no trace.

What The Gantry gives a membership team

Relationships formed, across the programme. Not per event: across your whole year. How many connections came out of your rooms, how many of them were confirmed by both people, and the proportion of approaches that were accepted.

Returning attendance and a loyal core. Who came back, how many of your attendees are at three or more of your events, how many were first-timers, and how many people in total your programme reached. These are the numbers a board wants in the retention paper and they are very hard to get any other way, because a per-event platform has no memory of the last one.

Verified attendance. QR check-in rather than a clipboard, so the no-show rate is real. Most membership organisations suspect theirs is worse than they report and would rather know.

What it gives the member

A member who can see who is coming, 14 days out, arrives with a reason to be there. Each profile leads with what someone is working on now and what they will happily be asked about, which is far more use than a name badge with a company on it.

You grant every delegate the full room in one action: 100% of the attendees rather than the 30% a free account sees, open from 14 days before until 7 days after. It costs the member nothing and it costs you nothing. Members who are already paying for Premium Membership keep what they have and you are not charged twice for them, because you are not charged at all.

The 2 approaches per event, one per person, matter more in a membership room than anywhere. Your members see each other repeatedly. A room where anyone can message everyone becomes a room where the one person selling photocopiers ruins it for the other thirty-nine.

The money

A chamber breakfast with forty people in it does not have a software budget, and the per-event licensing that dominates this market does not scale down to it. We checked what the alternatives publish: most publish nothing, and the one that does starts at €3,400 per event for an event of up to a hundred people. Against ticket revenue from forty members, that is not a decision, it is a non-starter.

The Gantry is free for event owners. Unlimited listings, delegate upload, full-room access for every attendee and the analytics, with no card and no trial that expires.

Associations and professional bodies

The same page applies, and we did not write you a separate one because it would have said the same things. A national body with branch meetings, a CPD programme and an annual conference has the identical problem: member value is produced in rooms and recorded as attendance. Branch-level and programme-level figures work the same way.

Common questions

Can we see which members are getting value from our events?

You can see it at the level that matters for renewal and not at the level that would be intrusive. Across your programme: who attended, who came back, how many relationships formed, who is in your loyal core and who came once and never returned. You cannot see who spoke to whom, or what they said, and that limit is permanent.

We run twelve events a year. Is it priced per event?

It is not priced at all. Unlimited listings, no per-event fee, no allowance to run out and no analytics subscription. A monthly breakfast costs the same as an annual conference, which is nothing.

Most of our members are not technical. Will they use it?

It is a web app reached by a link, so there is no app store download and nothing to install. When you upload your delegate list, each member gets an invitation email with a link that takes them straight into your room.

What happens to our member data?

The upload needs two columns, a name and an email address. It is used to invite them and to attach them to your event. It is not sold, not shared with other organisers, and organiser analytics never show attendee email addresses or message contents.

Related: how to measure whether an event worked, what delegate data an organiser should see, how to choose a platform, and the other kinds of room we work with.