Should you start a digital membership?
How realistic is it to monetise digital content in the culture sector? Caroline Schreiber, Rambert’s Director of Audiences, shares what the company has learned from building Rambert Plus
Happy 2026, Cultural Content friends! I know – you’re full of beans (coffee beans?) and just itching to start a large digital project. Well, you’re at your laptop anyway. Good job.
Here come two big ideas to get you started. Firstly, in case you *weren’t* thinking about strategy (sorry WHAT) in December, check out Mike Keating’s great piece on whether you need one. Maybe you’ve got 2026 covered without one? Or maybe you don’t.
Today, we’re talking about an aspiration that’s been the buzz of the sector since Covid – subscription. According to our data, roughly half the sector is exploring monetisation of content (more on that in Cultural Content Report, coming soon). The Tank Museum and NT at Home provide working examples across museums and the performing arts – so can online content become a viable and sustainable part of the culture business model?
Today’s guest post offers a case study of building a digital product in the arts – Rambert Plus. In a summary of the talk she gave at our recent event, One Further Sessions, Rambert’s Director of Audiences, Caroline Schreiber, shares her experience of developing the dance company’s “fandom”.
Caroline’s refreshingly honest take also includes some helpful considerations at the end, if you’re exploring this sort of initiative. If you are, we’d love to hear about it. Here’s Caroline.
I want to talk about a digital project that began with the promise of commercial scale – and ended up becoming something far more valuable to us: a powerful engine for fandom, loyalty and genuine two-way connection.
Let me tell you how Rambert Plus evolved from a Covid-era experiment into one of the most meaningful relationship-builders we’ve ever had.
The data problem every touring company has
There’s this brilliant 2013 quote from John Holmes at English Touring Opera that perfectly stands the test of time and captures the frustration:
“For touring companies, audience data is the topic guaranteed to start arguments, set pulses racing and see marketing managers throw metaphorical plates against the wall”.
He’s absolutely right. When you’re a touring company, you’re entirely dependent on venues sharing their data with you.
We’d show up somewhere, perform and unless audience members ticked that little consent box, we’d never be able to reach them again. We had no direct relationship with most of the people who saw Rambert’s performances.
Creating a new digital product
We noticed something interesting with our in-person dance classes. When our dancers went away on tour, and other teachers filled in, class attendance would drop significantly. People really wanted to be taught by our dancers specifically. Maybe, we thought, we could meet that need online.
We began experimenting – and then the pandemic hit. While other organisations scrambled, we already had dancers teaching from their homes – and people loved it. Every Monday, new classes. They were all free at that point, but the engagement was immediate and real.
How we secured buy-in and funding
That proof of concept opened doors. We raised money through the Innovate fund and turned our scrappy pandemic solution into something polished. Then, more funding through ACE’s Cultural Recovery let us invest in high-quality live streaming. To access those streams, people had to register as free members – and suddenly we had 6,000 email addresses from willing, interested people.
To get another round of funding, we shot for the moon: a new platform, 4,500 subscribers within three years, contributing 10% of the company’s turnover in 3 years. The logic made sense. We had proof of concept, clear demand and a scalable product.
Optimising with learnings from SaaS (Software as a Service)
Borrowing from SaaS methodologies genuinely helped. We looked at average customer lifecycle, churn rates and cost of acquisition to adjust budgets and paid campaigns and mapped out our sales journey funnel – discovering where people were abandoning the sign-up process.
With that knowledge, we were able to make small, targeted changes (looking at first-in-class fitness app designs) and redesigning our landing page, which significantly reduced abandonment rate by nearly 20%.
The cold hard truth about this business model
Fast forward to now: we have roughly 25,000 free members and 500 paying subscribers.
Here’s what I learned about sitting at the intersection of three very different worlds – tech, arts and audiences. Fitness apps typically lose about 70% of their subscribers, and they manage that by working at speed with capital investment and constant iteration.
Some organisations – with different audiences, scale and resourcing – have built genuinely sustainable digital products – but for Rambert, the reality of our particular model and market means that we lose about 80% of our subscribers, and have limited investment, team or product development resources.
That means constantly feeding a very leaky funnel.
In short, we can only optimise so much, so this is as good as it gets with our current resources and business model.
The real value isn’t revenue
So why do we keep going? Because we’ve realised that the value is relational, not financial.
Data, to start with, is readily available. We can see what people engage with on our platform, how long they have been with us, what they consume, like and attend all in one place, we practically know them by name. And when we write copy for social, emails, shows, we know what will land and resonate.
Our email open rates are 65-75%. In my experience, that’s pretty much unheard of. Click rates are nearly 5%. Bounce and unsubscribe rates are basically 0%.
People actually want to hear from us. Some even respond to our marketing emails, others send handwritten thank-you notes. Many share their fandom on social media.
We hear from members like Wawa: “Rambert Plus gives me the chance to try new classes with ease, and I feel more connected to the community.”
Or Lee: “Rambert Plus is the best online dance studio I’ve found (after searching long and hard!). It’s relaxed, accessible, and inclusive.”
This is content that has created a relationship. It really matters to people.
Digital membership as a relationship engine
As it stands, Rambert Plus doesn’t drive direct revenue – it drives fandom. We see the platform as:
A relationship engine
A data laboratory
A pipeline builder
A trust builder
A loyalty generator
We now have direct access to 25,000+ people who’ve told us they’re interested in what we do. We can test ideas, learn what resonates and build genuine loyalty before we ever ask them to buy a ticket.
Questions to consider before launching a digital membership
If you’re thinking about something similar, here’s what you might ask yourself:
What’s your organisation’s appetite for innovation? Are you actually ready for this?
What’s the minimum viable product you could build to test demand, show proof of concept and build momentum?
What are you really hoping to gain? Is it revenue or relationships?
What forces in your organisation will accelerate or slow this down? Consider your market, demand, organisational culture and financial landscape.
I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment below.