Coalitions: One Membership, Several Independent Venues

A membership to one café is a card almost nobody carries. A membership to eight good places within walking distance is something a person uses weekly and tells their friends about.

That is the whole argument for a coalition, and it is a structural one rather than a marketing one: the value of a membership to a customer scales with how often they can use it, and no single independent venue is visited often enough to clear the bar on its own.

Who it is for

Groups of independent venues that make sense together — a handful of places in one town, a street, a neighbourhood, or a set of businesses with an overlapping but not identical crowd.

It is specifically not for a chain. A chain already has one owner and can run a normal membership across its own locations. A coalition exists because the venues are independent and would otherwise have to trust each other with money.

How the money works

This is the part that makes or breaks the idea, and it is the reason most informal versions of this collapse within a year.

Settlement follows usage. A member who takes most of their benefit at one venue generates most of the settlement for that venue. Nobody is dividing a pot evenly and nobody is subsidising the busiest member of the group.

The informal version — everybody honours everybody's card and it all comes out in the wash — does not come out in the wash. One venue always ends up carrying more of it, works that out eventually, and leaves. Making settlement automatic and based on actual usage is what lets a group of independent businesses cooperate without it becoming a dispute about who owes whom.

Offer different things

The instinct is to standardise: everybody gives 10%, it is simple, it is fair.

It is also the weakest version. A membership that is the same discount everywhere is a discount card, and a discount card is a race to make the number bigger. A membership where the café gives a coffee, the wine bar gives a glass on arrival, the bakery gives a loaf on Saturdays and the restaurant gives priority booking is a collection of reasons to go somewhere, which is a different product.

It is also better for you individually, because you choose a benefit that suits your margins rather than one imposed by the group.

Keep it small on purpose

A coalition of everybody in a town is a loyalty scheme, and it will feel like one.

The ones that work are deliberately curated: venues that a particular kind of person would plausibly use in the same week, with enough variety that the membership covers a range of occasions and few enough members that being in it means something. Six good places beats twenty indifferent ones, both for the customer and for the venues.

You can still run your own

A coalition does not replace a membership of your own, and plenty of venues run both.

Your own membership is for the regulars who come to you specifically — the people whose habit is your venue rather than the neighbourhood. The coalition is for the wider group who would not have joined a single-venue scheme at all. They are different customers, and the second group is people you would not otherwise have reached.

Getting one started

The hard part is not the software, it is the first conversation.

What works: one venue does the organising, picks four or five others it already has a relationship with, and proposes something specific — a price, a benefit from each, and a start date. What does not work is proposing the concept and asking everybody what they think, because a coalition with six equal founders and no proposal on the table takes four months to not happen.

The second practical point is that everybody needs to agree the membership is worth having at the price before anybody worries about the split. Settlement being automatic removes the argument people expect to have, so it is worth saying early: nobody is trusting anybody with money.

What it costs

• 8% of what members pay, the same as any membership

No extra charge for the coalition being shared, no platform fee for organising one, and nothing if nobody joins.

A worked example

Six independent venues in one town — two cafés, a wine bar, a bakery, a restaurant and a deli — run a €25 a month membership.

Each offers something different: a coffee a day at the cafés, a glass of wine on arrival, a loaf on Saturdays, priority booking at the restaurant, 10% at the deli. Ninety people join.

That is €2,250 a month across the group, settled to each venue according to where members actually used it. More usefully, it is ninety people with a standing reason to choose one of six specific places over whatever else is nearby — and the venue that gets a visit is the one whose benefit suited the occasion, which is a fair allocation by construction.

What it connects to

• Run a venue membership — the single-venue version, and the place to start
• Run a loyalty programme — free, and a better first step than a paid membership
• Run restaurant promotions — which can be made members-only
• Refer a venue to Mosey — how the other venues get here
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page