We recently featured a post about pricing small/homebased-business chamber memberships. The question was around charging them less than main street businesses.
A similar question was asked by one of the members in our Chamber Professionals Group on Facebook concerning nonprofits. 
Nonprofits can be pretty large organizations, bigger than many for-profit businesses. There’s really very little reason to charge a nonprofit that happens to have a million dollar budget $50 a year when you are charging a small business just starting out and struggling to pay their rent $200 a year.
It seems arbitrary to me. And maybe a little insulting.
Tiered Dues Solves the Pricing Dilemma
I am not in favor of nonprofits and for-profits being charged at a different levels arbitrarily.
Don’t assume nonprofits are broke and can’t afford to invest at higher levels.
The best way to address this concern is through tiered dues, where the entity chooses the level of service it wants.
If you are working with a huge nonprofit, like the Red Cross (with a massive budget), they can come into your chamber and be involved at the highest level because they want the highest level of service.
The same goes with the smallest of nonprofits, a one-person show trying to do good. They can come in at the lowest level and still be an active part of your membership. But to charge the Red Cross and the startup nonprofit the same amount, that seems silly to me. Arbitrary.
Similarly, charging a startup small business more than the Red Cross simply because of their tax designation, seems unfair and unwise. Allow your members, without regard to their tax classification, to invest in your chamber and your community at a level that is appropriate for them.
If you can’t, or won’t, go the tiered dues route then at least remove the discount for nonprofits and base their dues as you do any other member, on the number of employees they have. To do otherwise is to force all your members to subsidize the nonprofit members (even the ones with deep wallets). Do you want to force that?
