I look at last year’s (2024) Cougar Pride total members and it shows 3,978. I look at the current year and it shows 3,056. Have we really lost that many Cougar Pride members from just last year? The goal for 2025 was 4,500. Anyone know if that is accurate? It seems like we’d be pushing close to 3,000 based just on basketball season tickets.
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Thank you for the statistics. Just a guess but we’ve squeezed all the juice out of the basketball fruit. The opportunity is with the football program. Due to last year’s football team, it is not surprising that CP membership dropped. That is why you need a mix of individual and corporate donors. The corporate donors want to expand their brand. When the team does not win, another way to attract corporate donors is through naming rights. I think UH has done a good job with naming rights. To increase CP, UH has to create a program where the perceived benefits are greater than the donation. Giving unique access to the program attracts very few new donors, in my opinion. CP Staff needs to put on its creative thinking cap and keep trying new ways to gain membership. In the meantime, UH needs to invest in getting good players that can change the trajectory of the program upward.
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I bet the number of season ticket holders in basketball is between 1500-2000 and most of those have football tickets.
That is a huge drop off, but that’s what losing will do. If we have a good season and go to a bowl we could pick up another thousand.
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If that is accurate, that’s a pretty significant number. I wonder if the lack of 46ers contributed to that. Of course, every season ticket holder is a CP member but I assume that count isn’t by seat but by accounts. So if you get your tickets through a group managed by a friend, you wouldn’t count in that number.
I’m sure we’ll hear that some of this is due to the effort to get rid of ticket broker accounts, but CP membership levels are a huge failure on the AD.
Jobs should be in jeopardy if there’s not at least some increase every year, as that’s an integral part of growing the ticket and fan support base. Losing almost 25% should result in a house cleaning.
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Pitiful for a P4 program
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Building a fanbase has not been our friend for many, many years. We no doubt have the smallest fanbase in P4 so it is not a surprise we have fewer givers than many other schools.
Unless our football team starts becoming a playoff possibility in the near future we will continue to wallow around in mediocrity.
We have depended on the Moores and the Fertitta’s and a very few others to survive.
I will remain a Coog until the day I die, and I will go to heaven with my Coog hat on. My biggest disappointment as a Coog has been the lack of support by our alums and the general public in the city.
It has been said many times before…we need generational Cougars and we need them to be successful…
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That number of ~3000 CP members is hard for me to accept.
We had a thread about this exact issue around this time last year, and it’s pretty clear that the AD hasn’t made even a hint of progress on this.
I’d be interested in seeing some historical numbers of CP membership. My gut tells me this is close to the number we had 20 years ago.
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Does Cougar Pride have a recruiting booth at football and basketball games? I think they had a tailgate tent, but I’m thinking more of a booth to recruit new members. I have never noticed, but to be honest, I’ve never looked either.
There’s usually people trying to sell season tickets from the ticket office which have the donation portion attached, so sure that’s a recruiting angle for Cougar Pride, basically.
Every donation helps, and sure it would be nice to increase those numbers and we could do so with a lot of low dollar donors too. I just wonder if the effort/expense would get the results. I mean if all we want to do is get the numbers of donors up, it can be done but you also have to service those donors to keep them donating. I don’t know what you’d need the average donation to be in that case. I’m sure there’s an optimal target balance there.
I’m assuming more time is spent on season ticket holders, luxury seating, and then larger donors or corporate sponsorships.
Is there a limit on how many tickets an account holder can have to their name?
I feel like people with 10+ tickets to their account can be the reason why our membership is low.
Get people signed up first. Worry about retention and donations later. You absolutely cannot do anything without increasing the raw numbers.
From last year:
I think there’s something to that, though our overall season ticket number is pretty abysmal, too. If there’s a limit, I’m not aware of it.
If there are CP members with double digit tickets in their name, the AD should try to incentivize people in those ticket groups to get separate memberships. This issue isn’t that different from the ticket broker problem, but it’s a tough balance, because we certainly can’t afford to be running people off with aggressive CP and ticketing policies.
Personally, I’d focus on finding new participants in the recent graduates pool. Create a cheap membership level to get them signed up and offer incentives for increased giving from year-to-year. One of our biggest challenges is getting alumni involved after they’ve moved on after graduation - gotta keep those hooks in. 
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The young alumni who graduated from 2020+ are at the basketball games, not so much for football.
I had a group in my basketball section drop their football season tickets so they can renew for basketball as the secondary market for football is way cheaper and they just buy it on gameday.
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Yeah, this is a football and donor base issue.
How many of those 2020+ alumni are CP donors, though?
They probably donate just enough to keep their seats if I’m guessing.
I do the same too so I can’t judge.
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Cougar Pride should think about partnering with local businesses and provide its members with an annual discount booklet for restaurants, retail stores, etc. Pitch the discount booklet as saving the CP Member $XXX. That may bring in more CP Members and will be good for local businesses.
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So the tickets we buy have a seat donation price automatically attached to the payment so in a round about way , however many people buy bb and fb tickets could be considered members paying . It’s forced but doesn’t it count or no?
Ex if we sell 20k fb tickets , they are paying cougar pride
Each ticket does not have an individual CP member attached.
As long as you don’t run off any season ticket holders doing that, then what you get is more Cougar Pride members, no net change in donated dollars, but that’s additional people you have to service annually. Now, I don’t know how many groups there are of 10+ tickets either. I guess if you’ve got a couple families of four all grouped together, it might be easier to convince them to break up the group. If you’ve got one person who’s got 10 tickets, and the group is 2-1-1-1-3-2 as far as the split, well, that’s different as well.
Of course, then some people will not like that because the one person with the account gets the benefit of the combined CP donations.
Agreed, for long term future, converting the new alumni into season ticket holders and keeping them is going to do way more than making people in groups split their tickets just to increase the donor count.
I get, the idea if we have a higher donor count should = higher total donations, which is the ultimate goal, I think there could be some ways to increase donor count (such as splitting up groups) that could lead to diminishing returns.
Anyone know how any other schools manage (non-corporate/non-luxury suite) group ticket buyers lke that? If there was a way to manage them so that the benefits of being in a group (one person is managing it so others don’t have to, easier to trade tickets if someone isn’t going to go to a game, etc) aren’t lost but still handled individually, it might be something more to look at. Though right now, I’m not sure if we want to make changes to what seems to already be a fragile season ticket base (at least for football, basketball is obviously more solid).