Another important angle to consider is visibility.
There are a lot of active users and contributors who have no idea the Membership program exists. I find this comes up a lot with newer faces in the community. It was a major contributing factor as to why we added the Membership content over on Ubuntu Community | Membership and added it into our conference materials.
In my view, it’s a really vital part of the contributor journey. We need to show how you can go from a passionate user → to a contributor → to a member → to sitting on a council where you can help shape the future of the project.
I too see a lot of misunderstanding as to what constitutes as “sustained contributions”. I mentioned in a call with the forums folks the other day that we need to shine a brighter light on non-dev work and the non-code contributors in the community. Their work is just as valuable and they deserve to be rewarded with membership for their valued contributions.
I would love to put our heads together on some ways that we can really spotlight the Membership program and get the word out. Perhaps some blog posts or occasional spotlights of existing members and their Ubuntu journey.