Keeping your members engaged and interested in your association can be challenging. You’re so busy managing dues, the website and your other admin duties that engagement strategies can fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, decreased engagement can often spiral into decreased membership. To up your efforts and strengthen your overall membership, try these 4 tactics to improve engagement.
Targeted Engagement
Your association likely has multiple verticals based on profession, age, interests and more. Considering this, it’s important to create a strategy that encompasses all types of members. Diversify your messaging to appeal to a range of personalities, needs, and interests. Share content across multiple social media platforms so you know you’re reaching each group within your association. This kind of targeted approach will yield much more engagement and let your members know you care.
Offer More Education Opportunities
One of the main reasons members join an association is to further their education. Delight members by offering frequent training or courses for members to develop their skills in the industry. Encourage internal discussion and learning by creating discussion boards specific to certain courses. Pose a question on the board and offer an incentive for members to participate.
Similar to our point above, be certain to offer courses that appeal to all segments of your group. Think about teaching styles, classroom environment, the technology involved and how members will interact with one another.
Social Media Groups
Though many AMS systems come with a group function where members can share documents, calendars and have discussions, creating a group on Facebook or Linkedin is a great way to further connect your members. They can post pictures and have a live stream of statuses and conversations with other members. Link to social groups directly from the member portal for ease of use.
Always Use Personalization
Personalizing your emails, messaging and marketing content is kind of a no-brainer these days. With marketing automation and merge fields, it’s actually pretty easy too. Even if members are used to this treatment, it’s still appreciated and makes them feel like less of a number and more like a real person. Even something as small as using a members name can truly make a difference in engagement levels.
