Member retention is the lifeblood of your association and it’s vital that association members find value in their membership. It’s also key that members feel they’re getting their money’s worth. One of the fundamental ways of achieving good member retention is by engaging your members. Engagement reminds members of your value proposition and allows them to feel as though their voice is being heard. Let’s take a closer look at how effective membership strategies are built.
What is member engagement?
In the broadest sense, member engagement is the effort your association makes to reach out to members, and their response to that effort. How this is defined depends largely on the association and its goals. Engagement for one association may mean members attending in-person events. For another, it may be defined by the number of members who take part in an online learning portal. Regardless of the metric used, member engagement is about getting members to interact with the association, so its value is more clear.
Why is member engagement important?
Very few people are willing to continue paying for something that they feel they are getting no value from. Building a member engagement strategy gets people regularly interacting with what they are paying money for. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement that keeps members wanting to keep paying you dues while also providing them with value in return. In many cases, the types of activity used to drive member engagement can also help to foster a sense of community within the membership.
How to build a member engagement strategy
Now that we’ve defined what membership engagement is, and why it’s important, let’s take a look at the best practices for building a membership engagement strategy.
Understand Your Key Personas
Personas are like fictional characters that represent a typical member. An association may have more than one type of member, but it’s usually possible to distill a membership base down to just a few personas. By meeting with members and asking them what they find valuable about your association, you can get a feel for the types of demographics and personalities that make up your membership.
By examining the activities of your best members, you have a blueprint for what makes you successful with those personalities and demographics. Look at the types of events they attend, the content they consume, and the networking or educational opportunities they pursue. Try to bake these discoveries into your membership engagement strategy.
Now is also a good time to see what types of engagement strategies the competition is using, to see if any of them could be useful for your association.
Identify Your Key Value Proposition
Your association’s key value proposition is what makes it stand out from the crowd. A trade association may focus on providing stellar continuing education resources, or on providing access to job opportunities. Your key value proposition should be something that your association does really well, but it should also be something that your key personas value. By figuring out what your personas value most about your association, you’ll be well on track to discover, and refine, your key value proposition.
Define Your Member Benefits
Your key value proposition is the thing you do best. The thing that solves your members’ biggest pain point. But it shouldn’t be the only thing your association does. The next step in communicating your worth to members, and driving engagement, is to define all of the benefits your association provides them with. This could be educational resources, networking opportunities, job opportunities, special events, and more. Here, too, information learned from creating your key personas can help guide you on which benefits to focus the most on.
Work Backwards to Set SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based. By setting goals with these criteria, you’ll easily be able to track how well you are meeting them. For example, you may set a goal to increase event attendance by 25% over the next six months or to improve member referrals by 10% over the next three months. Setting such goals will help you refine the types of engagement activities you want to implement.
After you’ve set your goals, you need an effective way to track them. Tools like Google’s DataStudio provide you with the analytics and dashboard you’ll need to easily see how well you are meeting your goals.
Make Member Onboarding Easy
There are two very important aspects to successful onboarding. The first, and most important, is that the process is as easy as possible. Hopefully, every member will love the benefits and value proposition you offer, but none of them are going to want to jump through unnecessary hoops to acquire those benefits.
It’s also helpful to pair new members up with an existing member. This can help further build a sense of community, but it also helps get the new member up to speed quickly on the benefits your association offers and provides them with an extra sense of belonging that will help keep them around longer. It can also result in existing members more deeply engaging with your association.
Create a Content Schedule and Stick to it
Successful engagement is when members interact with your association. But you can’t drive a successful engagement strategy by just waiting for them to come to you. Regularly updating your blog and website keeps visitors coming back to those resources, and helps with SEO as well. Newsletters that are sent regularly rather than sporadically project a more professional image and keep your association in the minds of members. For the same reasons, social media accounts should also be updated regularly.
Make Sure Your Website is Accessible to All
There are many disabilities that can prevent someone from accessing certain websites. It’s easy to forget about those people, or to simply not be aware of their difficulties in the first place. Below are some examples of how to improve your website’s accessibility:
- Alt-text – Those who have difficulty seeing won’t be able to identify what’s in your images by sight alone. The alt-text in the image describes it for them.
- Font size – Ensure the text on your website is large enough to be read by people who have less than perfect vision.
- Color schemes – People who are color blind can have a more difficult time distinguishing between sections of your site if colors aren’t chosen carefully. When there isn’t enough contrast, it can also make the text harder to read for some people.
- Descriptive URLs – By using descriptive URLs, and link text, you’ll make it easier for those who rely on screen reading software to know where a link will take them.
When your site isn’t accessible to anyone who wants to use it, you are artificially decreasing your potential membership pool as well as doing a disservice to visitors. Tools such as WAVE can help you evaluate your site’s accessibility.
Conclusion
Many associations make the mistake of thinking that attracting members is the hard part. In reality, retaining those members is where the real work is. After all, for every member you lose, you have to attract another. Without a proper retention strategy, member acquisition becomes an exercise in spinning your wheels rather than growing your association. The best way to start on the path to better retention is to improve engagement.
Getting started can be the hardest part – that’s why we’re here to help! Contact hello@amohq.com to set up a free consultation.