Five Ways to Engage Your Membership
Engaged members are happy members, right? But how do you foster member engagement, and therefore achieve member retention?
First, let’s define member engagement: it is the continuing interaction between an association and a member for beneficial value. In other words, making sure your members are receiving enough bang for their buck.
To deliver to your members a meaningful return on their investment, you must communicate the association's mission, values, benefits, resources, events, and more while providing a consistently valuable experience.
Here are five ways to engage your membership:
Provide ongoing communication with targeted and intentional email campaigns, e-newsletters, and social media posts.
Keeping your members informed is key. Make sure they are aware of the resources the association offers. Include multiple touch points, especially for new members. This could include a welcome email, followed by additional emails spread out over several weeks with each one focusing on the top three to five member benefits, upcoming events, webinars, and more.
Encourage member involvement by offering volunteer opportunities to serve on committees and board of directors.
Communicating the opportunities for members to become more involved by joining a committee or the board of directors is a great way to foster engagement. Clearly state responsibilities, terms of service, and when applications are due, so members fully understand the required commitment.
Survey membership and address concerns with articles, webinars, and speaker topics.
Find out what your members think with a survey. You can do a quick one-to-two question survey, such as do you find a benefit in monthly webinars? Then, once a year, do a more robust member survey produced either in-house or through a third party. If you use a third-party provider, members may be more forthcoming with their answers (make it anonymous). Ask about what they want to hear more about, what they don’t find much value in, if they value networking opportunities, and more.
Promote exclusive member benefits as a demonstration of membership value.
One of the perks of association membership is access to exclusive benefits and cost savings. It is important to keep members informed of what these benefits are, make them easy to find on the association website, and let them know if there are new benefits being introduced.
Host events and webinars including discussions on current topics providing solutions and additional resources.
Helping your membership stay up to date with current events and topics important to them and their profession is a role your association should embrace. Promoting webinars, inviting speakers to events, and sharing links to articles on your website with more information on key topics will demonstrate the value of their membership with the association.
Having an engaged membership keeps the association active, viable and current. This can also help attract new members, as the best referrals come from people who are committed to the association’s mission, values, and role in promoting and supporting its members. Have fun with your member communications! Show your association’s personality!
