Category: membership

Are members who join with a price incentive more or less likely to renew membership the following year?

Less likely. Don’t offer pricing discounts unless your audiences are EXTREMELY price sensitive or your membership is declining and you’re desperate to get people in the door by any means necessary.

Does offering a discounted membership based on time of the year (i.e. a summer sale) dilute the value of membership?

Yes. Also, when you start offering discounts, you train your members to bad behavior: “Well, I waited to renew last year, and they offered a discount, so I’ll wait again this year and see if I can get another deal.”

Now that’s different than pro-rating membership when everyone’s renewing on the calendar year. If a new member joins in July, one school of thought says “charge that member 50% of your regular rate,” but I’m not a fan of that because then that new member is going to start receiving “it’s time to renew!” notices almost immediately. I encourage clients to offer “18 for the price of 12.” That is, the new member pays the full rate NOW, but isn’t solicited to renew until next year’s renewal cycle.

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You’ve got questions – I (may) have answers!

Now that the Membership 101 Series has concluded, it occurred to me that folks might have some more questions about membership I didn’t think to address.

I have some membership FAQs my clients have asked me over the years that I’ll address, but you might have questions too, and might want the opportunity to ask them in an anonymous setting (rather than on ASAE’s Collaborate community or other public forum).

Now’s your chance.

You’re welcome to email me, call to text me (202.468.3478), @ me on Twitter, or drop me a message on LinkedIn, and I’ll answer your membership questions here.

No question too big – no question too small, and if I don’t know the answer, I promise I’ll try my best to get it for you.

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I’ve gotten through all the topics I had planned for the Membership 101 series, which leads to two additional questions:

1. What did I miss? Are there membership topics you were hoping I’d cover that I never did?
2. So then you might ask: “Um, what were all the topics you covered again?”

So glad you asked! Here’s the list of all the Membership 101 posts with all the links:

• Series Launch (which did have a topic request that is still on my list, but it was related to certification programs, so it’s not part of this series)
• MVP (not Most Valuable Player, Member Value Proposition)
• Recruitment V. Retention V. Renewal (what they are, and how they relate to each other)
• Lead Generation (making first contact with your eventual members)
• Ladder of Engagement (taking those budding relationships to a more serious level)
• How Do I Know When to Ask? (timing is everything)
• Why Did They Join? (and why you really need to know the answer to this question)
• The Welcome Series (don’t just dump everything on people at once)
• What Is Engagement Anyway? (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)
• The Importance of Personalization (not “Dear Colleague” – NEVER “Dear Colleague”)
• Ladders of Engagement, Revisited (they’re not just for prospects)
• LTV (Life Time Value)
• Data, Data, Data (learn it, know it, live it)
• Should You Reward Loyalty or Novelty? (it’s a trick question)
• Who Counts? (on expanding your definition of community)
• The Role of Volunteerism (or, more on engagement)
• Effective Renewal Cycles (once you’ve got ’em, you want to make sure you keep ’em)
• Exit Surveys (but sometimes they leave anyway – you should try to find out why)
• Reinstatement (and sometimes, they come back)
• What About Trade Associations? (both the same, and different)

Remember – let me know what I missed in the comments.

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Hopefully, your exit survey recaptured a number of your members who lapsed due to inattention.

What about the ones who lapsed for cause? Is it worth trying to get them back?

Yes, with some conditions.

First, you need to segment your lapsed members into those who left for reasons that are under your control versus those who left for reasons that are NOT under your control. That second group would be situations like people who’ve retired (or, let’s be honest here, died), people who’ve left the industry or profession, companies that went out of business or were acquired – basically, people or organizations who’ve removed themselves, or whose circumstances have removed them, from the pool of potential members.

Reasons that would be under your control include things like:

• Your association’s programs, products, or services didn’t live up to that member’s expectations
• Your association is missing programs, products, or services that member wants you to offer
• That member had a problem with your association that wasn’t resolved to her satisfaction
• Your association took a position (possibly, but not necessarily, advocacy-related) that member disagreed with

In other words, she had problems that she should reasonably be able to expect you to help her solve or goals that she should reasonably be able to expect you to help her achieve, and you didn’t.

This is why it’s important, when members lapse, so find out why. In a broad sense, if you discover that a significant number of your lapsed members are, for instance, dissatisfied with your research journal, that’s a good indicator that you need to make some changes to it.

In the more narrow sense, when a member has left for cause, you shouldn’t just bombard her with pitches for something she already decided she didn’t want (membership in your association as it stood when she left). Assuming you have changed what she didn’t like – fixed the program she had a problem with, added the product she was looking for, made a second attempt to resolve her problem, adjusted your position on the issue she disagreed with – you need to tell her about that.

It’s also possible that she just misunderstood – “I joined to find a job and your career center wasn’t useful to me because you don’t offer a job agent” when you do, in fact, offer a job agent – and it’s OK to work to correct that misperception, but be careful how you do it. It’s not a terse email pointing out: “It’s RIGHT THERE, dummy!” It flows more like: She responded to your exit survey with that reason and said it was OK to follow up with her. So you do, by the method she preferred, and offer something like: “Thanks for responding to our exit survey. I see you let your membership lapse because you were dissatisfied with our career center. Can we set up a time where I can walk you through what’s there and how it works to see if we can resolve this for you?” Resolve the problem, be polite, and DON’T IMMEDIATELY PITCH “So you’re going to rejoin now, right?”.  But do put her back in your recruitment campaign group, once her problem is resolved.

One last point on both your exit survey and reinstatement processes: Pay attention to your data. Sometimes you “lose” people because you literally lose contact with them. They may be students who graduated, moved to a new city, and are no longer using their .edu email address. They may have changed jobs, and if all you had was work address and email, they’ve vanished for all intents and purposes. There’s no perfect fix for this other than detective work. Some things you can add to your initial data collection that can at least help include getting more than one (address, phone number, email) and linking social profiles, particularly LinkedIn.

Image from Unsplash

 

Sometimes, despite your best efforts to understand your members’ most pressing problems and most important goals, and provide solutions for them, members lapse.

What happens next?

You should try to find out why they left.

One approach membership pros often take to discover their reasons for leaving is to ask membership committee members to make calls to lapsed members.

Raise your hand if that works well for you.

[crickets]

The reason that approach often fails is that it’s too scary. Most volunteers are going to resist calling lapsed members, because while it’s possible that the lapsed member just forgot to renew, she might be actively upset about something. Your volunteer doesn’t want to – and isn’t equipped to – handle that. So what happens in reality is that you ask/assign committee members to make those calls, and oddly, they never seem to get around to it.

Another potential approach is to task your membership team with making those calls. They are equipped to deal with potentially angry members – at least in theory – but again, this is not a fun task, so it tends to continually get bumped to the bottom of the priority list. Even if your team does make those calls, some lapsed members will have a hard time being honest about what’s really bothering them on the phone with another human being. While some people enjoy being squeaky wheels, most of us have a hard time being critical.

The solution is an exit survey.

A caveat: an exit survey is not a scientifically valid instrument that will provide statistically significant P values. You’re not sending it to a representative random sample from a large enough population, and you aren’t going to get enough responses.

So why do one?

• Exit surveys provide one last notice to members who may not have realized they’ve lapsed.
• If someone left for cause, it gives him one last chance to tell you why and you one last chance to fix his problem.
• Exit surveys provide clues to potential emerging problems with your member value proposition (MVP).

The best exit surveys are simple, asking one question only: “Why did you leave?”

The first option should always be: “I didn’t mean to lapse – I’d like to renew.”

You follow that with the common reasons you know people lapse.

Never offer: “Dues were too expensive.” Rephrase that as: “Value was too low” (which is what “dues were too expensive” really means).

The final option should be an open comment box. That is where you will get clues about emerging problems with your MVP, so make sure you review what lapsing members write in regularly.

To encourage responses, you will want to offer a small prize to everyone or a drawing for a larger prize for completing the survey. You always offer the option of submitting the survey anonymously, but allow people to share contact information if they want follow up about their responses and in order to get their prize or be entered into the prize drawing.

How often do you send it?

That depends on your rate of lapsing. Realize that you’re not going to get a lot of responses – maybe 5-10% of your group. That means out of 100 lapsed members, you might get five completed surveys. That might mean that, even if you do anniversary date renewals, you only send your exit survey once a year. Even if you do calendar renewals, if you’re a trade association with relatively few, large members, you might not even send it that often. Use your judgement.

Remember that however many responses you get, they’re anecdotes. And the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Those anecdotes are clues guiding you to areas where you need to do more research.

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At some point, after generating leads and nurturing relationships and persuading people to join and helping them find their own individual engagement paths, it’s time to ask your members to renew, to stick with you another year.

Membership retention is your goal – renewal is the process by which you achieve your goal. Renewal is all about how many of what types of notices are sent to whom on what schedule. In other words, it’s a campaign that reminds members why they want to stick with you and asks them to invest in another year.

Notice I didn’t say “convince” members. If you’ve been doing a good job with relationship building along the way, as so much of this series has focused on, renewal should be basically a formality. You are already a vital partner in your members’ success. Paying up for another year is just the final step. And frankly, if you’re not a vital partner in your members’ success, it’s going to be very difficult to convince them otherwise in a series of communications, no matter how persistent and persuasive your messaging or attractive your graphics.

As you’re constructing your renewal campaign, just as in earlier campaigns, you should answer the following series of questions:

• What are our goals?
• Who are our audiences? What do we know about them?
• What’s the offer?
• What are our key messages? What messages are persuasive to our various audience segments?
• What tactics are we going to use? What platforms are available to us for getting our message out?
• What resources can we enlist?
• What’s the schedule? Who’s responsible to do what?
• How will we know whether or not we met our goals?

Goals

For a renewal campaign, generally speaking, your goal is going to be to achieve a certain retention percentage. What’s a good retention percentage? The annual Marketing General Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report for 2017 lists an average renewal rate of 77% in professional societies and 88% in trade associations. (Marketing General will be releasing the 2018 data later this month, and you can register for the FREE release webinar here.)

What does that mean for your association? Maybe not that much. If, as a trade association, your retention rate has historically been 93%, “achieving” the industry standard would be cause for concern – why did your retention rate drop off 5%? Likewise, if, as a professional society, your retention rate has historically been 68%, setting a goal of 77% for the next year is likely unattainable.

You probably want your goal to be a little bit of a stretch, but not unrealistic.

Audiences

Well, for a renewal campaign, your audience is obviously your members. But I’d urge you to dig deeper and think about your segments. Who are the people who ALWAYS renew? Is there a segment of Texans that joined a year ago to get the member rate for your conference that was going to be in Dallas, only this next year, it’s in Vancouver? Do you have members who still prefer to renew by check? Do you have a bunch of members who all work for the same organization? Do you have a Pinterest page that draws attention from your women members? Or an Instgram account that attracts your young professionals? Do different sized companies use your membership benefits differently? What about your lapsed members? Is it time to solicit them again?

The Offer

Again, obviously, it’s to renew. One trap that associations fall into is getting late in a renewal campaign, seeing that retention rate is falling short of goals, and getting desperate – that is, starting to offer those slowpokes incentives to renew. The problem with that is that you train your members into bad behavior. “I waited to renew last year, and they offered me (extra months, a gift, a discount). I’ll do the same again this year and see what I can get.”

If you want to offer some sort of premium, reward the behavior you wish to see: renewing early in the cycle. Offer something special to the people who renew on the first notice, and for a limited time only. Train your members to good behavior.

The Messages

This is where you start thinking about those segments you identified in considering your audiences and thinking about what will be appealing to them. Remind different segments of what specific benefits they used in the past year, the problems you helped them solve or the goals you helped them achieve, and preview what you have planned for the coming year related to those problems and goals.

Trade associations with relatively few, large members should prepare individualized use reports for their member companies, not least of which because the person approving the renewal payment is often not the same as the many people who used benefits.

Even individual membership associations with lots of members should segment their messages, though. A student member does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is in the first five years of her career does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is mid-career does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is within a few years of retirement.

Tactics

Likewise, different members probably prefer to interact with your association on different platforms. Regardless of the segment, mix up your platforms. Don’t just send all your notices via email. Mix in some ads on your own website, some social media postings, print mail (maybe a traditional cover letter and printed renewal notice, maybe a colorful postcard, maybe both). Try a simplified landing page. Record a video of a few members explaining why they love your association. Maybe try a call from your CEO for high-profile members.

How many notices should you send? More than one and less than one hundred. OK, I’m being a little snarky there, but the only way to know is to test. Run experiments on how early to start the cycle (yes, it’s possible to start too early – have you ever gotten a notice to renew a magazine subscription before you’ve even received your first issue?). Run experiments on how to space out the notices. Run experiments on how long to keep pursuing people. Pay attention to results.

While you’re experimenting with all these platforms and tactics, pay attention to what happens. Use trackable URLs, watch for bumps in activity within a few days of the arrival of mailed notices, see who’s clicking on your social media postings or ads. Then as the campaign progresses, you know where to devote more resources, where to tweak what you’re doing for greater effectiveness, and where to stop putting good money after bad. Speaking of….

Resources

Money, yes, but also staff time and energy, volunteer help, even your whole membership. Take the time to segment and craft targeted messages. Take the time to run experiments and track what happens. Ask your volunteer leaders for their help – can they remind a colleague to renew? Tell your members it’s renewal season and ask them to help spread the word on social media.

Schedule

It’s important to create a detailed plan with what type of notice is going to go to whom with what messaging on what schedule, and who’s responsible to make that happen. It creates accountability, helps you with your results tracking, and ensures that your campaign doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of day-to-day busy-ness.

Metrics

Remember to sit down at the end of the campaign with the entire team who worked on it and assess how you did. Did you meet your initial goals? Why or why not? What worked better than you anticipated? What didn’t work? Is that something you just need to adjust next time, or should you dump it entirely? Celebrate your successes and capture what you learned from your failures. It will help you improve your next campaign. And don’t forget to thank everyone who helped.

Membership lifecycle graphic credit: Marketing General Inc.