membership Archives - Page 9 of 13

Membership 101: How Do I Know When To Ask?

Posted on April 28, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment

You continue to do that [make offers] for a few cycles, THEN ask her to marry you, once you both know it’s right.

Which begs the question: how do you know when is the right time to ask?

Data.

If you’ve constructed your ladder of engagement correctly, you started with asking your lead to do something free and easy (maybe signing up for your free e-enewsletter). When she did, you tracked what she clicked on, then offered her a free resource (infographic, webinar, whitepaper) on that topic. When she took you up on that, you offered her something that cost money (another webinar, a resource on the same topic that wasn’t free), which she purchased (hopefully).

By tracking what other new members have done with your association prior to joining, you can estimate how many cycles of offers you need to go through before pitching membership.

By tracking what that particular prospect is responding to (both topic and platform – she might be really interested in leadership OR she might be really interested in infographics OR she might be really interested in both), you can make sure that the additional offers you’re sending her will be appealing.

By combining those two, you can tell when is the right time to ask, and what you should emphasize in your slate of programs, products, and services when you do ask. My next post will explain why that’s important.

Image found at Lesbian News.

Membership 101: Ladder of Engagement

Posted on April 13, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments

Beth Kanter's chart of the ladder of engagement

As I discussed in the last post in this series, membership is all about relationship building.
The mechanism you use to build that relationship is the ladder of engagement.

Simply put, just like you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, so you need to create and deepen your relationship with your prospects (and members) over time before asking them for further commitments.

The first communication someone gets from your association shouldn’t be an invitation to join – they don’t know you yet, and they have no idea if they’re interested in committing a significant amount of money to a full year of relationship.

Membership *is* a relationship, and both parties (the association and the prospective or new member) need to gradually increase cost, commitment, effort, and knowledge. You do that by constructing ladders of engagement, based on engagement paths, that gradually deepen involvement on both sides, until individuals get to the point that they’re comfortable making a larger commitment to you, and you know enough about them to ensure that commitment will be meaningful for them and meet their needs.

There are four main steps in the ladder of engagement:

Capture – this is when you get leads in the door in the first place, virtually always by giving them something free but valuable to them that requires a very low level of commitment.
Nurture – this is when a lead turns into a prospect, which happens as you learn more about her and begin offering her programs, products, and services that can help her achieve key goals and solve problems, moving gradually from free to low cost to higher cost.
Convert – this is when you invite the prospect to join, in a way that’s tailored to his interests and needs, which you know because you’ve been learning more about him as you build the relationship through the nurture process.
Partner – this is when that new member becomes a long-term, loyal, committed, involved member through the ongoing process of getting to know her better and offering programs, products, services, and opportunities for involvement that are increasingly tailored to her most important goals and most pressing challenges.

In practice, this might work something like:

Someone registers for a free user account for your career center to look at jobs and post her resume.
That person goes into your prospect database, coded as a prospect and with a “career center” origination code.
A week or two later, the prospect gets an email offering some free editorial content related to professional development, which she clicks on and downloads. That email MUST have a call to action, and you MUST be able to track whether or not the prospect took it.
A few weeks later, the prospect gets another email offering something else free – perhaps a free archived webinar, which she then views (same thing with the call to action and tracking).
Next, she’s offered something she needs to pay for, perhaps a paid report or webinar on career development, which she chooses to buy (same thing with the call to action and tracking).
Then you offer her membership, with the offer focused on all the additional professional development-related content she’ll have access to if she joins.

Notice that the prospect is only being asked to join (marry you) after you’ve established that she’s actually interested, and she gets a membership offer that’s targeted to what *she’s* interested in, not something generic that’s mostly focused on what the association thinks is valuable.

Ideally, you will create MANY ladders of engagement based around all sorts of segments – source of lead, career stage, professional interests and needs, geographical location, past purchases, demographics, etc. You collect some of this data actively – you ask for it. Some of it you collect passively by observing and recording what people do and grouping them by demonstrated behaviors.

But in all of them, you start with something that’s of interest but is free and requires little commitment to get, often just providing one’s contact information. If your lead does that, offer him something that asks a little more of him. It can be money, but it doesn’t have to be – maybe you just ask for some demographic information about him, or ask about his interest areas. You continue to do that for a few cycles, THEN ask her to marry you, once you both know it’s right.

The fantastic, really simple graphic of the ladder of engagement above is from Beth Kanter. On an unrelated note, you should read her blog and follow her on Twitter if you don’t already.

Membership 101: Lead Generation

Posted on March 30, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments

Where does the membership relationship start?

It begins with lead generation.

People who might want to become members of your association have to find out that you exist.

Lead generation is first contact (and please tell me that somebody gets the reference in the photo accompanying this post so that I’m not the only nerd out here all by myself).

You are going to have to connect with a bunch of different people in order to find the ones who are the right match. Not everyone is a good candidate for membership.

It’s a lot like dating. To be more precise, online dating.

You need to throw a LOT of winks out there to produce several good online chats to produce a handful of great phone conversations to produce a few amazing dates to find someone you might want to spend a few months – or the rest of your life – with.

If you think of membership merely as a transaction, X dollars for Y services, then yes, you’ll probably have a lot of Mr. Rights. But those relationships will be shallow, without much commitment on either side, and thus easy to walk away from if the situation changes, for instance, if his employer stops paying his dues. “Eh, it was nice to have when it didn’t require anything of me, but now that I have to invest something, forget it.” Churn is the membership association equivalent of a booty call.

I’m urging you to think of membership as a real, deep, two-way, equal relationship. Just because someone is in or aligned with your profession or industry does not automatically mean she’s a good prospect for that type of membership relationship.

She might not be ready for or capable of that level of commitment. He might be looking for solutions to problems that you can’t reasonably provide. She might not really be into you, leading to a relationship that requires more investment of resources to maintain than it’s worth. He might have goals that contradict your mission.

Hold out for Mr. or Ms. Right. You do not want to be a booty call.

How do you do that? That will be the topic of the next post.

Image found here.

Membership 101: Recruitment versus Retention versus Renewal

Posted on March 9, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Three great tastes that taste great together.

Recruitment, retention, and renewal are related, but they aren’t the same thing.

Recruitment is what you do to get people in the door of your association in the first place. It’s at least partially about sales, but it’s also about starting a relationship. When you recruit a member, you are both choosing to start a relationship with each other.

Retention, on the other hand, is about keeping members, nurturing those new relationships over the long term.

To quote Joe Rominiecki from ASAE’s Associations Now membership blog:

“Recruitment requires creativity, but retention demands authenticity. Any number of offers, incentives, or messages can convince someone to try out your association, but once they’ve experienced it for a year, it’s either good or it isn’t. Which makes the decision to renew a lot different than the decision to join.”

Association membership professionals tend to focus a lot of energy on recruitment, and that’s understandable because campaigns are fun, let you be creative, and are time-limited (that is, they have a start and an end). But retention is critical to long-term, sustainable growth. Recruitment, no matter how successful, without a strong retention relationship-buiding program, is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. Pointless.

Renewal is a process. It’s the mechanics of retention, the glue that holds this cycle together. As such, it’s tactical, focused on answering questions like:

How many notices are you going to send?
When?
On what platforms/channels? (DO NOT only send emails.)
What offers are you going to make?
What messages are you going to use?
Who do you need to convince? (Your actual member may not be the only decision-maker.)

Retention is the goal. Renewal is the tactic you use to achieve that goal.

Image found here.

Membership 101: MVP

Posted on February 28, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Theodore Levitt saying about people wanting a hole, not a drill

Not Most Valuable Player, Member Value Proposition

It may seem obvious to say this, but people have to choose to join your association. What are their other options?

Join a competitor non-profit
Join a competitor for-profit (yes, there are for-profit membership organizations)
Be a customer (that is, buy programs, products, and services a la carte rather than joining)
Self-organize (LinkedIn group, Facebook group, Slack channel, etc.)
Do nothing

Your answer to why they should choose you rather than one of these other things is your Member Value Proposition (MVP), that is the programs, products, and services you offer that are designed to help your members achieve their desired outcomes and solve their most pressing professional problems that also align with your mission.

Sounds simple, right?

The problem is, association professionals tend to define MVP from the association’s internal perspective: “How can we convince members to think what we’re doing is valuable?”

That’s backwards.

One, it inclines us to think in terms of lists of features rather than benefits:

A certification program is a FEATURE.

Holding the most recognized credential in the field that all the top employers demand and that will let you command a higher salary is a BENEFIT.

A member directory is a FEATURE.

The ability to locate local peers with whom you can collaborate to solve problems and discuss issues critical to your professional success is a BENEFIT.

Two, MVP, much like brand, is NOT defined by the association – it’s defined by the people we serve.

So rather than asking ourselves how to convince people to like what we have, we should be asking things like:

- What are our members’ most important goals?
- What are their most pressing problems?
- What can we provide to help them?

That is, we need to be making what we can sell, not trying to sell whatever it is we’ve already decided we want to make.

How do you discover what your audiences’ most important goals and most pressing problems are? You ask, and pay attention to what people tell you. And “telling” you isn’t just survey responses – it’s also focus groups and interviews and emails and phone calls and hallway conversations at your events and offhand remarks and analyzing the data on their behavior (what do they open, click, read, share, like, recommend, BUY?) and paying attention to industry and larger socioeconomic trends.

Every staff member and every volunteer in your association needs to be a sponge for information about your audiences and needs to share what they learn as widely as possible. And then you need to act based on what you learn.

That’s how you ensure that your MVP is strong.

Levitt quote image found here.

Launching: Membership 101 Series

Posted on February 24, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments

I’ve had several clients hire me recently to do webinars/presentations on basic concepts in membership. It occurred to me that other people might want this information, too. So I’m launching a series of blog posts designed to introduce readers to – or remind them of – key concepts in membership recruitment, engagement, retention, and renewal.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll address items like:

MVP – what is is and why does it matter?
Recruitment v retention v renewal – how do they relate to each other?
Lead generation – where do you find people?
Ladders of engagement – how to you draw them in?
Using data – when is the right time to ask people to join?
Learning why people joined – why does that matter?
Welcome series – what is it, and why is it important?
What is engagement (it may not be what you think)
Personalization – why does it matter, and how do you do it?
Role of volunteerism – how can good volunteer experiences boost retention?
Effective renewal cycles – what do they look like and how do they work?
Exit surveying – why should you do it?

Suggestions for other topics I’ve missed? Leave them in the comments.

Where are the YPs?

Posted on January 5, 2017 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

“How can I recruit young professional members if there are no young professionals entering our industry?”

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently, not least of which because I have a client that is in this EXACT situation. Their industry is blue collar, but it is also one with excellent career and salary prospects and a clear educational track. That track just doesn’t happen to include college.

Associations Now recently profiled an initiative by the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association focused on exactly this: recruiting young people into the industry.

I’d guess that PHCC and my client aren’t the only associations struggling with this.

One of the things that basic math tells us is that associations are in for a bit of a rough patch related to membership. The fact of the matter is that GenerationX, currently in their prime career and, thus, association membership target, years, is a smaller cohort than the retiring Baby Boomers and up and coming Millennials. And while the internet didn’t kill membership for the Xers (in fact, Xers join associations at higher rates than Boomers), we’re in the middle part of the narrow part of the hourglass. Which puts pressure on associations to hang on to retiring members longer and recruit young members earlier than we historically have.

On the “hang on to them longer” front, we are assisted by the fact that Boomers are retiring later, and far more partially, than their Silent Generation forebears. While what Boomers are looking for from their memberships and what they’re willing and able to contribute as members of our professional communities may shift, they aren’t hitting 65 and bolting out the door, gold watch in hand, to move to Florida and fish full time.

On the “recruit them earlier” front, though, we’re having more trouble, not least of which because, for some of us, young people aren’t showing up to our professions or industries in the first place.

What can we do about that?

Associations have enormous untapped advantages in filling the workforce pipeline for the professions and industries we serve:

We have direct connections to, and existing relationships with, employers, so we know what they need in entry-level and junior workers.
We own non-college certification and credentialing. No other sector has as much experience with this as we do.
We’re lightening fast, at least compared with hidebound higher education.
We know how to educate non-traditional students in non-traditional settings.

To learn more about what you association can do to help create your universe of future members, check out The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm, the latest Spark whitepaper, co-authored with Shelly Alcorn, CAE, Alcorn Associates Management Consulting. It includes case studies of associations that are doing good work in educating the next generation of professionals in their industries, and practical steps you can take right now to position your association for success in this critically important arena.

Get your free copy today at http://bit.ly/29CIquL.

What Really Worked in 2016?

Posted on December 12, 2016 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Beth Brodovsky, who hosts the Driving Participation podcast (and if you haven’t checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?) recently asked a bunch of her former guests this insightful question for a year-end episode.

Here’s my answer:

One thing that really worked for my clients was talking to their members. I know that sounds obvious, but associations tend to – in my opinion – over-focus on surveying people to the detriment of other methods of learning about our audiences. I’m not saying that surveys aren’t important or a necessary part of our data gathering efforts. But they aren’t the whole picture.

Surveys can be particularly useful as an early warning system for identifying problem areas in your value proposition, if they’re properly designed and administered, and if you ask the right questions.

They’re not great at “blue ocean” situations, though. If you’re trying to learn about future goals and desired outcomes, new challenges, or emerging trends in the profession or industry your association serves, surveys are not effective. You learn about those sorts of things much more effectively and efficiently through open, honest conversation.

Association professionals can sometimes be nervous about talking directly to members in an unstructured way. What if they’re angry about something, or have complaints, or ask questions we can’t answer, or have requests we can’t meet? Those are all reasonable fears. I would argue, though, that it’s better to invite the momentary discomfort that comes from finding out something negative than it is to ignore it. When you know, you can do something. When you choose not to know, members walk away and you have no idea why.

In 2017, I would encourage your readers and listeners to start a formal program of regular audience conversations. There are lots of ways this can be accomplished: regular in-person or virtual focus groups, town hall style meetings or calls, tasking staff members or volunteers with calling one or more members a week, working with your chapters, setting up regular member visits, an emailed or online open-ended question of the week, doing Appreciative Inquiry style peer interviewing, hiring a consultant to conduct interviews, a mix of the above, etc. But regularly gathering and widely sharing this sort of information is vital for the long-term health of your organization and your relationships with your constituents.

Is Growth Necessarily Good?

Posted on July 6, 2016 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments

For membership associations, total membership count tends to be one of the key pieces of data we report to our senior leadership, our Board, and often publicly. And up is always better, right?

Not necessarily.

First of all, to quote the Spark/Mariner Getting to the ‘Good Stuff’: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations:

More members may be better up to a point, but beyond that you risk bringing in marginal members whose commitment to your mission is incidental at best, whose contribution to your community will be minimal, and whose acquisition and renewal costs will exceed their marginal revenue. In other words, they’ll be a drain on your association’s resources.

(Joe Rominiecki talked about this concept recently in Associations Now, too.)

This is all focused on growing your market share, that is, getting more customers.

But there’s also the concept of growing your customer share, that is, getting your customers to have a larger relationship with you – to buy more stuff and be more involved.

Harvard Business Review recently highlighted this same trend in looking at “super consumers.”

“But my most involved members already are, well, really involved. They aren’t going to buy more, are they?”

Actually, they will. To quote HBR:

…superconsumers represent 10% of a category’s customers but account for 30% to 70% of sales and an even higher share of profits.

Admittedly, their study focused on consumer brands. But it reiterates a message associations would benefit from, one that I’ve written about before:

Assume you have 10,000 members. Your annual meeting regularly sees 500 attendees, at $500 a pop. Based on past attendance, your actual number of prospective attendees is about 1,000. And you have a $10,000 marketing budget.

Most of us proceed to blast undifferentiated messages out to the entire 10,000 members. Which means we can spend $1 per member trying to get people to our conference. What if, instead, we focused that $10,000 and our staff time ONLY on the 1000 prospects who are likely to attend? All of a sudden, we’re only managing 1000 contacts, not 10,000, and we have $10 per prospect to market the conference. What if those focused, high-impact messages aimed only at truly likely attendees could increase conference attendance from 500 to 700? At $500 a head, that’s an additional $100,000.

In other words, pay more attention to your super consumers, who are, again according to HBR:

…defined by both economics and attitude: They are a subset of heavy users who are highly engaged with a category and a brand. They are especially interested in innovative uses for the product and in new variations on it. They aren’t particularly price sensitive. (emphasis added)

These are the people who aren’t just members or attendees or readers – they LOVE your association and are willing to offer their time, expertise, and innovative ideas to make it better.

What are you doing to find them, to nurture them, and to let them know you appreciate them? Maybe if we all got off our “growth in (marginal?) membership, no matter what” hamster wheels, we could find out.

Do You Know How to Be A Member?

Posted on May 12, 2016 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments

YAY! You just got a new member! Hopefully, she’ll acclimate and find her place and stay with you forever.

Wait: “hopefully”? We can do better than that.

Here’s the question you need to ask yourself: does your new member know how to be a member of your organization?

Of course not, right? She’s new. She knows enough about you to have been willing to invest her money in joining. Now you need to help her learn how to make the most of that investment. You have to welcome her, make her feel at home, and show her how to be a member.

Make it personal. Someone who’s not on staff (i.e. another member, aka one of her peers) needs to call her or drop her an email welcoming her and sharing some insight from a member perspective on what membership means and offers. (This, by the way, presents a GREAT opportunity to engage ad hoc/micro-volunteers.)
Get her started right. What’s the first most important thing she needs to know right away? That should be the SOLE focus of the first communication from staff (well, other than the confirmation of her membership, of course). Related to that…
Don’t drop everything on her all at once. What does your “welcome to Association XYZ” communication look like? Is it a long list of “member benefits” (too often presented as features and from the association’s perspective) that she’s supposed to plow through? Try introducing one thing at a time with concrete examples of how other members use it, explaining why they like it in their words (testimonials, examples, case studies).
Benefits not features. “Association XYZ produces the leading annual conference in our field…”? No. “Earn free continuing education credits when you come to our annual conference. We’re excited to feature speakers and topics like:…” Yes!
Don’t ask her for more money – at least not right away. She just joined – the first thing she hears from you shouldn’t be “now spend MORE with us on our book/webinar/conference/whatever.” She’s still figuring out if her initial investment is going to be worthwhile. Don’t try to get her to sink more money in before she’s even sussed that out. It’s just rude.
Ask about her. What’s the main reason she joined? You need to know that so you can focus on delivering it to her, and then remind her that you did deliver it when it comes time to renew. What are her most important professional goals for the year? What are the biggest challenges she’s facing? What do you offer that can help her achieve those goals and resolve those challenges?
Pay attention. As you’re doing your drip campaign introducing benefits, what does she respond to? Did she ignore your email about your new book but click immediately on a link to a webinar? That gives you some valuable information about what she might be interested in. Oh: and don’t just assume “she likes webinars and hates books.” Maybe it was the topic of the book versus the topic of the webinar. That’s something else you can try to find out.
Stay in touch. You’re trying to develop a relationship here, one that you want to last over the long term. You don’t do that by ignoring the other party for a year (or, worse, bombarding her with tone-deaf marketing messages about things she’s not interested in), and then asking her for more money. You need to stay in touch on a personal and non-financial basis throughout the year. Ask her how things are going. Check in to see if she has questions. Remind her of what’s included in her membership. Get volunteers to reach out. You know, actually develop an actual relationship as if you’re an actual person and so is she. Then, when that renewal invoice does arrive, her decision will be an easy one, and you’ll have a successful renewal.

Thanks to YourMembership.com and one of my clients for inspiring this post.

Photo by Nico Smit on Unsplash

Category: membership