The Art of Membership: How to Attract, Retain and Cement Member Loyalty (The ASAE Series) by Sheri Jacobs

Author:Sheri Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781118633083
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-05T14:00:00+00:00

Action Steps

1. To ensure that you understand your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, conduct a membership needs assessment. To clearly define your organization’s brand as members and prospects currently perceive it, conduct market research. But if you want to create new programs and products that will be embraced by members today and in the future, expand your research efforts to include an assessment of past behavior and an environmental scan of the marketplace. Engage stakeholders in the process, yet expand the group to include individuals who are not too close to your brand and will bring a more critical perspective to the assessment of new product development.

2. Toss aside assumptions you may have made about differences in generational needs, member loyalty, and the value of your current offerings. Consider, for a moment, whether there are other factors that may be influencing the decision to join, participate, volunteer, purchase, renew, and recommend membership to others. Create a list of items you can change or create that could reverse existing trends.

3. Examine and address, at a deeper level, all of the barriers to success. Some of the best new products can fail if the need to overcome certain barriers—be they timing, technology, culture, or price—is too great. Begin this process by assuming you can overcome barriers, but then examine what will be required to succeed in your efforts.

4. When recruiting younger members, it’s all about show and tell. Consider promoting the benefits of membership based on how each offering will help them advance and succeed in their careers. Share stories and examples that demonstrate the outcomes of taking advantage of membership in your organization. Create profiles that showcase different career paths, and emphasize how taking an active role (volunteering, participating, or using your association’s resources) helps members advance in their careers.

5. Keep in mind that behavior is very different from preference. Even if your members are twice as likely to prefer face-to-face meetings to webinars or virtual conferences, a better predictor for success is how they’ve behaved over the past twelve months. This isn’t to say that you should eliminate offerings based on past behavior, or that you shouldn’t try new ideas. I am simply recommending that you weigh past performance in addition to needs and interests when creating new programs or products.

6. Create and nurture a culture that embraces flexibility and speed when building new programs and products. Some of the best new products fail because it took too long to get the program or product through the development process. Although your organization may adhere to a rigorous quality assurance process before launching any new program or product, this may not be necessary for everything you offer. Streamlining the process for product development will increase the likelihood that your organization provides relevant resources in a timely manner. One of the best ways to ensure that your organization has access to the latest data, so that you do not need to wait until information is collected before you can make decisions, is to increase your commitment to the collection and use of all types of research.

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