So it’s summertime, which means Dean’s ignoring responsibility, I mean, busy with his commitments tied to his volunteer responsibilities with ASAE, so you get the membership musings from our strategist, Nikki Golden, CAE.
I think about membership a lot, obviously, as I work in the association management space and everyone’s livelihood generally relies on it. And we can talk all the live long day about membership modeling, generational opinions about membership, etc., but in my view, the so-called membership issue comes down to a few key items.
- Are you thinking about it far enough in advance? The time to do something about membership retention or acquisition being lower isn’t after you’ve seen a pattern for three years. You need to start discussing and addressing it immediately. Because …
- Are you giving changes enough time to take hold? It’s going to take at least three years before you see if your changes made a difference. Nothing makes an immediate impact. You need to go through at least two renewal cycles before you see if your changes work.
- A membership issue is EVERYONE’s issue, not just the membership department. Membership growth and renewals don’t happen in a vacuum, it includes member sentiment about in-person meetings, virtual education, your website, your publications and anything else your association offers. If others aren’t brought to the table to discuss and brainstorm, the issue isn’t going to get solved. Especially if you’re looking at a new model, which might be moving money around in department budgets. Then you’ll definitely need others’ buy-in to the process.
- Your so-called membership issue is often something else. Sometimes it’s a marketing issue—for instance, your website is terrible to navigate so members get frustrated because they can’t find the thing they need or want and never interact with you again, which includes not renewing. Or, it’s a technology issue because you can’t segment your members in any way because you can’t collect data on them—or they don’t feel like you “know” them because they keep receiving emails about the meeting they’re already registered to attend because you can’t suppress the registration list. Or it’s an education issue. You think your professional development fits the needs of your members, but it’s interpreted through the association lens, not the member lens, and it’s not hitting the right mark.
- Sometimes, you don’t actually know your members as well as you think you do. For instance, do you know the issues your members think will be impacting them in the next three to five years? Do you know what their personal and professional or maybe even organizational goals are? Do you know if they work in one or more location? All of these items play into what your members need and/or want from you, and if you don’t know the answer to these questions, it’s going to be hard to ensure your product mix is hitting the mark.
- You don’t have a non-member engagement strategy. Sometimes, non-members are never going to join. They’re either too adjacent to your audience and have their own home association elsewhere or it’s not the right time in their lives to add a commitment to something else. And that’s OK. If they like your webinars or your annual meeting and continue to participate, see if there are related programs that might interest them… as a non-member customer. Otherwise, you’re cramming a round peg into a square hole and losing a long-standing customer in the process.
- You don’t have an organization-wide agreed-upon definition of engagement, so when you speak about it, each department is looking at it differently through potentially different metrics. This can be your first step to membership success—have an all-staff discussion on what engagement means for your association so that each department can put KPIs into place to be measuring the right thing, for you to continually look at as a whole to know if you’re moving the needle or not.
The best way to solve a membership issue is to bring stakeholders from all departments to the table to discuss what they see is going on from their space in the organization and start from there. Because spending time trying to solve the wrong problem is wasted time that doesn’t fix anything.