Membership recruitment is a never-ending project. Every year, members leave your association—they retire, change jobs or professions, go out of business, lose their professional development budget, or just vanish for unknown reasons. As members go out the back door, you have to keep new ones coming in the front.
What strategies will guide your plan for recruiting these new members? And what tactics will you use to achieve your recruitment goals?
The easy way out is recycling membership recruitment tactics of the past. But the most successful associations do it differently. They encourage staff and volunteers to bring their creativity to the planning table. They’re willing to try out new ideas and experiment with new tactics. The world is changing, people are changing, and your membership tactics must change too.
Provide Targeted, Valuable Content That Increases Lead Generation
Instead of relying on membership promotions, provide content that helps you develop relationships with membership prospects. What’s the first thing to do in any relationship? Get to know the other person.
Identify and research the different segments of your target membership market, for example, students, early career, mid-career, executives, and professionals in transition. Here’s what to ask to identify their content needs:
- What do they need to know to advance their career or do their job better?
- What do they need to know to improve their bottom line?
- What issues trouble them? What challenges do they encounter?
If you provide valuable content for prospects, they’ll keep coming back to you for more.
Maximize Growth With Technology
Make sure you have the technology in place to support the membership growth you’re looking for. Some association management software products only support a few membership features and options, leaving you out of luck if you want to expand your membership offerings. Some software doesn’t handle automated membership type progression effectively, requiring significant manual data entry if you decide to offer someone an introductory membership (i.e. student), and then roll their membership into a full-fledged membership later.
Good association management software allows you to easily leverage your new and creative ideas. If you want to attract new members through a new discounted introductory membership package, don’t let the limitations of your technology burden your membership growth. The less time staff has to fiddle with older technology, the better. Find the software that lets you grow.
Engage New Members By Encouraging a Second Interaction
Survey data indicates that the more personal your follow-up interactions are with a new member, the more likely that member is to renew. Another key is to encourage additional interactions between the new member and your organization. For example, one organization’s data showed that members who placed a product order in the past year were 28 percent more likely to renew than those who had not made a purchase. Eliciting almost any interaction from a new member, from having them complete a survey to simple phone contact, increases the likelihood of renewal.
Membership recruitment and development isn’t the only never-ending project. You can never stop learning about your prospects and members. The more you know about their needs, interests, preferences, and habits, the better decisions you’ll make about the content, products, and services—the value—you deliver to them.
MVP
Megan Van Petten
CEO & President
Van Petten Group, Inc.
This original article was featured in Association Forum’s magazine, FORUM in September 2017, titled, Three Overlooked Tactics for Growing Association Membership. See the Association Forum’s newsletter link.