In the five-stage association membership life cycle which I posted on March 15, 2017 membership engagement is in the middle of the cycle, with awareness and recruitment ahead and renewal and reinstatement after. As such, membership engagement is at the core of and is the most challenging work for association executives.
Engaging with members during this pandemic has even made this work pressing and demanding as members need their association’s presence and assistance more than ever. It is in this context that the Philippine Council of Associations and Association Executives (PCAAE) organized a webinar on “Membership Engagement in the Virtual World.”
Our featured speaker was Dot Miller, a Colorado, USA-based certified association executive, book author, entrepreneur, and community leader, who is CEO of The Solution, an association management company, and co-founder of the National Credentialing Institute. She was on the dot (pun intended) when it comes to these suggestions to webinar attendees:
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Bring solutions to your members, as well as energy and enthusiasm, in engaging with them. The pandemic may have made your members stressed, burned out, unsure of the future, or have no control over the situation. Understand your members’ pain points and their profession or industry needs. Write press releases to elevate your association and share your members’ successes with the media.
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Categorize your members into green, yellow and red (the “traffic light” member clusters). Green symbolizes your most engaged members who attend events, work on committees and serve on the Board. Yellow is for those who have attended one or two events in a year and may need more knowledge sharing. Red is for those who have never attended anything, have not participated and you don’t know them at all.
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As a strategy, you need not spend much time engaging with those in green as you can also find them as ambassadors able to engage with fellow members. You may need more time to reach out personally to those in yellow so they will renew their membership. For the red group, you may only engage if they have been with you for less than five years.
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Hold stakeholders meetings, typically a networking event where you bring in the yellow and the red, clustering them by size or interest, to enable them to interact with each other. Conduct sprint (short, one hour and a half) visioning and strategy sessions before Board meetings to map out actions for the next six months or so.
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Reach out (via phone calls, handwritten notes, cards) to five members per day and ask them how they are doing. Your ambassadors and Board members can ask them to engage with your association by, say submitting an article for your newsletter, a member spotlight, content for a blog, or for your website or social media channels.
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Make short, regular, easy to answer, three-question surveys to your members on benchmarking and other relevant topics. Share survey results with your members and use these in strategy sessions.
Association Man 