To radically improve member engagement requires you to look carefully at how you create engagement opportunities based on how members value their time. Before the COVID19 pandemic, most associations viewed themselves as mainly physical organizations hosting events and training courses, chapter get togethers and board meetings.
That focus on physical events has perhaps been the winning formula and the Achilles Heel of associations this century.
In 2013 I did some interesting research on member engagement in the association, SEGD, that I was running. Interestingly enough, I found that less than 50% of our members were engaging with us at physical functions. I learned that this was not unusual. In fact when I benchmarked SEGD, I found that was actually a pretty high percentage. For many associations, attendance at their annual conference was generally only around 10-15% of membership, versus our 25-30% attendance. If member engagement is critical to reducing churn and keeping members happy, they we certainly were not doing a great job only engaging less than 50% of our members in the physical events. Never mind others 10-15%!
ASAE research shows that the more you can engage a member, the less churn you should expect. Most association leaders interpreted that as physical engagement, but I discovered that is not the case. Engaging members digitally is effective as well. A different effectiveness, but effective nonetheless. Digital member engagements allow you to engage them more often and that regularity is key to keeping them as members. We are all time stretched and committing 2-3 days to a conference is not easy, but looking at something you have published for 1-30 minutes? That makes a world of difference in member engagement.
Knowing there is real value in shorter term digital member engagements got me thinking about other ways to engage members. Many digital platforms and our on-line competitors were engaging members of their communities much more often than we were and growing much faster than we were!
We created an inventory of how we were engaging members based on the time commitment required. First conferences, then Board Meetings, chapter meet ups, courses, feature articles, short news pieces, awards write ups, the weekly newsletter, social media. It quickly became apparent that we needed much stronger content on-line to engage members for short 5-30 minutes at a time.
As we worked on our short time commitment content and introduced many new types of content on our website, so we saw our membership begin to steadily rise and within 3 years, we had almost doubled membership and increased our on-line community by more than 300%.
Websites, new types of content and all digital platforms will be the way of the future, long past this pandemic. They should have been a strategic part of all associations ways to engage members since the early 2000’s. The pandemic has just accelerated the need for associations to think differently about member engagement and figure out how to engage members digitally as a part of their strategy.
Detailed ideas, how to’s and strategies are covered in my book: Creating Digital Value for Members.
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