Managing an association involves a lot of responsibilities on an administrative, managerial, and financial level. But most importantly, membership management is essential to guarantee the success of your association. If we look at the 2015 membership marketing trends, we notice that 23% of the membership renewals were related to “Networking with the others of the field”. On the other hand, the top reason for not renewing a membership was due to “the lack of engagement with the organisation” for 38% of the members.
These results remind us how important member engagement and membership management are. In this article, we will explore what the key value in one’s membership is, how to measure your association’s success, and finally, how to drastically improve the global value proposition of your association with tips and tricks on membership management.
Membership value
Before we delve into this, let’s be very clear about one point: as mentioned in a previous article, the success of your community depends on your members. The way they are interacting and creating value together is essential. As a community manager, or president of the association, you are not the one creating value to your community. This may sound harsh, but your purpose should be to drive your members to be more engaged, more involved.
The collaboration process of your community should be the central axis of your value proposition, whether in your marketing communication or in your membership management efforts. Your members have to realize they are the centerpiece of the community. They are the ones creating membership value. Making your community awesome.
3 metrics to measure how successful your association is
There are three key metrics to your membership management that determine if your association is successful:
- Member acquisition
- Member engagement
- Member retention
According to the 2015 membership marketing trends, associations are more likely to focus their efforts on member engagement than on the other components, which is logic: the more your members are engaged, the higher the membership value is. Plus, you kill two birds with one stone by focusing your efforts on member engagement as you are also positively affecting the member retention.
Member acquisition is also a key element: if your community is growing, it offers more potential interactions. Also, new members can give a new shape to the community. They can start new debates that can enrich the interactions. The more, the merrier! In addition, it conveys a strong image to your members, the image of a community widely recognized.
Tips to improve your membership management
Streamline your communication, make staying in touch easy
You can definitely not continue interacting with your members solely with emails. It has become inefficient and time consuming. The communication system you are using should be customized according to the needs of your members. Your communication tool should support you in the association’s daily tasks while allowing you to become closer to your members (a lot more than with traditional mailing). I would recommend to go for something mobile-first. Nowadays, there are several apps that can help you chat, WhatsApp-style, but also organize your events, and maintain a member directory. That’s what we do at Minsh, and there are plenty of other tools as well, like Slack, or Yammer to name a few.
Engage them more
There is plenty of tricks to easily engage your members. We recorded many of those tricks in previous blog posts. Check out “All you need to know about community engagement“ or “11 tips to successfully launch your community platform“. Most importantly: be creative and always think out of the box!