Member Engagement
Today I attended a session on “Building Loyalty: A Life Cycle Engagement Plan”. I got to thinking about my association’s membership………When a member calls to end membership, my first thought is “how engaged were they with the association?” In order to answer that, you need to have a way to measure membership engagement. How do you record this information? At NACUBO, our database maintains a pretty accurate record of purchases and participation. Quarterly, our director of membership and marketing ranks members based on their engagement with the association. There are 5 levels to the ranking. We know that our “gold” members are highly involved with the association and most likely will renew. The “tin” members have not been engaged at all and tend to be business partner members or smaller institutions that have a very limited budget.
At my previous association, we had noticed that members were more likely to let their membership lapse in the first to third year of membership. This point was emphasized by the content leaders today in the session I attended on “Building Loyalty: A Life Cycle Engagement Plan”. The content leaders reiterated the necessity of a 1st year of membership engagement plan. As association professionals, I think that we are each responsible for increasing our member‘s engagement. It isn’t simply the “job” of the membership staff. As a team, we can all effectively communicate the value of association membership and the impact it can have on particular industries as a whole. This session gave me a lot of ideas to bring back to my association, especially as our renewal period quickly approaches.
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Comments
This is an interesting way to classify the members. Are you able to vary your general level of contact by level of engagement and, if so, what is your philosophy (i.e. do you initiate more contact with tin to try to upgrade them from their at-risk status, or do you spend more time with the gold and other precious metals because you'll probably get more 'bang for your buck' from greater contact with them).
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | February 24, 2009 4:03 AM
This is a neat model to share - curious what types of participation are you tracking and are you tracking involvement at all levels of the organization.
As the DT Join and DT Volunteer studies both show, its about connecting to the community. We spend a lot of time in associations tracking retention while tracking engagement is often overlooked past the national meeting attendance, purchases and national committee and board service. Love to hear who's digging deeper.
Posted by: Peggy Hoffman | February 24, 2009 8:56 AM
Kristin, I'm glad the session gave you some ideas to bring back to your association. If anyone would like a copy of the powerpoint we gave just email me at jgriffin@marketinggeneral.com
Posted by: Jeremy Griffin | February 24, 2009 12:02 PM
We rank our member by their engagement levels. This includes all of their purchases, registrations, attendance, etc. We are an association with members that are organizations (institutions specifically) rather than individual people. The ranking is based on the engagement of an entire institution rather than one person. We tend to target those members that fall into the "middle" rankings. We do try to engage those in the "tin" levels but not as much as those that have bought or participated. Our director of membership & marketing will actually be presenting on this at the ASAE Membership/ Marketing Conference that is coming up.
Posted by: Kristin Witters | February 26, 2009 8:56 AM
Let us know once the presentation is done. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in more details on how the ranking system works.
Posted by: Jeremy Griffin | February 26, 2009 2:31 PM