Membership Engagement Strategy
The first step to improving engagement is to create a membership engagement strategy that builds, validates and measures your organisation’s strategy. Membership engagement services help steer the future of the organisation by consistently keeping your members engaged, you won’t just attract and keep more members—you’ll have the leverage to increase your event attendance and other types of revenue.
Create a Clear Membership Engagement Strategy
Create a clear four-step membership engagement strategy: plan, promote, execute and follow up. In order to know if your strategy is working, you need to begin with clearly developed and easily measurable plans and goals. How are the relationships with your members going to change through this plan? What will you measure to know if you’ve achieved your goal?
Identify Personas to Gain Membership Engagement
Initially, you need to understand who your members are. Personas help give an insight into member requirements. We might break down the membership into small groups divided by things like job title, time in role, company size, education, history, and more.
When you have well-defined personas, you can start to see how each type of member interacts with your association. The data behind your personas will give some insight. Some may show a high interest in webinars, while others may show no interest but have other requirements. What are each persona’s most urgent and pervasive challenges? How can your membership organisation and community help to solve them?
Membership Engagement
Membership engagement is not instantaneous, there are several stages within the engagement process based on the stage your members are in, with hopes of moving them towards full engagement. In the case of an online member community, common steps in the engagement process include awareness of the community, visiting the community, returning frequently, asking a question, responding to a discussion and adding content.
Measurement of Member Engagement
Since there are different degrees of engagement, Romax will use different metrics to track your success and identify your weaknesses. Then, you can make adjustments to specific aspects of your engagement plan without having to waste your time on areas that are working well.
You’ll need to decide how you will communicate the opportunities for engagement to your members throughout each phase of the process. Consider how you will target your audience: email, direct mail, member events, member publications, search engines, social media, etc.
Your membership engagement services strategy is an ongoing initiative. To remain successful requires consistent effort on the part of your organisation to deliver ongoing value to your members while making adjustments to your plan.
With more than 20 years of experience managing membership communications, direct marketing, client printing and communication services for organisations, Romax will add value and will successfully direct the process for you.
