5 Key Considerations for Engaging Your Association’s Members

No matter your trade or professional association’s goals, having a base of loyal, engaged supporters is the top factor for success. To secure essential revenue, you must motivate members to renew their memberships, purchase your offerings, and attend events. Fortunately, engaged members are likely to do these activities, and the more they participate in them, the more engaged they will be.

You can even meet goals like acquiring new members more easily when current members are dialed into your association. For example, members who are deeply engaged are more likely to refer their friends and colleagues.

In this guide, we’ll explore key considerations for keeping member engagement high:

1. Leverage a community engagement platform
2. Use technology to personalize member experiences.
3. Encourage member-generated content.
4. Track the member lifecycle.
5. Ask for feedback regularly.

Let’s start by discussing how leveraging technology like a community engagement platform or an association management software (AMS) streamlines member engagement and provides insights into your members’ preferences.

1. Leverage a community engagement platform.

Many members join trade and professional associations for the ability to connect with other professionals. Meet their needs by ensuring they can do just that with a community engagement platform.

Community engagement platforms are a software solution associations can leverage to create social media sites just for their members. However, unlike on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you won’t need to compete with the rest of the internet for your members’ attention. Instead, every post will be created by and for your members about topics relevant to your association.

For an overview of how this technology works from the user end, let’s take a look at our favorite community engagement platform, Tradewing.

New members receive an email invitation that prompts them to activate their account. This process should be as simple as pressing a button, logging into their member account through your website, or scanning a QR code.

Once members navigate to your engagement platform, they’re greeted with a social media-like interface. Here, they can make posts related to your association, engage with other members’ posts, and read up on the latest news from your association’s team.

Additionally, members will be prompted to complete a membership profile. Your community engagement platform should enable you to add the custom fields you want to profiles. For example, one association might simply ask members for their contact information and job titles, whereas another association might also prompt members to share their alma mater, career goals, and hobbies.

Members can then search your membership directory for others to network with and send private messages through your community engagement platform. For example, a member might see someone post an interesting article they wrote. They could then click on that member’s name, peruse their profile, and write a direct message to them.

With these tools, networking becomes a breeze, keeping your members engaged with each other long-term.

2. Use technology to personalize member experiences.

Message personalization is cited as the number one tactic used by email marketers to boost engagement. Why not apply the same principles to your association’s engagement strategy?

While impactful, gathering and analyzing member data to build personalized experiences can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Here are a few tools to facilitate the process:

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

CRM platforms make it possible to gather and manage all of your association’s data in one centralized database. This data can reveal anything from members’ alma maters to their preference for digital communications over mail. With this information, you can tailor communication and engagement opportunities to your members’ interests.

Association management software (AMS)

AMS solutions are the standard member management tool for associations. Many are all-in-one solutions that include CRM functionality tailored to association needs. In addition to storing member data, these tools also help associations track and collect membership dues, monitor engagement rates, and conduct email outreach to individual members. Plus, while few AMSs offer robust community engagement tools, many top platforms integrate with community management tools, like Tradewing.

Advanced analytics platforms

Specialized analytics platforms reveal how and why members interact with your website, providing the insights you need to improve. Google Analytics, for example, allows you to track your association’s website performance and analyze user behavior through metrics like website traffic, source of traffic, demographics, conversions, and more. Not only does this reveal who is visiting your website, but it also helps you diagnose and improve any technical issues that impact the user experience.

Personalized video engagement

Personalized video platforms are an emerging technology that empowers organizations to craft individualized videos for each member. This entails delivering a bespoke video message uniquely tailored to the recipient’s preferences and interests. The inherent personalized touch of these videos fosters heightened engagement, significantly contributing to improved retention and conversion rates. Remarkably, a substantial 93% of organizations that have incorporated personalized videos have reported a noteworthy uptick in conversion rates.

These tools allow you to uncover essential information about members, which you can use to build your engagement strategy. By grounding your strategy in data, you’ll create engagement opportunities that resonate with your members.

3. Encourage member-generated content.

When members create content for themselves and their fellow members, they’re more likely to continue engaging with your association. User-generated content includes anything your members make related to your association that they opt to share with the rest of your community. This might include:

• Blog posts on their personal websites
• Conversation-starting questions they post on your community engagement platform
• Video content, such as day-in-the-life videos or recorded software tutorials
• Visual media, like art, infographics, or photographs

For instance, here’s an example of user-generated content from Tradewing’s community engagement platform:

You might think this looks like a post on social media, and you’d be right! Social media platforms like Facebook keep their millions of users engaged over the course of years by encouraging user-generated content. Rather than Facebook’s team engaging users, they rely on users to engage one another, and your association can do the same.

4. Track the member lifecycle.

Stages like awareness, recruitment, and engagement make up the membership lifecycle. Analyze your data to categorize donors based on where they fall in this cycle. Then, send targeted messages encouraging them to advance to the next stage.

For example, use the date they joined to determine when to send renewal reminders.

According to Fonteva’s guide to member engagement, tailoring events and opportunities to a member’s position in the lifecycle is an effective way to motivate them to participate. Here are some ways to engage members at various stages of the cycle:

• New members: Send them a welcome email series, create and share onboarding webinars, and assign them an experienced member as a mentor.
• Current members: Offer advanced learning opportunities, invite them to guide educational courses, and extend leadership roles.
• Members at risk of lapsing: Provide a customized value proposition, offer exclusive discounts, and share member appreciation messages and benefits.

Adapting your engagement opportunities to the member lifecycle is ultimately another form of personalization. Your engagement opportunities must align with members’ interests, skills, knowledge levels, and experience with your association.

5. Ask for feedback regularly.

Have you ever changed your website design or rolled out a new webinar series and wondered what members think about it? The best way to know how members feel about changes, events, and your association in general is to ask them.

eCardWidget’s guide to member appreciation encourages associations to send surveys to members regularly, explaining that they “show members that you appreciate and respect their opinions.” In turn, their feedback allows you to adjust existing engagement opportunities and add any that members suggest. Send tailored surveys for occasions like:

• Membership renewals
• Annual meetings, conferences, or other events
• Membership services and benefits check-ins
• Release of new eLearning resources or courses
• Rollout of new policies or initiatives

You can also send more general surveys every year or quarter to get a baseline understanding of what members think of your association. Offer a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended survey questions to allow members to elaborate on their answers.

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Developing a member engagement strategy pays dividends to your association. After all, when your members are engaged, they are also more likely to see value in your offerings, form meaningful relationships with other members, and feel a sense of loyalty that makes them want to renew year after year.