Category: membership

Big Risk, Big Reward

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Big Risk, Big Reward
two red dice with black dots

This is IT. You’ve just come up with THE game-changing idea for your organization. It’s going to transform your profession or industry, bring in more members, or dramatically increase your non-dues revenue.

Upside: potential HUGE reward.

Downside: equally HUGE risk.

But we’re associations. We’re risk-averse. So don’t do it, right?

WRONG.

Part of making a big impact is being willing to make a big bet. But be smart about it, and find ways to reduce your risk.

Do your homework on your audiences. Craft a business plan that helps you surface your assumptions so you can test them. Create a prototype. Run beta tests. Get member input, and not just from your board. Invest. Determine in advance how much you can invest before you need to start seeing a return. Have a plan B and a plan C. Define what success looks like. Be ready to capture what you learned, whether it works or not. Iterate. Know what your exit strategy is.

You only get so many opportunities to take the big leap, so choose carefully. If you do, you’ll start a virtuous circle where you get MORE opportunities to take those game-changing risks because you know how succeed AND fail well.

Want to learn more about how your association can do this successfully? Check out Spark’s lean startup consulting options, and get started innovating better today.

Photo by manas rb on Unsplash

Reaching Detente With Your Chapters

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Reaching Detente With Your Chapters
pink and white boxing gloves on a grey concrete background

One of the truisms of association management is that national/chapter relationships are often…fraught. Even though we’re all ostensibly on the same side, it doesn’t always feel that way. Each side feels like the other is holding out on the them or trying to gain advantage, and the lack of trust that results makes it hard to communicate and to work together for the good of the organization as a whole and, ultimately, the profession or industry you serve.

How do you get past this?

I was recently chatting with some colleagues who were working through this exact problem. Details concealed, of course, but a little background. The organization has chapters in every state. As is common, some are quite strong and many are less so. The national provides staff support for chapters, but it’s in the form of two staff members who are both in DC (and in the eastern time zone).

The national wants to switch to an “account executive” model, dividing the country into regions and locating a regional chapter support manager in each of them. Those regional managers would still report to the national membership director, but they would work remotely and be charged solely with supporting the chapters in their region (so they would really work FOR the chapters).

Sounds great, right? Unless you’re a strong chapter that’s worried that this is a power grab by the national. And there is one chapter in particular with a strong, nationally-known executive and a full staff of their own. The national staff is concerned that she will lead the revolt that will doom their plan to help struggling chapters by providing better overall support and coordination.

What we realized is that this apparent negative could actually be a huge advantage. But it would all depend on the approach. Going to the strong chapter executive with, “This is the plan that we, the national, in our great and mighty wisdom, have devised for you, the poor little chapters, and you’ll accept it whether you want to or not!” would result in disaster. It turns her into an opponent immediately. “My chapter is just fine, and we don’t need your help/interference, thanks.”

But, if the national approached the strong chapter executive with this as a POSSIBLE idea to provide better support for the chapters that they’d very much like her to PILOT for them before they consider rolling it out to all the chapters, suddenly, we’re on the same side of the table working together to solve a problem.

Of course, the national has to be genuine. The program really IS a pilot and is open to modification – or even being dumped – based on the experiences of the beta group, which should probably consist of some chapters of all types, strong and weak. The staff person would remain at the national headquarters during the pilot, but she would switch her work schedule to better align with the region’s time zone. And if the beta testers came up with a better idea, the national would pilot that as well.

How can you start standing next to your chapters facing issues together rather than standing opposite them and *being* the issue?

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

She Tells Two Friends…And They Tell Two Friends…

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
three black pump bottles with gold trim - shampoo, conditioner & body wash

Remember that old Faberge shampoo commercial, where the hook was that the shampoo was SO amazing that a woman told two friends about it, and then they each told two friends, etc., until the screen was covered with little boxes containing pictures of female heads with awesomely feathered hair?

Witness word of mouth at work.

The exact number offered differs, but we’ve all heard the old trope that someone who has a good experience tells a small number of other people, while someone who has a bad experience tells a MUCH LARGER number of other people.

For associations, the customer service we offer our members is a huge source of word of mouth, positive and negative.

So how can you make sure your customer service is in tip-top shape?

First of all, even if you’re “senior,” don’t take yourself out of the loop. It’s easy to say: “Let the call center/junior staff handle it. I’m too busy/important/expensive.” Wrong. The day-to-day treatment your members receive IS your organization to them. No matter what super-important, high-level project you’re working on, if your members have a lousy experience every time they call, email, or otherwise ask for help, they aren’t going to care.

Second, empower your staff. Tell all your front-line staff that they have the authority to do whatever seems fair to them to resolve a member’s problem without fear of punishment. And back that up. Yeah, they’re going to make mistakes. And you’ll want to make sure that post-game analysis is part of your process, so you can talk through what your staff chose and whether there might be an even better way to respond the next time. But seriously, your word on “no punishment” has to be IRON CLAD. If it is, I guarantee that beautiful things will happen between your staff and members.

Third, secret shop, or better yet, ask trusted members to do so for you and report back.

Fourth, ask your members. We all survey, actually probably over-survey, our members about EVERYTHING. And we love those Likert scales, because we can make all sorts of pretty charts and graphs from them. But ranking your conference location or the quality of a webinar speaker or the ease of your renewal process on a 1-5 scale is way less important than this one question, that should be on every survey you ever send:

“If there was ONE THING we could do to make your experience with us better, what would it be?”

Yep, that’s an open-ended comment box type question, which means you won’t be able to make a nice graph out of it that you can show to your boss or your board and compare across time. And 90+% of the time, it will be empty when your survey is submitted. But 10% of the time, you are going to get fantastic intel about what your association could be doing that would make a real difference for your members and other audiences. And isn’t that why you exist in the first place?

Photo by Leanna Cushman on Unsplash

What’s “Normal” For You?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Chart showing membership retention rates from Marketing General's 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, pg. 20

An association colleague recently called me because her membership director is “freaking out” about their association’s retention rate.

The rate? 65%.

Which, if you look at data like that from Marketing General’s 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report above, is low, even for individual membership associations.

Average retention rate for IMOs = 79%

Median retention rate for IMOs = 82%

So 65% is bad, right? Terrible, even.

Cue membership director freak out.

My colleague and I talked about a bunch of potential reasons for this:

  • They’re a secondary membership association, and their members have LOTS of other options.
  • Relatedly, potential members have finite resource (dollars and time) to invest in association membership.
  • They do a six-month check-in with new members to ask about their expectations and how the association is doing at meeting them, and regularly hear that their new members were looking for information on particular topics and haven’t found it, even though the association almost always offers AMPLE information on those exact topics.
  • Relatedly, they’re concerned their systems are not user-friendly and are too complicated to navigate.
  • In their industry, employers are clawing back money for professional development, including association memberships.
  • Members may be coming in to learn about a particular topic, getting through everything the association has to offer on that topic in a year or two, and dropping membership.

We also talked about some possible remedies:

  • Create a drip welcome campaign that introduces one benefit at a time with a clear call to action. And track who responds to what.
  • Perform UX/UI testing at their upcoming annual meeting (they’re already planning to run member focus groups, so they just need some computers with keystroke logging software and a few monitors).
  • Track member interests.
  • Institute a regular reinstatement campaign, segmented by member interests, so that as they have new resources come available in interest areas, they can solicit lapsed members who are interested in that topic to rejoin.

And all that probably will help.

But I did leave her with one question to ponder: What’s “normal” for you?

To put it another way: Is 82% a good retention rate?

Now, obviously, for my friend, that would be OUTSTANDING. But if your normal retention rate is 97%, like another association colleague I was recently speaking with, not so much.

This illustrates the importance of benchmarking AGAINST YOURSELF. You need to know what’s normal for your association, not just the industry as a whole, so you know what are reasonable goals to set for your team (if your normal retention rate if 65%, it is not reasonable to set a goal of 80% for next year – try 67%), when to celebrate success (if my friend’s association gets to 67% next year), and when to be worried (if you’re like my other colleague, and retention drops to 92%).

Header photo and data from Marketing General’s 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, page 20. Download your copy at https://www.marketinggeneral.com/knowledge-bank/reports.

Try Before You Buy

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Try Before You Buy
White woman in a brown shirt and cream apron standing behind a bakery counter with various baked goods on display

Free samples are a time-honored tradition at bakeries. You walk in and there, on the counter, are bite-sized samples of some of the wares available for sale. You might have come in for a loaf of bread or a cup of coffee, but that taste of a croissant or a bear claw or a palmier prompts you to add a few treats to your order.

Associations can do the same thing.

I was recently talking to a membership director of a trade association for a highly regulated industry. His association has a very defined universe, where all the players (members or not) know about the association, and fairly high dues. In other words, there aren’t 100,000 potential nonmember individuals out there who just need to be informed that the association exists to fork over a small amount of personal cash to join.

This association has a VERY high retention rate – nearly 100% most years – and has already captured about 70% of their potential universe.

But what about that other 30%?

So far, their recruitment plan has mostly been for the membership director to call CEOs of nonmember organizations and ask them to join. And it does work, for some of them (they do recruit at least a few new members every year). But he was looking for some ideas to juice things up a bit.

I asked him: “What would members (not staff) say your main member value proposition is? Do you know?”

He did. There are two main groups: People who come for the professional network, and people who come for one particular tangible benefit they provide.

Next question: “Is there a way to let prospective members have a taste of your association before they buy?”

For the prospects who are looking for community, we talked about their events. Nonmembers are allowed to attend nearly all of them, for a fee. But they also have regular “pocket” meetings, informal in-person gatherings of CEOs in various locations around the area their association serves.

One idea: Ask attending CEOs to bring a nonmember colleague for free, as a guest. The CEOs won’t be tasked with making the membership sale – that’s on the membership director, for follow up to pitch membership after the gathering. Member CEOs are just the ones making the introduction, and then when that prospect does come, she already knows someone in the room.

For the prospects who are looking for that “stuff” style tangible benefit, we brainstormed ways the association might be able to offer limited, metered access to prospects, i.e., you get one freebie to try it out, after which the membership director can follow up and pitch membership.

What can you do to allow your prospects to get a taste of what your association provides to entice them to join?

Photo by Ekaterina Tyapkina on Unsplash

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Two dolphins in turquoise water

The title of the fourth book in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “So long, and thanks for all the fish” is the message the intellectually-superior-to-humans dolphins leave as they depart Earth just before the Vogons show up to demolish it to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Don’t worry – the dolphins save the day by constructing a duplicate Earth and transporting everything from the original Earth onto it before the Vogons destroy the original Earth, thus saving the human race.

So what does this have to do with associations?

What happens to your members when they retire from the industry your association serves?

Do you offer them nothing more than active professional benefits at an active professional price? Do you kick them out because they no longer meet the standards of membership?

Or do you provide ways for them to move to an emerita/us status and stay engaged in different ways that make sense to people who’ve stepped back from active day to day involvement in the profession?

What might that look like?

  • Has your association been trying to launch a mentoring program? Most mentoring programs suffer from too many prospective padawans and not enough Jedi masters (to mix my sci-fi metaphors for a moment). Retired members and young members are a match made in heaven (or at least on Tatooine) for cross-mentoring.
  • Are you short volunteers who can help with the doing, not just the planning and issuing of orders? Your emerita/us members have time and expertise.
  • Do you need people who can help orient new members? Trust me, your staff doesn’t know what members need to know, but other members do.
  • Are you trying to run a fundraising campaign and need people to make initial contacts? Your retired members can give, use the networks they developed over the course of their entire careers to help you identify prospects, and use their career’s worth of contacts to open doors.

Don’t leave your retirees with no option but to say, “So long, and thanks for all the fish!” Find ways to engage their expertise in and passion for your industry or profession in ways that make sense for them.

Photo by Ranae Smith on Unsplash

Do Your Incentives Make Sense?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Do Your Incentives Make Sense?
Blue question mark on pink background

I was recently chatting with a newly hired membership director. Their association offers both individual and group membership, and they were looking for ideas on ways to increase individual recruitment and retention.

We had a great conversation and shared lots of potential ideas they could pursue.

But one thing jumped out to me immediately. Their group memberships (80% of their members) are paid by companies. Their individual memberships are almost universally paid by the individuals. And the individual memberships cost more and offer fewer benefits.

Spot the problem?

The association has good reasons to nudge people towards join as groups. Having the entire team as members is better for the member organizations, and administering group memberships is easier for the association. So just flipping that equation – dropping the price for individuals and offering them more in the way of benefits – would be counter-productive.

So what we discussed as a solution was to find what’s common among the individual members that’s not among the members that join as a group.

  • Are their companies smaller?
  • Are they from different industry segments?
  • Are they in a different career stage?

Once the association can figure out what makes those individual members different, i.e., answering why they are joining as individuals rather than a group in the first place, they can develop offerings that address those different needs. If they’re able to do this carefully and well, charging more, less, or the same as the group memberships won’t matter – the members will segment themselves appropriately based on their needs.

Do the incentives you offer your audiences make sense to them? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Be the Solution

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Be the Solution
Rubik's cube on a white background

Why do people associate in the first place?

We come together because we have a goal we want to achieve or a problem we want to solve that has proved resistant to individual fixes.

I was reminded of this yesterday, as I joined the first Prometheus First Tuesday conversation of 2025.

I joined the breakout room on the topic of membership marketing. One of the participants shared that his members, classroom teachers, are stressed for time and money (and other resources), so they tend to request bite-sized learning and content they can easily implement in the classroom immediately.

Sounds (relatively) easy, right?

Well, not if your customary approach to creating professional development has been to focus on traditional multi-week courses.

So we brainstormed some of ways to chop up the association’s existing PD offerings into just-in-time, highly digestible, immediately applicable chunks.

The main one? Put together a member task force to address it. They’re the experts in what pieces are most useful, what delivery formats will work, and what classroom teachers need to take away from the modules, both in terms of what they’ll learn and in terms of specific tools and techniques.

This led to a larger discussion of what it means for associations to be solution providers for members.

As Anna Caravelli and I discussed in our 2015 whitepaper, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In, what we should be after is “level four” engagement, where:

Organization is product-agnostic. It seeks a network of partners to serve customers’ needs.

Taking this perspective is both liberating – the association doesn’t have to create all the solutions for members and other audiences, but can also point people to solutions provided by other organizations – and a little scary, as the association gives up control over those solutions and invites other players into the relationship.

This is perhaps even more important in 2025 than it was in 2015, as the volume of AI-generated “slop” proliferates online.

Information has never been easier to come by, which is a serious potential problem for associations that have long positioned ourselves as primary sources for the professions and industries we serve. However, good, valid, useful, accurate information is becoming increasingly hard to find, which represents an opportunity for associations to curate solutions and information for our members and other audiences, regardless of who created those solutions and that information in the first place.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

“My Members Don’t Read!”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on “My Members Don’t Read!”
Bronze statue of a woman reading a tablet she's holding in her right hand

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this.

Now raise your hand if you’ve SAID this.

(Everyone’s hands should be up by now.)

And we can all also relate to hearing, “I didn’t know you did X! I really need that!” from our members. ALL THE TIME.

OK, so we’ve all been complaining about this for years. Our members have no idea what we offer them. What we’re doing to educate them isn’t working.

What do we do to fix it?

I don’t claim to have the answer, but I do have some ideas about where to look:

K.I.S.S. Many of our organizations, in an attempt to be all things to all people (or due to the temptation of all that tasty, tasty non-dues revenue), have larded up our membership “benefits” with so much tangential crap that our members can’t focus on the stuff that will actually help them achieve their goals and fix their problems. Not to single out a particular industry, but while royalty revenue from your credit card program is nice, is it worth losing your members’ attention over the things that really matter to them?

Inside Voice. How much do your members need to know about the internal workings and arrangement of your association to find stuff? If the answer isn’t “zero,” you need to rethink how you present information. Your members don’t care that the professional liability insurance you offer them lives in your financial services department, which they have to access under Member Services –> Other Services –> Affinity Programs. What does “affinity program” mean anyway, if you’re, say, an instrumentation engineer, as opposed to an association membership professional? View the world from their perspective and represent your programs, products, and services accordingly.

Broadcast. Are you targeting the particular needs of particular members, or are you still broadcasting everything to everyone? Have a conference that’s for marketing directors? Why are you sending a thousand marketing messages to CEOs? They’re tuning you out, and the next time you launch your CEO salary survey, they aren’t going to be listening. “But our AMS…” “But our bulk mail client…” No buts. Learn what your members are interested in AS INDIVIDUALS, track it, and target your messaging appropriately.

How do you think we can we do a better job of educating our members about the things we offer that we know they need (because they told us) but that they don’t know we have?

Photo by ian borg on Unsplash

What Do You Reward?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
White West Highland terrier wearing a blue neckerchief

Novelty or loyalty?

We’ve all heard the come-ons: Switch your cable/cell/Internet/long distance provider and we’ll give you gifts, or better pricing, or premium services for free, or whatever.

Everybody’s always looking for new customers, right?

Association professionals should know better. But we don’t. We know that a retained member is more valuable than a new member. We know how much more expensive it is to get a new member. We know how important member satisfaction is.

But who gets the goodies?

New members – join now and you get free months, a free book, a free webinar, a free conference attendance, etc.

What if we rewarded loyalty instead?

What if you said: “As a thank you for your committee service last year, please choose any book in our bookstore.”?

What if you offered buy 5 get the sixth for free on your conference attendance?

What if you sent out a letter that read: “Congratulations on ten years of continuous membership! Next year’s on us!”?

How can you show the love to your most loyal supporters?

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

(Yes, that’s a picture of a dog. What’s the first thing you think of when I say “loyalty”?)