membership Archives - Page 5 of 13

Membership 101: The Full Series

Posted on September 5, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment

People working at computers in a coffee shop

I’ve gotten through all the topics I had planned for the Membership 101 series, which leads to two additional questions:

What did I miss? Are there membership topics you were hoping I’d cover that I never did?
So then you might ask: “Um, what were all the topics you covered again?”

So glad you asked! Here’s the list of all the Membership 101 posts with all the links:

Series Launch (which did have a topic request that is still on my list, but it was related to certification programs, so it’s not part of this series)
MVP (not Most Valuable Player, Member Value Proposition)
Recruitment V. Retention V. Renewal (what they are, and how they relate to each other)
Lead Generation (making first contact with your eventual members)
Ladder of Engagement (taking those budding relationships to a more serious level)
How Do I Know When to Ask? (timing is everything)
Why Did They Join? (and why you really need to know the answer to this question)
The Welcome Series (don’t just dump everything on people at once)
What Is Engagement Anyway? (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)
The Importance of Personalization (not “Dear Colleague” – NEVER “Dear Colleague”)
Ladders of Engagement, Revisited (they’re not just for prospects)
LTV (Life Time Value)
Data, Data, Data (learn it, know it, live it)
Should You Reward Loyalty or Novelty? (it’s a trick question)
Who Counts? (on expanding your definition of community)
The Role of Volunteerism (or, more on engagement)
Effective Renewal Cycles (once you’ve got ’em, you want to make sure you keep ’em)
Exit Surveys (but sometimes they leave anyway – you should try to find out why)
Reinstatement (and sometimes, they come back)
What About Trade Associations? (both the same, and different)

Remember – let me know what I missed in the comments.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Membership 101: What About Trade Associations?

Posted on August 24, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

If you’ve been following the Membership 101 series, you may be wondering: “What about trade associations? A lot of your advice seems directed to individual membership/professional associations. My members are companies/institutions. Does your advice still hold?”

The answer? Sort of.

On the one hand, many things are different in your operating environment. Trade associations frequently have a highly defined universe – you often know EXACTLY how many companies qualify for membership in your association (and who they are). Generally speaking in individual membership associations, anyone who wants to pony up for dues can be a member, while in trade associations, new members may come in on provisional status until they’re approved by the board of directors, because there are qualifications they have to meet first. Dues are usually SIGNIFICANTLY higher than for professional societies – a $100 individual membership can be an impulse buy, but a $100,000 company membership is not. And advocacy often plays a far more significant role in the slate of benefits in trades than it does in individual membership societies – which can actually be a big problem, as companies elect to be free riders, trusting that the association will advocate for them regardless of whether they PAY for that service or not.

On the other hand, while the company may be paying for the membership, the association is still in the business of creating relationships between people (both between the members and the association and within the membership base as a whole). But being a trade adds a layer of complication to that. Your primary contact will often be a CEO-level person, but the dues notices go to the finance department, while the people who are taking advantage of membership benefits are often widely spread across the organization, and many of those people might, like the blind men of the fable, only be experiencing a tiny part of the elephant.

That means that a few of the things we’ve talked about in this series become even more important:

Trade association membership staff MUST accurately calculate comprehensive Life Time Value of membership, because the high dues amounts your members pay mean that it’s often appropriate to spend LARGE sums on recruitment.

Trade associations’ limited universe means that your members have the right to expect a much more personalized level of service. You should at least consider providing concierge type relationship management, including in-person visits.

Although someone in the C-suite is probably your primary membership contact (and thus approves paying the annual renewal notice), the value of membership may be somewhat hidden from that person, as staff members across their company are the ones who are using and benefitting from your programs, products, and services. Because of that, it’s critical to illuminate that value by providing an annual activity summary to that payment approver.

While advocacy is often a critical service your trade association provides, you have to be careful about how you talk about it. One, you can’t guarantee any legislative outcomes, so you have to be cautious about what you promise. And two, as mentioned above, there’s the free rider problem, so you need to think about what you can offer that will encourage companies to kick in their fair share.

Since you’re often talking large sums of money for dues, you also need to be aware of your members’ fiscal year, budget schedules, and annual flow of business in a way that an individual membership association promoting $100 membership doesn’t. Align your fiscal year with your members’, don’t run your renewal cycle during their busy season, and if you’re going to make significant dues changes, pay attention to their budget cycles before you do – they’re going to need some lead time to prepare.

But in the end, remember you’re still real people dealing with real people, and your main focus is still on creating authentic relationships that allow them to come together to accomplish goals they were unable to achieve on their own.

Membership 101: Reinstatement

Posted on August 2, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Two boys making "yuck" faces - image by Austin Pacheco from Unsplash

Hopefully, your exit survey recaptured a number of your members who lapsed due to inattention.

What about the ones who lapsed for cause? Is it worth trying to get them back?

Yes, with some conditions.

First, you need to segment your lapsed members into those who left for reasons that are under your control versus those who left for reasons that are NOT under your control. That second group would be situations like people who’ve retired (or, let’s be honest here, died), people who’ve left the industry or profession, companies that went out of business or were acquired – basically, people or organizations who’ve removed themselves, or whose circumstances have removed them, from the pool of potential members.

Reasons that would be under your control include things like:

Your association’s programs, products, or services didn’t live up to that member’s expectations
Your association is missing programs, products, or services that member wants you to offer
That member had a problem with your association that wasn’t resolved to her satisfaction
Your association took a position (possibly, but not necessarily, advocacy-related) that member disagreed with

In other words, she had problems that she should reasonably be able to expect you to help her solve or goals that she should reasonably be able to expect you to help her achieve, and you didn’t.

This is why it’s important, when members lapse, so find out why. In a broad sense, if you discover that a significant number of your lapsed members are, for instance, dissatisfied with your research journal, that’s a good indicator that you need to make some changes to it.

In the more narrow sense, when a member has left for cause, you shouldn’t just bombard her with pitches for something she already decided she didn’t want (membership in your association as it stood when she left). Assuming you have changed what she didn’t like – fixed the program she had a problem with, added the product she was looking for, made a second attempt to resolve her problem, adjusted your position on the issue she disagreed with – you need to tell her about that.

It’s also possible that she just misunderstood – “I joined to find a job and your career center wasn’t useful to me because you don’t offer a job agent” when you do, in fact, offer a job agent – and it’s OK to work to correct that misperception, but be careful how you do it. It’s not a terse email pointing out: “It’s RIGHT THERE, dummy!” It flows more like: She responded to your exit survey with that reason and said it was OK to follow up with her. So you do, by the method she preferred, and offer something like: “Thanks for responding to our exit survey. I see you let your membership lapse because you were dissatisfied with our career center. Can we set up a time where I can walk you through what’s there and how it works to see if we can resolve this for you?” Resolve the problem, be polite, and DON’T IMMEDIATELY PITCH “So you’re going to rejoin now, right?”. But do put her back in your recruitment campaign group, once her problem is resolved.

One last point on both your exit survey and reinstatement processes: Pay attention to your data. Sometimes you “lose” people because you literally lose contact with them. They may be students who graduated, moved to a new city, and are no longer using their .edu email address. They may have changed jobs, and if all you had was work address and email, they’ve vanished for all intents and purposes. There’s no perfect fix for this other than detective work. Some things you can add to your initial data collection that can at least help include getting more than one (address, phone number, email) and linking social profiles, particularly LinkedIn.

Image from Unsplash

Membership 101: Exit Surveys

Posted on July 25, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Sometimes, despite your best efforts to understand your members’ most pressing problems and most important goals, and provide solutions for them, members lapse.

What happens next?

You should try to find out why they left.

One approach membership pros often take to discover their reasons for leaving is to ask membership committee members to make calls to lapsed members.

Raise your hand if that works well for you.

[crickets]

The reason that approach often fails is that it’s too scary. Most volunteers are going to resist calling lapsed members, because while it’s possible that the lapsed member just forgot to renew, she might be actively upset about something. Your volunteer doesn’t want to – and isn’t equipped to – handle that. So what happens in reality is that you ask/assign committee members to make those calls, and oddly, they never seem to get around to it.

Another potential approach is to task your membership team with making those calls. They are equipped to deal with potentially angry members – at least in theory – but again, this is not a fun task, so it tends to continually get bumped to the bottom of the priority list. Even if your team does make those calls, some lapsed members will have a hard time being honest about what’s really bothering them on the phone with another human being. While some people enjoy being squeaky wheels, most of us have a hard time being critical.

The solution is an exit survey.

A caveat: an exit survey is not a scientifically valid instrument that will provide statistically significant P values. You’re not sending it to a representative random sample from a large enough population, and you aren’t going to get enough responses.

So why do one?

Exit surveys provide one last notice to members who may not have realized they’ve lapsed.
If someone left for cause, it gives him one last chance to tell you why and you one last chance to fix his problem.
Exit surveys provide clues to potential emerging problems with your member value proposition (MVP).

The best exit surveys are simple, asking one question only: “Why did you leave?”

The first option should always be: “I didn’t mean to lapse – I’d like to renew.”

You follow that with the common reasons you know people lapse.

Never offer: “Dues were too expensive.” Rephrase that as: “Value was too low” (which is what “dues were too expensive” really means).

The final option should be an open comment box. That is where you will get clues about emerging problems with your MVP, so make sure you review what lapsing members write in regularly.

To encourage responses, you will want to offer a small prize to everyone or a drawing for a larger prize for completing the survey. You always offer the option of submitting the survey anonymously, but allow people to share contact information if they want follow up about their responses and in order to get their prize or be entered into the prize drawing.

How often do you send it?

That depends on your rate of lapsing. Realize that you’re not going to get a lot of responses – maybe 5-10% of your group. That means out of 100 lapsed members, you might get five completed surveys. That might mean that, even if you do anniversary date renewals, you only send your exit survey once a year. Even if you do calendar renewals, if you’re a trade association with relatively few, large members, you might not even send it that often. Use your judgement.

Remember that however many responses you get, they’re anecdotes. And the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Those anecdotes are clues guiding you to areas where you need to do more research.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Membership 101: Effective Renewal Cycles

Posted on July 5, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment

Marketing General membership lifecycle graphic

At some point, after generating leads and nurturing relationships and persuading people to join and helping them find their own individual engagement paths, it’s time to ask your members to renew, to stick with you another year.

Membership retention is your goal – renewal is the process by which you achieve your goal. Renewal is all about how many of what types of notices are sent to whom on what schedule. In other words, it’s a campaign that reminds members why they want to stick with you and asks them to invest in another year.

Notice I didn’t say “convince” members. If you’ve been doing a good job with relationship building along the way, as so much of this series has focused on, renewal should be basically a formality. You are already a vital partner in your members’ success. Paying up for another year is just the final step. And frankly, if you’re not a vital partner in your members’ success, it’s going to be very difficult to convince them otherwise in a series of communications, no matter how persistent and persuasive your messaging or attractive your graphics.

As you’re constructing your renewal campaign, just as in earlier campaigns, you should answer the following series of questions:

What are our goals?
Who are our audiences? What do we know about them?
What’s the offer?
What are our key messages? What messages are persuasive to our various audience segments?
What tactics are we going to use? What platforms are available to us for getting our message out?
What resources can we enlist?
What’s the schedule? Who’s responsible to do what?
How will we know whether or not we met our goals?

Goals

For a renewal campaign, generally speaking, your goal is going to be to achieve a certain retention percentage. What’s a good retention percentage? The annual Marketing General Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report for 2017 lists an average renewal rate of 77% in professional societies and 88% in trade associations. (Marketing General will be releasing the 2018 data later this month, and you can register for the FREE release webinar here.)

What does that mean for your association? Maybe not that much. If, as a trade association, your retention rate has historically been 93%, “achieving” the industry standard would be cause for concern – why did your retention rate drop off 5%? Likewise, if, as a professional society, your retention rate has historically been 68%, setting a goal of 77% for the next year is likely unattainable.

You probably want your goal to be a little bit of a stretch, but not unrealistic.

Audiences

Well, for a renewal campaign, your audience is obviously your members. But I’d urge you to dig deeper and think about your segments. Who are the people who ALWAYS renew? Is there a segment of Texans that joined a year ago to get the member rate for your conference that was going to be in Dallas, only this next year, it’s in Vancouver? Do you have members who still prefer to renew by check? Do you have a bunch of members who all work for the same organization? Do you have a Pinterest page that draws attention from your women members? Or an Instgram account that attracts your young professionals? Do different sized companies use your membership benefits differently? What about your lapsed members? Is it time to solicit them again?

The Offer

Again, obviously, it’s to renew. One trap that associations fall into is getting late in a renewal campaign, seeing that retention rate is falling short of goals, and getting desperate – that is, starting to offer those slowpokes incentives to renew. The problem with that is that you train your members into bad behavior. “I waited to renew last year, and they offered me (extra months, a gift, a discount). I’ll do the same again this year and see what I can get.”

If you want to offer some sort of premium, reward the behavior you wish to see: renewing early in the cycle. Offer something special to the people who renew on the first notice, and for a limited time only. Train your members to good behavior.

The Messages

This is where you start thinking about those segments you identified in considering your audiences and thinking about what will be appealing to them. Remind different segments of what specific benefits they used in the past year, the problems you helped them solve or the goals you helped them achieve, and preview what you have planned for the coming year related to those problems and goals.

Trade associations with relatively few, large members should prepare individualized use reports for their member companies, not least of which because the person approving the renewal payment is often not the same as the many people who used benefits.

Even individual membership associations with lots of members should segment their messages, though. A student member does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is in the first five years of her career does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is mid-career does not interact with your association the same way as someone who is within a few years of retirement.

Tactics

Likewise, different members probably prefer to interact with your association on different platforms. Regardless of the segment, mix up your platforms. Don’t just send all your notices via email. Mix in some ads on your own website, some social media postings, print mail (maybe a traditional cover letter and printed renewal notice, maybe a colorful postcard, maybe both). Try a simplified landing page. Record a video of a few members explaining why they love your association. Maybe try a call from your CEO for high-profile members.

How many notices should you send? More than one and less than one hundred. OK, I’m being a little snarky there, but the only way to know is to test. Run experiments on how early to start the cycle (yes, it’s possible to start too early – have you ever gotten a notice to renew a magazine subscription before you’ve even received your first issue?). Run experiments on how to space out the notices. Run experiments on how long to keep pursuing people. Pay attention to results.

While you’re experimenting with all these platforms and tactics, pay attention to what happens. Use trackable URLs, watch for bumps in activity within a few days of the arrival of mailed notices, see who’s clicking on your social media postings or ads. Then as the campaign progresses, you know where to devote more resources, where to tweak what you’re doing for greater effectiveness, and where to stop putting good money after bad. Speaking of….

Resources

Money, yes, but also staff time and energy, volunteer help, even your whole membership. Take the time to segment and craft targeted messages. Take the time to run experiments and track what happens. Ask your volunteer leaders for their help – can they remind a colleague to renew? Tell your members it’s renewal season and ask them to help spread the word on social media.

Schedule

It’s important to create a detailed plan with what type of notice is going to go to whom with what messaging on what schedule, and who’s responsible to make that happen. It creates accountability, helps you with your results tracking, and ensures that your campaign doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of day-to-day busy-ness.

Metrics

Remember to sit down at the end of the campaign with the entire team who worked on it and assess how you did. Did you meet your initial goals? Why or why not? What worked better than you anticipated? What didn’t work? Is that something you just need to adjust next time, or should you dump it entirely? Celebrate your successes and capture what you learned from your failures. It will help you improve your next campaign. And don’t forget to thank everyone who helped.

Membership lifecycle graphic credit: Marketing General Inc.

Membership 101: The Role of Volunteerism

Posted on June 21, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Oncology Nursing Society volunteer contributions clock

“Engaged members renew.

Disengaged members don’t.”

If you’ve been around the association industry for more than a few minutes, you’ve undoubtedly heard at least one membership professional say that.

Volunteerism is a MAJOR opportunity for engagement.

But as we’ve discussed continually throughout this Membership 101 series, engagement, like brand, is defined by your audiences, not by you.

So how does that impact volunteering? After all, the association defines the board and committee structure, right?

Well, yes, but in 2018 I hope those aren’t the only opportunities for volunteering you’re offering your members.

In 2013, Peggy Hoffman (Mariner Management) and I wrote a whitepaper titled The Mission Driven Volunteer. It’s free, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should get a copy.

Our thesis was – and this remains true – that forces of generational change and differing needs and expectations mean that volunteering needs to change, too. Younger generations aren’t as interested in the type of prestige and position-based volunteering as their elders. They are still willing – even eager – volunteers, but their goals are different, concerned more with independence, meaning, and impact.

We proposed a model, mission-driven volunteering, that empowers individuals through things like micro-volunteering and adhocracy, and provides episodic and virtual opportunities to contribute.

The image above is from one of our case studies, the Oncology Nursing Society.

As Diane Scheuring, ONS’s membership and SIG manager, said: “We don’t want checkbook members. We want our members to say “yes” to ONS and to personally connected with us.”

One way they went about that is, rather than restricting definition of volunteer to committee or board service, ONS asked their members how they DO contribute and how they WANT TO contribute. Members’ responses led them to define volunteerism much more broadly, and also helped them better understand the concept of different levels of volunteering, represented by the clock image above:

Small investment: voting in an election, serving as a mentor
Bigger investment: item writing for their ONCC certification
Even bigger investment: national conference planning team
Biggest investment: serving on one of their few remaining standing committees or the board

By both changing the opportunities they offered and surfacing – and then recognizing – what people were already doing, they increased their volunteerism ration from one person in 26 to one person in five. In other words, 20% of their members are considered – and recognized as – active volunteers. This has had a positive impact on two of their key organizational metrics: membership retention and leadership development for individual nurses, which then increases the capacity of the entire system.

What are you doing to increase opportunities for different kinds of people to volunteer with your association? What are you doing to recognize the “hidden” work that’s already happening?

Membership 101: Who Counts?

Posted on June 5, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Who do you consider to be your members?

That seems like an easy question: “Anyone whose dues are current,” right?

But if you dig a little deeper, it quickly gets a lot more complicated.

Do you offer a grace period?
Are there ways to pay other than money?
What about the people in your profession or industry who haven’t paid?
What about the people who support those in your profession or industry?
What about their audiences or customers?

For instance, many associations report trouble attracting and retaining young professionals. But if we’ve set up “pay us money” as a barrier to entry, it’s no wonder. Young professionals are young – their employers may not pay for association membership for them, and if those employers don’t pay, young professionals often can’t afford to pay out of pocket. They tend not to be making large sums of money, and meanwhile they’re paying off school debt and/or saving for major life events and purchases. Is there a way those cash-strapped young professionals could contribute something else of value? The most obvious non-monetary contribution would be serving in a volunteer position, but they might not have the capacity to be committee members either. Could they serve as social media ambassadors for you? Volunteer at chapter events? Assist in moderating your online community (after, of course, receiving training)?

As another example, what roles do you offer for the people and organizations who support your profession or industry? What are you doing to work with those who provide training and education to your entering new or career-change professionals, whether they be graduate or undergraduate program faculty or those who provide more hands-on training at technical schools or through formal or informal apprenticeships? Those trainers and educators may not be appropriate targets for your primary membership benefits, since those benefits are likely targeted to people actually doing the work, but they are critical contributors to the profession or industry you serve. What are you doing to build relationships with them?

Many associations offer “supplier memberships,” but those are often little more than fees we charge companies for the right to advertise to our paying members. What can you do to stop treating those companies like a cash register? They are critical elements of your community, too.

There is no one right answer to any of these. But all those groups – people in their grace period, people who contribute to your association in ways other than financial, the rest of your industry or profession (including supporting players like educators who train people and suppliers who make their work possible), even potentially your members’ “end users” – are potential valuable contributors to your community, if you can find the right way to connect with them.

The Passive Experienced Member

Posted on April 25, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

The MCI Group recently released the American Engagement Index 2017 (the link takes you to a page where you can enter your contact information to get your own copy, and you really should). There’s lots of interesting information in there, but one thing jumped out at me (and Associations Now‘s Tim Ebner), in part because I’ve seen this issue in many of my clients: disengaged (or, using Tim’s term, “passive”) experienced members.

I’m about to lay an “on the one hand” – “on the other hand” post on you.

On the one hand, maybe it’s OK that a given experienced member is “passive.” She’s probably pretty settled in her career at this point. She has the degrees and certifications she needs to be successful. She’s not jumping jobs every 18 months anymore. And even when she is changing jobs, she has an established, robust network she can turn to for leads and connections. Her kids may be getting older and their lives might be getting more complicated. She might be in a “sandwich” situation, taking care of elderly relatives as well. In short, it might not be about you.

On the other hand, it MIGHT be about you. One issue that comes up over and over in talking with my clients’ members (regardless of profession/industry or whether membership is individual or corporate/institutional) is lack of content that goes beyond the basics. Many (if not most) associations appear to lack programs, products, and services that can help mid-career members achieve their particular most important goals or solve their unique most pressing problems.

Which makes sense. It’s relatively easy to figure out what someone who’s fresh out of school or otherwise new to a given profession or industry is going to need – introduction to basic principles, help understanding how to translate training or a particular degree into the actual jobs in your industry, relationship and network building, soft skills development, your certification – and it’s relatively easy to create programs, products, and services that deliver those things, often using mostly (or only) unpaid volunteers.

It’s not nearly as simple to to do that for people who already know the 101 and 201 level stuff. Their needs will be more complex and individualized. You might actually have to pay some experts (either subject matter or instructional design or both). You might have to act more as a broker, helping those members find what they need outside your association, with the association vetting quality and perhaps negotiating for better rates for association member, rather than creating programs yourself. You might have to step into the role of host, creating a forum for them to share information and experiences with each other, rather than a content-provider (and you should probably rethink what you charge for those different types of experiences). It’s not an easy nut to crack.

So which is it? Should you look at your passive members and think: “No worries – they’re just busy”? Or is it time to panic? How do you what situation you’re in?

You have to ask them. And I don’t just mean via a survey, because the answer here is utterly individual – one member might just be really busy, but the next one might be dissatisfied and ready to walk away if the situation doesn’t improve, and the only way you’ll know which is which is to have genuine one-on-one conversations. That can be scary, because you might hear some negative feedback. But diagnosing the problem correctly is the first step to finding an effective cure.

Growth Strategies from Top Fundraisers Q&A

Posted on April 11, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

In my last post, I shared the link to the webinar my Steal This Idea! co-author Sohini Baliga and I presented for Wild Apricot on March 21. Sohini and I got to as many questions as we could at the end the webinar, but as usual, we missed a few, so we’re answering them below:

How can wildlife conservation related organizations tap into millenials if we are asking them to be a hero for another species?

EWE: This provides a great opportunity to tell a story of an endangered animal (or species or wild place) in a way that’s compelling and, in that story, explain how your donor/member can be the hero who saves that animal (or species or wild place) by her donation.

What if your membership is a low fee like $25/year?

EWE: Well, at least you’ll probably never hear the objection: “Dues were too expensive”! Seriously, though, that hopefully means you have a lot of people in your membership file. The trick now is to start looking for the ones who do more than just pay their $25 a year – or who want to do more than that.

How have you had best success at gathering stories from members/donors?

EWE: Talk to them. That can be individual and formal (like a phone interview), group and formal (like a focus group), or individual and informal (like a conversation at an event). Pay attention to when he starts talking faster, or a little louder, or in a higher pitch. Watch for when her eyes light up and her face gets more animated. That means you’ve struck gold – you’ve discovered something that member is passionate about. Then it’s your job to look for ways that member’s passions tie to your organization’s mission, and explain to her how involvement in your organization will make a difference to that issue she’s passionate about.

We are a membership association of cause-oriented organizations. But we don’t have a cause ourselves. Will there be materials in this webinar that will help me?

EWE: Sohini and I would like to think so. When you’re a federation of organizations, it can be hard to make that direct, personal tie with people. I’m about to use an example that’s a bit politically charged, so stick with me. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton founded an organization called Onward Together. It uses her high profile and large audience to raise money for small, scrappy nonprofits that are doing excellent work, but that may lack the audience base to effectively raise money themselves. Can you highlight the stories of the organizations you serve?

We are thinking about doing a major gala. What is the best way to get corporate table sponsorships if you don’t know people within the individual businesses?

SB: The first thing to consider is that corporations look at the bottom line, and want bragging rights – it makes them look good. Now, put yourself in a corporation’s position. You’re not just spending money because it feels good – you have to pay employees and benefits, investors and backers want to see returns on their investment, and you need to be able to stand behind your spending decisions. All of them. So what’s going to make you give? What’s going to make you say, “Sure, I’ve got bills, but you can not only have a big chunk of change, you can put my name up in lights so others come asking me for the same thing”? What will make you say yes? What will make it hard for you to say no? Therein lies your answer – make your best case; make the story of the gala compelling; make it really hard to say no. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.

This is where I will say that nonprofits should not skimp on fundraising staff and professional executive development. A good, connected development officer is worth every penny of salary. And it is their job to make those sponsorships happen in tandem with a board and executive staff that is not shy, and can make the ask clearly, comfortably, and elegantly. There are grants available for hiring fundraising staff and professional development at all levels of the nonprofit world. The bigger the budget, the more they exist – because everyone understands that you have to support staff so they can do their best. It’s not a perk; it’s an investment that allows nonprofits to continue growing and serving their core mission.

What is the best way to get feedback from members? Surveys at events, letters, or…?

EWE: Yes. You want to turn your organization into a sponge for information. That means you want to collect data on your members and other audiences formally (like surveys and interviews) and informally (like conversations and responses to emails). You want to collect it actively (asking people to answer questions) and passively (paying attention to what they do and tracking what behaviors you can without turning into Big Brother and creeping people out).

Collecting the data is only the first step, though. You also have to share it with your colleagues. You’d be amazed at what your “line” staff in customer service knows that you don’t know, because they talk to your stakeholders all the time. Likewise, you’d be amazed at the insights your newer or more junior staff might have into some of your “C-suite” information, because they have a fresh perspective and aren’t jaded by “we’ve always done it this way” and “we tried that five years ago, and it didn’t work.” No information hoarding!

I have a large number of small dollar donors that I want to cultivate to be higher donors. I would like to meet with them to know them better. How should I go about doing that?

EWE: Ask them. I am a donor to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (one of our case studies). My relationship with them started by going to one show. I liked it, so I went to more. I liked them, so I became a season subscriber. I realized I supported their mission, so I started donating. Now I’m donating much more, on an annual basis, than I was then. The Woolly development staff started building that relationship by calling me up to ask if I would like to meet for coffee.

Any suggestions on where to start with an all-volunteer organization?

EWE: It’s tough when you have no paid staff. Sustained projects, like fancy integrated multi-channel campaigns, are really hard to do. You need to assess what, for your organization, would constitute low-hanging fruit. Can you easily identify who your super-members are? Can each volunteer take responsibility for calling one of them in the next two weeks? Do you have young people in your volunteer base? Can you get them talking about what sorts of engagement activities they would find appealing? Does your organization have a compelling story, where it’s easy to frame the member as the hero? Could you send out one email that does that? Figure out what the easy thing is, do it, (hopefully) experience some success and learn some things, and build from there.

Missed the webinar? Wild Apricot’s got you covered.

Growth Strategies from Top Fundraisers

Posted on March 28, 2018 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

My Steal This Idea! Innovations in Cause-Oriented Fundraising for Associations co-author Sohini Baliga and I recently had the opportunity to talk with some smart people about the information in the whitepaper.

Special for those of you who prefer to learn from methods OTHER than reading: Two are videos; one is a podcast. We embrace all types of learners around here!

Video one: Association Chatwith KiKi L’Italien: