Category: membership

Who should make contact around things like joining and renewing: other members or staff?

Member-to-member (or member-to-prospect) communications can be very effective, IF you can persuade your members to actually make the calls.

We’re often tempted to ask volunteers to call lapsed members – in fact, that can be a stated requirement of serving on a membership committee. However, that is the hardest call to get volunteers to agree to make (and actually follow through on), because unless your lapsed members just forgot, they lapsed for cause, and facing an angry or disgruntled member is scary for volunteers.

It can even backfire, if the volunteer who’s placing the call is the combative type. “I was upset with the association for X reason, so I let my membership lapse, and then Member Y called and started an argument on the phone with me,” is not good for your association.

I recommend starting with something easier. So what IS easier?

The best place to start with a member-to-member contact campaign is welcoming new members. While you can certainly restrict those new member calls to your board of directors and/or your membership committee, it’s not complicated to do (particularly if you provide a simple script), so it’s an excellent micro-volunteering opportunity for any member.

What would a script look like?

Start by – if possible – matching up a new member with an experienced member who is located physically near them, which allows for an in-person meeting if both members are amenable. Your volunteer starts off by introducing herself and welcoming the new member to the association. Then she asks for two pieces of information:

• How did the new member find out about the association?
• What caused him to join?

Then your volunteer shares a few things she likes about her membership, highlights one thing the new member can expect to see soon, and, if appropriate, invites the new member to get a coffee or lunch.

That’s it – easy and fun for both your welcome wagon volunteers and your new members.

Moving up a level in complexity, you can run a Member Get a Member (MGM) or Member Get a Lead (MGL) campaign.

There are MANY resources on how to run an MGM campaign. The keys are to make sure you have a good tracking mechanism, make sure you provide your member recruiters with plenty of sales support, and keep your expectations in check (every single member will not recruit one member – a tiny percentage will be really into it, and everyone else will ignore it). MGM can be challenging because people who aren’t salespeople as their profession tend to fear sales. Even people who are salespeople as their profession may not be comfortable selling your association.

Because of that, I often encourage clients to start with MGL, which is a lot less pressure on your members. All they have to do is introduce the association to a colleague and ask if it’s OK for someone from the association to follow up with more information, then your members submit those warm leads for association staff to follow up on. It makes tracking a cinch – you know exactly where a lead came from, because the members submit them directly – and takes the pressure to “close deals” off members.

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Do members respond well to “tiered” membership plans?

Generally, yes, with an important caveat. There must be meaningful differences in member behavior patterns.

If all your members pretty much behave the same and use your benefits the same, there’s nothing around which to differentiate tiers.

Or if you don’t have enough benefits to allow for it, you really can’t create tiers.

But if different groups of members use different benefits in identifiable and trackable ways, yes, tiered pricing is a good way to go.

What you do is bundle benefits together in ways that you can support based on member use data, adjust the pricing to be favorable, and market to the right members.

An example from one of my clients: We were able to identify that member firms either didn’t attend their annual conference at all or sent teams of five or more people. So we offered a tier of membership that included five pre-paid conference registrations, at a rate slightly lower than the early-bird registration rate. We then marketed that option specifically to the firms that regularly sent teams of five or more people, with the pitch that it would save money (lower rate) and time, by not requiring them to go through another round of payment approvals. And they took us up on it.

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Is there a “tipping point” when too many benefits start to get lost in the shuffle? 

People associate because they’re trying to accomplish something or solve a problem that they’ve been unable to do alone. So yes, your members come to you looking for something in particular – help solving a particular problem that has so far proved intractable or achieving a particular goal that has so far proved unattainable.

Each member is likely joining because of 1-3 key benefits that particular member is looking for. The trick is to figure out what those 1-3 key benefits are for any given member, and then to clearly show her how those benefits solve her problem or help her achieve her goal.

But yes, you can offer too much stuff. Clues that a benefit is a waste of resources include:

• Few members use it (you find that out from behavioral data)
• Those members that do use it aren’t passionate about it (you find that out in member satisfaction surveys)
• The cost to provide the benefit is out of line with use (which requires fully weighted cost center accounting to accurately calculate)
• The benefit is tangential to your mission
• Someone else is providing an equivalent benefit both better and cheaper than your association does
• The benefit is a major drain on staff

Don’t be afraid to eliminate under-performing benefits. That’s the only way you free up resources for the new things your members are going to need to face tomorrow’s challenges.

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Are members who join with a price incentive more or less likely to renew membership the following year?

Less likely. Don’t offer pricing discounts unless your audiences are EXTREMELY price sensitive or your membership is declining and you’re desperate to get people in the door by any means necessary.

Does offering a discounted membership based on time of the year (i.e. a summer sale) dilute the value of membership?

Yes. Also, when you start offering discounts, you train your members to bad behavior: “Well, I waited to renew last year, and they offered a discount, so I’ll wait again this year and see if I can get another deal.”

Now that’s different than pro-rating membership when everyone’s renewing on the calendar year. If a new member joins in July, one school of thought says “charge that member 50% of your regular rate,” but I’m not a fan of that because then that new member is going to start receiving “it’s time to renew!” notices almost immediately. I encourage clients to offer “18 for the price of 12.” That is, the new member pays the full rate NOW, but isn’t solicited to renew until next year’s renewal cycle.

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You’ve got questions – I (may) have answers!

Now that the Membership 101 Series has concluded, it occurred to me that folks might have some more questions about membership I didn’t think to address.

I have some membership FAQs my clients have asked me over the years that I’ll address, but you might have questions too, and might want the opportunity to ask them in an anonymous setting (rather than on ASAE’s Collaborate community or other public forum).

Now’s your chance.

You’re welcome to email me, call to text me (202.468.3478), @ me on Twitter, or drop me a message on LinkedIn, and I’ll answer your membership questions here.

No question too big – no question too small, and if I don’t know the answer, I promise I’ll try my best to get it for you.

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

1. What did I miss? Are there membership topics you were hoping I’d cover that I never did?
2. 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.

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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.

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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.

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