Speaking Engagements

10 Tips for Increasing the Stickiness of Your Membership


We all want to increase membership retention.  Here are some tips that you can implement this year to help make your membership stickier and encourage members’ to stay with your organization.
1.      Increase the number of contacts and relationships you have within a member’s organization.  This is particularly applicable for trade group memberships where it is important to identify the membership champion, decider, approver, and user.
2.      Reward continuous membership tenure with loyalty points or recognition with a “member since” award.
3.      Limit access to members for important, critical, or timely content and communicate these limitations to members.  Members only content might include alerts, salary and industry surveys, standards, and notifications on regulations.
4.      Provide member financial incentives beyond member discounts like members only product sales, group purchasing, and free shipping.
5.      Exclude non-members from the benefits of full access to your organization’s social media networks.
6.      Require continuous membership for participation in hard to find industry specific services like professional liability or workers compensation insurance.
7.      Gain members approval for auto credit card or EFT renewals or installment billing to turn membership renewals from opt-in to opt-out.
8.      Maintain important data for members for third party validation of certification, continuing education, graduation, and awards.
9.      Enhance member visibility with directory listings, vanity email addresses, referral links from your organizations website, certificates for display, window clings, and member usage of your organization’s logo -- all limited to continued membership.
10.   Monitor members interactions with the organization through email opens, purchases, and participation in social media and develop and intervention plan to reach out to those who are not engaged.
This list is only a start.  Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section here. 

3 comments:

Lucas Cioffi, QiqoChat said...

This is a solid list.

I'd also recommend realtime events to foster member-to-member interaction. Interacting with another person rather than an email can make their experience with the association much more personal.

Example events can range from speed networking (by phone or video) to small-group video chats and also large-scale written group chats.

We build tools in this arena along with other firms, and it's exciting to see how much innovation is happening at the intersection of associations and realtime events.

Elizabeth Engel said...

Tip #12:

Discover what your members are trying to accomplish, that is, what their desired outcomes are, and build your offerings to help them achieve their most important professional goals.

Who's next?

Tony Rossell said...

Thanks for the comments. They make good sense to me. Tony