OF the three aspects in association membership management—recruitment, engagement, and retention—I find engagement as the most challenging. This is made more imperative now due to the pandemic, as members long for connection and care.
Member engagement is an activity that connects your members to your association. Engagement can be made through many channels and touch points. There are tools and technologies available today to maximize impact and create efficiencies of scale.
This was the premise of our recent webinar, “Bring Me Higher Love: Creating Customer and Member Loyalty Through Engagement,” that featured Robert Barnes,CAE, Country Manager, Asia-Pacific at Higher Logic Australia, as speaker. Here are my key takeaways from Robert’s presentation:
Many-to-Many: This is about scalability. Many-to-many or one-to-many is a way to draw in members by having them engage with each other. Automated email campaigns allow you to connect multiple messages and audiences with targeting and cadences you define, while an online community is the perfect partnership of human interaction and advanced technology.
Omni-channel:This means hybrid. An engagement strategy should combine multiple programs to make it truly robust. Online community engagement and personalized email communications are two critical pillars (and the most impactful because they are the easiest to scale with a small staff). Your online community can also be the hub for your other engagement activities.
Personalization:This is about building your “engagement ladder.” Your members are not at the same level. You probably have recent subscribers and have some who are growing and getting more familiar with you, a step up from the newcomers. You may also have supporters who like you and generally support you. Then there is the top level – probably one of the smallest categories—or “raving fans” who love you. As your members realize the value through increased engagement, this creates “higher love.”
The three steps to create engagement that lead to higher love are:
Build your (digital) destination. When members gather in your online community, you have the structure you need to start leading them up the engagement ladder. Your online community becomes their best resource – connect with peers to problem-solve, learn, and share resources. The more their activities in the community, the greater the value they’ll receive, and the greater the value your association will get in return or “return on engagement” (ROE).
Keep them coming back. Behind a great engagement strategy is a great content strategy. This means more than just the content items themselves, but also involves segmenting and personalizing who gets what. So your online community content should focus on the users’ interests and trying to get them to participate again in another area. This is also where community personalization comes in handy.
Take them on a personalized journey. Encourage your members to get more and more involved, both in the community and with your association as a whole. When they enter the community for the first time, use segmenting to show them exactly the right content for their product, level, etc. A special segmentation tool can take information from your member database and translate it into the community member’s view.
The column contributor, Octavio “Bobby” Peralta, is Founder & CEO of the Philippine Council of Associations and Association Executives and concurrently, President of the Asia-Pacific Federation of Association Organizations. The purpose of PCAAE—the “association of associations”—is to advance the association management profession and to make associations well-governed and sustainable. PCAAE enjoys the support of the Tourism Promotions Board, the Philippine International Convention Center and the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific. E-mail: [email protected]