Membership

Tuesday Buzz: Members Not Biting? Try a New Hook

Don't let your approach to member marketing stagnate—switch up your strategies every once in a while. Also: Dropbox eyes a plan to make cloud storage a little less painful on your hard drive.

The challenging part about attracting new members is that the same old tactics won’t always work, no matter how effective they once were.

Sometimes, you have to cut bait and then start over with a fresh new hook. That’s the suggestion of Wild Apricot’s Terry Ibele, who offers some tips on how to freshen up the member marketing techniques you use to draw interest. Ibele offers the example of a tennis club, where the membership has evolved and therefore needs a new strategy:

A great hook will help you stay current and can attract more people. Imagine our tennis club started as a tennis club for kids. Well, maybe 10 years have passed and suddenly the demographic of the region has changed. All the kids have grown up and now they’re young adults.

In this case, a tennis club for kids might struggle if no new families move into the area, but a tennis club for single, young adults might do really great!

With a little reinventing of itself, our tennis club can stay current and continually reach new members, whereas a tennis club that has an outdated hook might fail.

Check out the full post at the Wild Apricot blog to get an idea of how to build a fresh member-attracting hook of your own.

Dropbox Lightens Up

The cloud-syncing tool Dropbox is incredibly useful, but keeping all of those files on your machine can get pretty weighty—especially if you’re using a business account. Project Infinite, a new approach by the company, basically keeps the file structure in place but downloads the files from the cloud only when you ask for them.

“With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve. The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity,” the company’s Genevieve Sheehan explains in a blog post. “While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals’ laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team’s data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best.”

The Project Infinite approach is compatible with just about any desktop platform that you use, including multiple versions of Windows and Mac OSX. Check out the video above to get an idea of how it works.

Other Links of Note

If you’re looking to get some additional eyeballs on your Facebook page, you might want to heed these algorithm suggestions from Christina Green, who spotted an interesting pattern. Check it out on Frank J. Kenny’s blog.

Could Google’s Chromebook platform become a lot more exciting in the coming months? The company is reportedly planning to bring numerous Android apps to the platform, significantly increasing the devices’ usefulness, according to Ars Technica.

“Why do I blog? I get this question a lot,” says Eric Lanke, CEO of the National Fluid Power Association. He has an answer to that question, and it’s surprisingly deep and fascinating.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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