Article Membership 2 min read

Friday Buzz: Revitalize Member Experiences

If your membership numbers are flagging, here are a few ideas to try to get them back up. Also: Find your next showstopper speaker through crowdsourcing.

Raegan Johnson

March 2, 2018

Heads up: this content is over 5 years old, so some information may be out of date.

If your group has experienced a decline in your membership rolls recently, you may not be delivering a valuable enough experience.

The WebScribble blog shares several ways to refresh and improve your member experience  (opens in a new tab).

To combat repetitiveness, implement an experience cycle. “Creating a cycle allows your association to keep its traditional events and activities, but mix in new experiences,” writes Audra Hopkins. “Think of it like a mixtape—it’s good to mix classic songs in with some new tunes.”

Also consider that you may be delivering what your members need, but you’re just not communicating enough with them. The blog recommends using a communication tool like Slack or Line to connect with your members. “This way, members with questions or [concerns] can easily reach out to an association representative for any answers they might need,” says Hopkins.

Crowdsource Speakers

https://twitter.com/meetingsnet/status/969258493646639105

The Association of Proposal Management Professionals experimented with an engaging way to find exciting new speakers that your group may want to try. They took inspiration from the effectiveness of GoFundMe to crowdsource better panel topics for their meeting.

“Instead of letting the content happen to us, we tapped into the collective intelligence of our members and gained deeper insights into what they wanted,” APMP’s executive director Rick Harris told MeetingsNet  (opens in a new tab).

If you’d like to try this, start by developing an automated crowdsourcing system that is easy for your members to use. “We realized that it could devolve into chaos without a radio button selection, and it would cause more administrative work for us if we had to sort through mountains of paper,” says Harris. “We built a web response page so we could download the results into Excel. That made it fairly simple.”