Ask Your Members Who They Are

Professional and trade associations use a variety of membership tactics to ensure strong retention and acquisition rates.

A multipronged approach means you might analyze member databases, purchase activity, conference attendance rates, and other factors. These are all passive analytical methods that attempt to understand membership behavior after they happen.

On the other hand, a proactive analytical method—talking to and asking members to explain who they are and what they do—can be useful for knowing what’s on their minds right now.

It’s a tactic borrowed from the field of personnel credential and curriculum development. Organizations that develop and manage personnel credentials are familiar with methods that define professional competencies for their constituents. These organizations use a job-task analysis  (opens in a new tab) to create a standard job description accepted by the profession.

The JTA process uses subject-matter experts (SMEs) who are interviewed, describing jobs functions, tasks, and knowledge or skills required for certain professions. The JTA collects quantitative data by surveying the profession on the importance, criticality and frequency of certain knowledge or skills.

For professional societies that already offer credentials, their work is largely done—they’ve spoken to members and know what they do.

But if an association does not offer a credential, it might want to ask and define who their members are. This qualitative approach to creating a member profile usually goes through a process of vetting with long-standing members and staff.

It’s also accomplished through dialog with the board of directors and talking to identified experts in the field. This process establishes a draft member profile that covers the knowledge and tasks performed by members. Trade associations can conduct a similar qualitative analysis with their board, identifying specific types of member companies. And since trade associations likely know what their member companies provide, or sell, this process would focus more on how products are sold and what relationships are needed to maintain or expand a business.

A proactive analytical method—talking to and asking members to explain who they are—can be useful for knowing what’s on their minds right now.

Build Your Member Profile

The first step in creating a member profile is to look for members who can describe their activities and skills more accurately than anyone else.

Member profiles seek to understand what members know, value, and want. Utilizing member SMEs and talking to them in qualitative discussions will help prepare a comprehensive list of activities associated with members’ job duties, management roles, and networking activities—things they do daily.

This discussion can include brainstorming techniques, like the free sharing of ideas or constructive criticisms and suggestions.

From these discussions, a member profile is created and broken down by segments and work areas. For example, a professional society targeting consultants as members might organize member profiles by how many years of experience they have. This group can further be segmented by specific work areas. For a trade association with product manufacturers, profiles might be organized by industry-market share and segmented by specific output or stockpiling.

Validate Your Member Profile

The second step is to validate the profile, which requires another level of stakeholder engagement. The best way to do this is through a survey sent to a broad range of members, or stakeholders. Stakeholders rank the importance of member segments and activities or tasks. The results can be used to determine the weight and accuracy of the area within the member profile.

Once established, member profiles can support the development of new education or advocacy programs, publications, and affinity programs. Your association can also use these profiles in day-to-day staff work, but you can’t get here until you talk to and ask your members who they are.