Golden Handcuffs: Get Your Members Hooked for Life

Getting people to stay is the hard part, isn’t it?

Sure, people are willing to give your association a try, and they might even pay for a year or two of membership. But what keeps them around? For the tech startup GitHub, the secret is a strong offering mixed with a community that keeps them there. Learn more in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Learn From GitHub

https://twitter.com/MJTydings/status/434418130690260993

Know a coder or two? If so, ask them about GitHub, a hugely popular site for sharing open-source code and collaboratively building projects. It has a bunch of members, and they’re really busy, contributing to 10.8 million code repositories.

What’s the secret to the company’s success? According to Avectra contributor Deirdre Reid, the secret may be in its “golden handcuffs”  (opens in a new tab): “GitHub doesn’t solve problems for its members, instead it provides what members need to solve problems,” she explains. And that gives it major value for its many paid members. Read on for more insights from Reid  (opens in a new tab). (ht @MJTydings  (opens in a new tab))

Make Things Easy

https://twitter.com/MV_Partners/status/435538419221938176

When the approach is simple, it feels refreshing, doesn’t it? That’s how IntrinXec Management’s Maria Huntley felt about signing up for the National Association of Distinguished Professionals.

“As a person who has spent the last 15 years making association management my career,” she wrote on the MultiBriefs Exclusive blog  (opens in a new tab), “I wanted to learn more about this distinguished association. I clicked on a link that brought me to a page that told me in four easy steps how I could ‘apply’ for membership. It was slick, easy and took me less than a minute.”

It wasn’t the only thing that wowed her about the membership sign-up process. (Hint: Her phone rang.) Check out the other things that impressed her  (opens in a new tab) over this way. (ht @MV_Partners  (opens in a new tab))

(Photodisc/Thinkstock)