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Suzanne Carawan

By: Suzanne Carawan on August 3rd, 2016

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The Year of Marketing Membership

Association Industry Commentary | membership marketing | Association Research | association marketing

mailto:demo@example.com?Subject=HighRoad Solutions - interesting article

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Top challenges this summer are in membership

One of the key challenges that I've heard all summer surrounds membership. The two-fold challenge of how do we grow? and how can we do a better job of limiting year 1 to year 2 attrition seems to be the key focus area for many associations right now. We are spending a ton of time working with organizations to re-think this two-fold challenge and apply social marketing principles and digital marketing techniques to arrive at unique solutions. 

the secret challenges no one wants to admit

For most membership organizations, there are actually more than two problems. There is a very big elephant-in-the-room set of challenges that few organizations are comfortable discussing. Namely: 

1) How well do we currently know the consumption patterns and user behavior of our current membership?

2) How well do we really understand generational splits and tastes & preferences, cultural references and lifestyles of our membership?

3) How well are we spending the time we have to strategize on membership campaigns to help us overcome our challenges?

addressing the secret challenges

The third question is perhaps the easiest to tackle because it's one of workforce reallocation and optimization. For many organizations, a workforce analysis would quickly show that an inordinate time is spent on repetitive, manual tactical tasks that could be either eliminated, automated or reallocated to a different production source.

We work in digital marketing, so we see this all the time with the #1 time suck being email marketing. Why organizations are still spending time on manual email creation is only understood as being a good use of time if the cost of labor is not included and the human labor element is not valued. If either of these is not the case, then no organization would decide after conducting a cost-benefit analysis that the organization is better off choosing a do-it-yourself approach versus leveraging technology to do email marketing for you (why? because technology can do email marketing in a total hyper-personalized way that humans simply cannot do).

The first two elephant-in-the-room challenges are a bit tougher to tackle because we all want to think that we know our memberships inside and out. In fact, when working with our clients, we typically find the disease of organizational familiarity--i.e. our belief that we know something because we are immersed in it and therefore, deny the fact that we are inherently biased--runs rampant. It is not atypical that the "known" membership really accounts for those members that make direct contact, serve on committees and/or attend the conference. What's interesting about working with a consultant trained in social marketing is that I'm not looking at sub-groups that are already exhibiting a desired behavior in isolation. What I'm looking at is your total population and viewing the hard data on who is consuming so that we can understand are they the right people and where can we find more like them.

digital marketing helps address elephants in the room

What's great about digital marketing is that it affords the social marketer with a massive amount of data that can be used to compile a rich profile that includes preference and behavioral data. What's better than that is that you can group all these individuals together and study target populations to understand what the triggers might be to elicit desired responses. In this case, the desired response being either to join or renew.

One of the big take-homes I've had this week in working with organizations that want to grow while reducing attrition is that the target population for each of these endeavors was fuzzy. Organizations acknowledged that they want to grow and need "younger people", as well as to cut off year 1-year 2 drop-off, but didn't have a good plan for how to approach. One way to approach this is to understand who your true consumers of your content/programs/events currently are and assess if these are the ideal people for membership. If yes, then great! Let's further study them to find out where else they might exist. If no, then let's whiteboard who your target market actually is so we can go find them.

The transactional activities are no longer enough to use in creating targets. Demographics and past purchase behavior are definitely needed in today's segmentation, but if you're really going to effect revenue, you need to have the right offer to the right people on the right channel at the right time. This idea is the key to solving membership growth and minimizing attrition. While we implement the greatest marketing automation platforms known in the software industry, I will be the first to tell you that no tool is going to do this for you because it's no longer about the tools--it's the know-how. Affecting membership changes requires a deep understanding of market principles and how to employ price, promotion and placement, in particular, to really see ROI.

digital marketing's effect on membership

Membership remains one of my favorite social marketing areas in which to work because you already have a defined population to study. The magic we can find when running simple data analysis is amazing when digital marketing data easily gathered through any email platform, social media and Google Analytics is combined. The digital transformation era in which we now live means that membership is due to be the hardest hit.

While organizations have been rethinking membership models for quite a bit of time now, the addition of understanding membership through a digital data-driven social marketing lens is now coming to fruition. Technology has evolved to get us to the point of having data easily amassed into tools that allow us to visualize data (Association Analytics does this well), so now it's natural that the next step is the need to look for someone that really knows how to ask questions to the tool and knows how to employ the tools to get desired results. To bottom line it, there's a lot of Swiss army knives out there ready and available, but now we need the person with the project ideas for how to use the tool.

discussion at membership section reception at asae annual

Membership professionals that are looking to better understand their membership and looking to grow are speaking our language. We want to elevate this conversation and bring the attention back to dues revenue for the next year. To kick off this "Year of Marketing Membership", we are proud to sponsor the Membership Section's reception at ASAE Annual on Sunday from 5-6 pm which is open to any attendee. We're hoping to continue the discussion over cocktails. Additionally, our HighRoad U educational offerings--webinars, eBooks and toolkits--will be heavily focused on the topic of how digital marketing is affecting membership results. 

Also, if you're interested in having us do a complimentary current consumption audit of your email or website, let us know and we'll get you scheduled for a consult. The results are always fascinating and lead to a great conversation bubbling with ideas. We're offering this free (in case you are skeptical) because of ourASAE endorsement which allows us to commit ourselves fully to advancing the association industry through such programs as the Power of A awards and the Gold Circle awards.