Member engagement can be harder to measure in trade associations than in professional societies. But that doesn’t mean it’s not vitally important.

Why do some members leave an association while others go on to become board members? Why are some people passionate, vocal advocates for association membership, while others don’t even bother to open emails?

It all comes down to one thing: member engagement.

How do you know if your association management strategies are working? How can you track the return on investment in marketing, content creation and IT infrastructure investment?

It all comes down to member engagement. Are you connecting with members and making them feel like they’re getting value for money?

Engagement is the ultimate metric of your efforts. It soars when your strategy is working; it plummets when you need to make changes.

The only problem is: how you actually go about assessing engagement?

Ever since associations were first formed over a century ago, their executives have had a problem:

They have a large group of people they need to take action – join, renew, purchase products, attend events, advocate at the capitol, etc. While their membership may seem homogeneous, even small associations have a great deal of diversity among their members.

Are you having trouble connecting your marketing and communications teams? Do you understand the marketing tools you have at your fingertips? Are you interested in gaining insight on prospects and members? You are in the right place! Suzanne Carawan, Chief Marketing Officer here at HighRoad, exposes “marketing automation as a tool that can shed light on how individuals are interacting with all of your digital touchpoints—web, email, social and more—so that you can understand buying signals” in her webinar “The Digital Black Box: Using Technology to Bring New Sales Opportunities to Light”.

Social media is nothing new in today's digital marketing world. You’ve heard of all the big ones, there's Twitter and LinkedIn or maybe you’re using an Instagram account for your upcoming event, or you are regularly posting content every week to your Facebook. With the ever evolving world of technology that we live in, sometimes it is hard to keep up with the new terminology that seems to be going in affect every other week, and even harder to learn where and how to implement that terminology.