Engaging Your Members through Engaged Action

The membership model framework for associations is over 100 years old. It’s mostly about people who join and staff that support them. I read somewhere that “Facebook is the world’s largest association with over a billion members and anyone can start a group for free. Many people are no longer willing to plop down dollars for the privilege of belonging. They need more tangible value.”Engaged Action is one contender. If you begin to consider everyone who has a stake in a particular action, suddenly the market expands way beyond membership. Members don’t want to sit on the sidelines. As if they cannot take action, they will lose interest and not see the value.

Associations with limited staff tend to struggle with new initiatives as they tend to be working in the business. Using a form of Engaged Action, they will find the flow on effect will be higher retention rates, as members will be more committed to the association cause.

Steps to create more Engaged Action for your members would be:

To strengthen your associations main value proposition whether it be networking events, educational programs or providing sector-based content. Contact a member that hasn’t been active in the first 5 to 7 months of the membership cycle, and ask them to help. As engaging your members even in low level activities, such as helping setting out name tags, MC’ing an event, will have high engagement.

It is the small things that count, such as, when you hear a member speaking on the radio, being interviewed on television or posting in social media. Give them a call, post them a letter – saying well done you sounded really great. I have an old Royal typewriter that I write messages and post to my members on (and I tell them that it’s handwritten with my typewriter).

Pick up the phone, call a member – not the ones that are engaged but the ones that aren’t. The only reason that you called in for is to say ‘hi’. Of course – you have a reason to call, whether it is to ask their opinion on something of relevance.

Setting up member free groups is an excellent way of both engaging action and at the same time creating a value proposition for your membership. The old word ‘content is king’, is absolutely valuable when it comes to these meetings. They should be about a singular sector issue or where your membership base is asking questions about. It goes without saying that non-members should pay to attend.

Content is King, as I mentioned before, anything you do for your members whether it’s for them, on behalf of your suppliers/business partners or any other source. Anything you do, you always have to have in the back of your mind, "is this what your members want because ‘Content is King’". If you don’t get this right, they won’t engage.

Engaged Action isn’t an art, it’s a methodology of behaviour, and You, along with other association executives and staff members, will become much better predictors of future member behaviour. You’ll become experts at reviewing past member activities and determining how they’re correlated with member retention, revenue, and satisfaction. And, as always, remember that it is our members that control what we do and what they want. Not our suppliers, not the staff but our members…. Engage Action….NOW.

This article was written by Brett Jeffery of AuSAE.