What Does It Mean to Be Member-Centric?

In our line of work, we know that our members are at the heart of everything we do. After all, our organisations exist to serve their needs and interests. But in today's constantly evolving market, it's not enough to simply offer a good product or service. To truly stand out and drive member engagement, we need to adopt a member-centric approach. This means putting our members at the center of all our strategies and decisions, from membership recruitment to retention and beyond. But what does it really mean to be member-centric, and how can we implement this approach in our organisations??

Try to remember using a service of one of the brands with a customer-centric culture. Whether it’s Spotify, Amazon, Sephora or McDonald’s, you probably know how it is. Once you buy one product, it’s like by the wave of a magic wand you’re offered another one that you just wanted (or maybe didn’t even know you wanted, but you’re already buying it!).

Customer centricity is not only about delivering an exceptional service, but about predicting your customer needs, and offering products and services to satisfy them.?

In this article, we'll explore the steps to create a culture of member-centricity. I’ll be sharing insights, best practices, and real-life examples to help you create a truly member-centric experience that delivers value, fosters loyalty, and drives growth. So, let's get started!

1. Start with the culture

Customer-centricity begins with your association’s culture. If you want to be member-centric, then your association needs to make a company-wide commitment to your member’s success.

Every department, not only the membership team and other front-line employees, needs to create services and experiences with members in mind. Starting from an organisation’s top leaders, every role needs to operate under the assumption that they have the potential to impact the overall member experience.

For example, when creating a new event program, you need to consider the needs of every segment of your membership, not only offer what’s been convenient or worked before. When creating a new piece of content, you need to think what members’ problems it will help to solve, not how many clicks you will get after publishing it. When signing the next sponsorship agreement, you need to look beyond the paycheque and consider how your members will benefit from this partnership.

2. Embrace the power of technology

To succeed in the era of customer centricity, associations must undergo a continual digital transformation to create an exceptional digital experience for their members and the team.

If your members regularly communicate that they can’t find information on your website, that it’s hard for them to login or navigate the member library, or if your team finds it extremely hard to extract data from the membership system and make sense of it, it’s time for you to review your tech infrastructure.

New digital tools are constantly emerging to meet the needs of modern business. These tools work together to address every stage of the membership cycle: attracting, converting, engaging, managing, and understanding your members. They also make collaboration across teams simple and intuitive.

When implemented well, the Tech Stack creates an agile and data-driven company that can best meet members’ needs.

The good news is that with growing competition these tools are becoming more and more affordable and even small businesses can embrace the power of data and technology.

I once heard from an association executive, “We’ll need to educate our members on how to use the member portal.” The truth is, members won’t learn how to use your system, they have so much more interesting things to do! Instead, they’ll call your team, wasting both member and team time and developing frustration with your service.

3. Encourage data-driven decision making

There has never been more customer data available than there is today, and associations are in the unique position of being able to directly communicate with their customers and members and gather the most precise and detailed information.

However, ironically, the volume and variety of data flooding into organisations is often the main reason why customer focus is so hard. The challenge is the ability to read and interpret this data, to use it in a meaningful way.

One of the main recipes of success for member-centricity is centralised access to customer data and insights, whether it’s an all-in-one membership administration system, CRM or any other tool that merges customer data from different sources that you may use. However, functional silos often block the aggregation of data from different sources and software pieces.

When you put your member at the core of your association culture and combine it with powerful software, you collect a wealth of data about your members, which you can use for:

• Understanding interests, engagement and buying behaviour
• Segmenting your members in a meaningful way
• Identifying opportunities to create services, events, and promotions relevant to different member segments.

“Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn’t know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can’t imagine your life without it.” Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

4. Focus on Personalisation

Personalisation is at the heart of customer-centricity. Long gone are the times when by simply including your member’s name, you could consider a personalised email. With the highly cluttered inboxes and customisable feeds on social media feeds, your members expect to receive content relevant to their location, career stage, industry, and interests. They want to see content addressing their problems, not the list of all services and events you’re offering. They want to login to your member portal and see the information that’s relevant to them.

If your association aims to be member-centric, you need to focus on delivering unique member experiences instead of practising a one-size-fits-all approach. Imagine a student graduate receiving an invitation to a course on crafting a resume straight after they’re finishing uni. Or a top executive being offered a discount for a course on preparation for a board position, after they’ve been researching it for a while.

Start personalisation by segmenting your data and creating member personas based not only on their geographic location or industries, but based on their needs, challenges, and common values. Narrow and sharpen your focus on your key segments and make sure you understand them well, and then use your data and insights to offer personalised, targeted offerings.

The next step would be to create the right content for each persona based on their preferences, interests, digital behaviour, and level of engagement.

Becoming a truly member-centric association takes time and a lot of associations might not have all the components in place. Many don’t have the systems and technology to collect the data and segment members properly. Others lack the skills and operational capabilities to target them with personalised communications and experiences.

But it’s not a reason to give up – start with the small steps.

Member-centricity starts by focusing on member needs and how they want to interact with your association – not your events, programs, or tiers of membership. By designing your programs and services from the member perspective, nurturing your team culture, analysing your member journey and removing obstacles along it, your association will provide meaningful member experience and build long lasting relationships with your members.