Engage First, Grow Naturally: Membership Strategies
Seasoned association leader Avi Olitzky joined us on Oct. 15, 2024, to share how membership engagement can lead to improved member retention and attraction.
Avi’s first message is that the goal of associations should be to serve members, especially in a post-COVID world. This focus helps us stay true to our association’s mission. If you’re serving your mission, people will scream your praises from the rooftops. Think about a great restaurant: they may need to do a little marketing to begin with, but after that, word of mouth will build the business. You’re still recruiting, but others are doing the work for you.
The minute you label yourself as a “nonprofit,” you put on an unfortunate blinder that you’re coming from of a position of scarcity. The difference between a nonprofit and a for-profit is that a nonprofit puts any excess money back into the mission. But nonprofits need to learn how to develop a mindset of abundance.
Avi says that beginning in 2016, society entered an era of hyper-transition. Innovation is central to staying relevant in this environment. The benefit provided to your member will be out of date by the time they realize they’re getting it, and you need to focus on the next benefit that is coming.
Connect with members every quarter or every month to be sure they’re using the benefits you offer. If you engage members regularly and well, members will be your ambassadors. But this doesn’t mean sending multiple emails every week! Instead, find ways to go deeper. Perhaps each board member could call a few members and have a conversation about what they need right now.
We also need to find new ways to measure our success. Net Promoter Scores don’t speak to the happiness factor. We must figure how happy and engaged members are now compared to the past. This will require quantitative and qualitative engagement measures. Quantitative measures show how many people are using the association’s services or how many people you’re connecting with regularly. Qualitative engagement is about measuring happiness, which is a more profound conversation.
As many of our Associations Trends Talks presenters have stated throughout this year, Avi says that we all need to start using AI in some way. Use it to assist you in prediction and to help you move faster as you innovate. You’ll need to test the results with pilot projects and test cases, but AI will help you generate ideas.
Additional resources:
NotebookLM.google (creates podcasts from PDFs)
Great by Choice by Jim Collins
Master of Change by Brad Stulberg