How to Increase Engagement within Your Membership Organization

Engagement is the cornerstone of any membership organization.

Passive members of an organization are highly unlikely to renew their memberships. Engaging your members is the key to boosting retention and ultimately, your bottom line. Member engagement fuels your organization's growth and helps you fulfill your mission.

Membership engagement efforts typically concentrate on informing members of all the great things that an organization does. But simply providing members with more information won't do a thing - you have to impact their behavior in order to obtain worthwhile results. Here are some tips for increasing member engagement levels.

Focus Less on Recruiting and More on Engaging Current Members

The key to building a successful membership organization is encouraging members to move from nominal participation to active participation. Engage members with the aim of moving them to higher levels of participation within your organization. Determine exactly what members will get at each level of participation and how you will encourage them to move from one level of participation to the next.

Collaborate with Members to Develop New Products and Services

Membership organizations commonly make the mistake of creating products and then trying to persuade members to buy them. To create offerings that your members truly want to buy, it's essential to develop products and services in collaboration with them. Membership organizations have tons to learn from their members, so they should regularly engage in a dialogue with them and apply the insights they gain.

Make Member Interaction a Central Aspect of Your Organization

Use social media tools to develop communities and encourage members and potential members to interact. Using various engagement platforms is also helpful for market research because it allows you to keep tabs on your target audience and increase your market knowledge. Look at interactions on Facebook or Twitter as a real-time case study. You can learn a ton just by observing people, asking questions, and polling your audience.

Create Pre-Membership and Post-Membership Engagement

There are opportunities to engage with people before they become members of your organization, as well as afterwards. Examples of pre-membership engagement include viewing content on your Twitter feed, Facebook page or website; sharing content from your website via social media; buying a product; and attending one of your events/conferences. Examples of post-membership engagement include volunteering for a committee or task force; taking on a leadership role; and paying a significant amount of money for advertising, sponsorship, exhibit space, etc.

The key to success is determining how people will progress from lower levels of engagement to higher levels of engagement as their relationship with your organization matures. When it comes to fulfilling their mission and increasing revenues, organizations that have an efficient flow from low to high-value engagement are ultimately more successful.

Increase Membership Engagement Levels with the Help of efelle

In addition to building interactive membership organization websites, efelle offers a full range of services that help membership organizations increase engagement and achieve success, including SEO and social media marketing. For more information about efelle's online marketing and web design services, give our membership marketing specialists a call at 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form to set up a free consultation.

About the Author

As the founder of efelle (launched in 2005), Fred's vast work experience brings together a perfect balance of business, marketing and technology.

More Posts by Author Read Author's Full Bio