A Membership Growth Case Study

This article is an edited excerpt from the book Membership Recruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission. Find it on Amazon.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) is the premier professional association representing the interests of the nation’s registered nurses through joint membership with affiliated state nurses’ associations. In just over five years, ANA has grown membership by 61 percent, with annual growth rates ranging from 6 percent to 9 percent.[1]

However, for years, a growing membership was not the norm for ANA. In fact, by 2011, ANA membership had declined from well over 100,000 members to 90,000 members due to the disaffiliation of five of ANA’s state associations and inconsistent membership marketing efforts.

ANA leadership realized that significant changes were needed to reverse the membership decline and stop the hemorrhaging. The board, executive director, and membership vice president set a goal for ANA to become a high-growth membership organization. The two decisions to accomplish this change were to focus on improving the membership value proposition and allocating significant budget dollars for an ongoing membership recruitment effort.

Additionally, the membership team at ANA committed to function as a “learning organization” to identify innovations in membership marketing, aggressively test them, measure and analyze the results, and then deploy them in the recruitment efforts. To help accomplish these goals, ANA decided to partner with a direct response agency to add to their capabilities and expertise.

To improve the value proposition and bring better alignment between the price and membership benefits, ANA launched a program with their state nurses’ associations to offer a reduced-price standard membership category for new members. At the same time, existing members received additional benefits through a new category called Premier membership. Through these multi-level membership categories, ANA was able to present an economical membership option to potential new members without sacrificing revenue growth from the loyal current membership base.

Concurrently with enhancing membership value, ANA launched a membership recruitment program built around market testing and analysis. ANA’s testing efforts included:

·       Tests of creative to determine what messages, copy, and graphics are most effective;

·       Audience tests to find the best market segments and prospect lists;

·       Special offer tests to identify the incentives that encourage a prospect to join; and

·       Marketing channel tests to properly allocate budgets for direct mail, email, online advertising, and telemarketing.

The outcome of the testing resulted in an integrated channel, multi-touch recruitment program. The annual marketing efforts featured six recruitment campaigns each year. These campaigns include direct mail to former members and contacts in the ANA database, along with rented third-party lists and multiple emails. Results showed that when email efforts were sent simultaneously with direct mail, both channels saw improvement.

Additionally, ANA ran paid digital advertising continually throughout the year. The most effective ads drove prospects directly to the ANA join page and annually produced up to 5,000 new paid members. The digital program has advertised on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Digital ads on Facebook were particularly effective for ANA to recruit new members. [2] The online techniques included using Facebook custom audience ads that showed ads to an uploaded list of prospects who were also receiving direct mail and email membership offers. ANA also found success with Facebook lookalike ads that display invitations to candidates who look like current ANA members. Retargeting ads to prospects who visited the ANA website but had not made the decision to join produced outstanding results.

Another major step to enhance marketing effectiveness was to build a prospect database and score potential members on their likelihood to join based on their previous behavior, original source, and demographics. Those individuals with a high score received the full complement of marketing efforts. However, for those individuals who were much less likely to join, they only received lower-cost marketing efforts like an email or digital ad.

To continue to accelerate growth, ANA also launched a successful early career membership campaign to reach younger nurses. Like many other associations, ANA tends to have members in their 40’s and 50’s. ANA used content marketing to build an early career prospect list by offering a “new to the profession” welcome kit. Early career members also received a substantial discount on dues, a private online community, and had access to a mentor program. [3]

Through this strategy of focusing on value and then funding and executing a sophisticated recruitment program, ANA overcame its steep membership decline and established a sustainable program resulting in an increase in membership from 90,000 to more than 150,000. [4]

Because ANA had already established such a powerful membership marketing infrastructure when the COVID-19 pandemic hit along with the subsequent recession, the association was able to adapt the tools that it had created to meet the critical needs of members and the nursing community. For example, ANA developed a free COVID-19 webinar series and made it available at no charge to both members and nonmembers. They promoted the webinar series via email and paid digital advertising and drew over 130,000 registrations. By meeting the needs of nurses during this time, ANA also experienced a dramatic rise in new members. Membership grew by 12 percent in April and May of 2020, with over 23,000 new joins. [5]  This increase represented the highest new member recruitment levels in the history of the organization.

How can your organization develop a program to drive membership growth? The next section of this book presents each of the critical components for building your membership recruitment success story.

This article is an excerpt from the book Membership Recruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission. Find it on Amazon.

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[1] Membership Acquisition: Follow the ROI.“ Associations Now

[2] “Member Acquisition.”

[3] “Is Career Stage the Key to Member Acquisition?”

[4] Carol Cohen and Elisa Joseph, “Membership CPR:  From Flagging to Thriving in Just 5 Years.”

[5] Lisa Boylan, “Membership Success Stories Amid COVID-19.”