Three Steps to Engage Volunteers in Membership Marketing

Volunteers can make a significant impact in helping you reach out to others and grow your membership.

In fact, once again word-of-mouth marketing has the top spot as the most effective method of new member recruitment in our 2016 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report.  So getting volunteers' help is not just a good idea, but an essential part of membership development.

Here are three steps to get volunteers plugged in your membership marketing efforts.

1. Motivate them with “why” membership is important.

Someone once said, “Anything in life is too difficult without an adequate answer to the question ‘why’.” To get a volunteer motivated to help in membership we need to help them answer their question, "why?”

I would postulate that there are at least two aspects to answering this question for the volunteer. The first is helping them to understand your organization's story. This is the vision, values, and mission of your organization and how they are changing society, your profession, and your members’ lives. We all want to be a part of making the world a better place.

The second aspect of motivating a volunteer is helping them get in touch with their own story of how membership has influenced their life and success. I can speak from a personal example here. I am a long term member of ASAE. Through my membership, I have had the opportunity to publish over twenty articles in ASAE periodicals, contribute chapters to two ASAE membership books, stay on top of important issues through their social network, and meet hundreds of colleagues who I have learned from with almost every interaction. This past year I have spoken at ASAE sponsored events and completed a term as the chair of the ASAE Membership Section Council. Keeping in touch with my membership story motivates me to share ASAE with others.

2. Tell them “how” they can be involved.

Here is another reason why knowing and using the membership lifecycle can be so important. One size does not fit every volunteer when it comes membership marketing. Some volunteers will be great at cold calling potential members, but calling people you do not know may be outside the comfort zone of others. But when you look at the membership lifecycle -- awareness, recruitment, engagement, renewal, and reinstatement -- many volunteers can find a place that is right for them to be involved in the membership program.

Some members may be more than happy to focus on engagement – helping new members get involved in the association. Other members might be great at following up with their friends and colleagues to get them to renew. Keep in mind that our benchmarking report highlighted that personal contact appears to be a key ingredient for increasing renewals. Associations with renewal rates over 80% are significantly more likely to use peer to peer member contacts to help with renewal efforts.

Volunteers also might be perfect to follow up with lapsed members to gain important insights and understanding of why the member did not continue with the association.

3. Help them establish a plan of “what” to do.

Motivation by the organization’s story and the member’s own story and matching volunteer’s strengths with a specific role or job is a great start. But we all know that the best intentions without clear plans and goals do not work.

So an additional step is working with volunteers to establish a written plan of action and specific goals. In a fully developed volunteer structure, an accountability system with a regular check-in with other volunteers could be put in place. But a simple first step might be having the volunteer write out their membership goals, put them in a self addressed envelope, and having staff mail them to the member a month after setting the plan as a reminder.


For any organization, relationships and referrals are critical.  This may be even more important for membership groups.  Your membership marketing success can be enhanced by engaging your volunteers in this effort.

Lifecycle Marketing: The Foundation for Membership Marketing

At this time of year, many of my clients are working on their 2015 membership marketing plans.  If that is the case for you, be sure to step back as you plan and keep in mind the big picture.  Membership is all about relationship.  There is a marketing lifecycle that you need to keep in mind.   In membership, the marketing lifecycle segments the membership experience into five consecutive steps:

1.      Awareness is when prospects first discover you.

Awareness is typically developed through a proactive online presence using the multiple opportunities that are now available to marketers ranging from SEO, to social media, to lead generation, to SEM.  Offering free content and to capture an opt-in and contact information from a prospective member is particularly powerful way to initiate a relationship with a prospective member.

2.      Recruitment is when prospects choose to try you.

Recruitment capitalizes on the awareness that has been established and invites the prospect to become a member by presenting outstanding value and a special offer to act now.  Membership is what marketing call a “push” product and needs to be sold.  If you build it they typically will not come unless asked.  

3.      Engagement is when new members feel they belong with you.

Engagement is the key to high retention rates and sustained membership growth. Membership engagement is built through encouraging usage of the products and services made available by an organization and by understanding and presenting relevant and targeted information back to the member that fortifies the value of membership.

4.      Renewal is when lapsing members decide whether to keep you.

Renewal is a confirmation of the value members feel they have received from the organization. It is a vote of confidence or no confidence. Renewals are a campaign not an event and require frequency and multiple channels to break through the clutter of competing demands on members’ time and resources. 

5.      Reinstatement is when former members agree to return to you.

Reinstatement programs offer opportunities for lapsed members to reconsider the decision to join when presented with fresh messaging and perhaps new benefits.  It is always easier and more cost effective to try and restore the relationship with former members than to recruit a brand new member.

By keeping the framework of the relational lifecycle in mind, you will be sure to cover the important elements of building a strong membership marketing program for the upcoming year.

The Membership Lifecycle Turns Five

Way back in 2007, I developed a white paper around a concept that I called the Membership Lifecycle. The concept was built around a systems thinking approach to membership. The lifecycle model has gone through some changes and adjustments over the years, but I still find it a very practical and helpful tool to use to diagnose and fix problems that organizations are experiencing with their membership.

So on the fifth anniversary; I thought that I would share a brief review of the concept. The Membership Lifecycle segments the membership experience into five consecutive stages:

1. Awareness -- when prospects first discover you. No one joins a membership organization unless they first know that you exist and have value that will help them. You also will have difficulty recruiting a new member if you cannot identify who top prospects are for membership. So the goal of the awareness stage of the lifecycle is what I call mutual awareness. On the one hand, just like any product, you need to establish share of mind with your prospective members. But in addition, you also want to gain what I call share of database. You want them to raise their hand and register on your website, accept a free whitepaper or newsletter, or attend a webinar or meeting. When they know who you are and you know who they are, you have the chance to cultivate a relationship.

 2. Recruitment -- when prospects choose to join you. Membership is what marketers call a “push” product as opposed to a “pull” product. A pull product is something that is bought not sold. If you are a coffee drinker, you do not need a promotion piece to convince you to drink your coffee every morning. You seek it out. But very few people wake up in the morning saying that they need to find a membership organization to join. As a push product, membership is sold not bought. Successful membership organizations put in place a very pro-active recruitment plan as part of the lifecycle. They test, track, and analyze special offers, messages, marketing channels, and timing to convince a prospect to give membership a try by making the decision to join.

3. Engagement -- when new members feel they belong with you. The most likely member not to renew is a member in their first year. The second most likely member not to continue membership is one who has no behavioral indicators of usage or involvement with the membership. So the goal for these new members and those not taking advantage of the value provided is to generate interaction. Any type of interactive engagement, whether it is a purchase, a visit to the website, a completed survey, or a phone call to the organization correlates positively with the ultimate renewal of a member. Membership engagement is a crucial lead-in to renewal.

 4. Renewal -- when lapsing members decide whether to keep you. The mind shift that is important when thinking about renewals is that you are undertaking a campaign and not managing an event. We are entering another political season. Politicians know that just sending one letter or one phone call is not a strategy that will maximize voter turnout. So they are very aggressive (some say too aggressive) in turning out the vote for themselves. In the same way, today the standard three part renewal series is no longer sufficient to maximize retention rates. A synchronized, multi-channel, high frequency, campaign is required to maximize renewal outcomes.

5. Reinstatement -- when former members agree to return to you. In life there will always be bumps in the road with any relationship. It is no different with the membership relationship. However, it almost always makes more sense to try and restore an existing relationship than starting a new one. The reinstatement portion of the lifecycle is where attempts are made to understand the problem and fix it. This sometimes involves market research. As the old proverb says, “Look where you tripped, not where you fell.” It also involves ongoing outreach to highlight new opportunities and new membership options. Successful membership organizations never give up on getting members to come back.

The Membership Lifecycle is a framework to diagnose and fix the challenges that face every membership program. In my consulting work, I usually find that two, three, or even four elements of the membership lifecycle are functioning well in a membership program. But I also find that one or two parts need to be addressed to establish a strong and resilient program. Take some time to look at your membership to see which of these parts of the lifecycle is a weak link and put some time and effort into making some changes. It will positively impact the entire membership program.

Is There a Membership Gene?

The future of membership is often debated in associations, non-profits and local communities. Is membership a concept that’s time has passed and we are looking to a societal future of “bowling alone”? Or is membership and association with others something that is at our core as humans?

I tend to think that although how we associate will certainly change, there seems to be a consistent recognition across the ages of this human characteristic of coming together around common interests. From Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville to Dr. Suess, there seems to be recognition that we need each other.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) wrote, “For men journey together with a view to some particular advantage, and to provide something that they need for the purposes of life; and it is for the sake of advantage that the political community too seems both to have come together originally and to endure.”1.

In addition, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the particular expression of this membership tendency in America. He wrote, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America. Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals . . . in the United States associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining.”2.

Finally, in a lesson that Simon Sinek draws from no one less than Dr. Suess, he writes, “Dr. Suess explained it best. [There is a] very basic human need – the need to belong. Our need to belong is not rational, but it is a constant that exists across all people in all cultures. It is a feeling we get when those around us share our values and beliefs. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe. As humans we crave the feeling and we seek it out.”3.

As membership professionals, our key to success is better understanding how to meet this “need to belong” and harness this desire for “collective exertions” for some “particular advantage”.

1. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle book viii 9
2. Democracy in America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville, chapter 6 “Political Associations in the United States”
3. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek,Penguin Group, 2009, page 53.

Solutions to a Declining Membership

Back in April, I wrote a post titled, “What are the Biggest Impediments to Membership Growth?”

However, I did not talk through potential solutions to these impediments. So here we go with some thoughts on what to do about a declining membership.

I have been doing membership consulting for over twenty five years. During this time, I have noticed that organizations tend to react to membership declines with two types of responses.

The first response is to demand action now. An organization might say, “Our membership numbers are down. We need to send out emails tomorrow to get the numbers up for the month!”

The second reaction that I see is avoidance. “Our membership numbers are down. But I cannot get the staff, chapters, or board to do anything about it.”

Neither of these reactions tends to bring long term solutions to a membership problem. What I have found works best is to help an organization step back and see the big picture and then develop a systemic solution to fixing the problem.

A classic treatise that speaks to these organizational tendencies is a book by Peter Senge titled, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. In the book he applies the concept of systems thinking to help organizations respond effectively to the challenges that they face.

Systems thinking highlight the inadequacies from the response that says “do something now” or simply work harder to solve the problem. This organizational response generally results in just kicking the can down the road. System thinkers call this “just push harder” reaction “compensating feedback”. This is “when well intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention. We all know what it feels like to be facing compensating feedback – the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back; the more effort you expend trying to improve matters, the more effort seems to be required.”1

In fact, Senge maintains, “pushing harder and harder on familiar solutions, while fundamental problems persist or worsen, is a reliable indicator of nonsystemic thinking – what we often call the ‘what we need here is a bigger hammer’ syndrome.”2

Systems thinking also speak to the avoidance or victim response to organizational challenges by helping to uncover high leverage solutions to a problem.

A basic premise of The Fifth Discipline is that organizations, economies, and people naturally grow as long as the things preventing that growth are removed. Senge says, “Don’t push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.”

“Systems thinking shows that small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Systems thinkers refer to this principle as ‘leverage’. Tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, a change which – with a minimum of effort – would lead to lasting and significant improvement. The only problem is that high-leverage changes are usually highly nonobvious to most participants in the system.” 3

So from a practical perspective instead of treating just the symptoms of a membership problem or being in denial what should one do? How do you bring a systems thinking solution to the problem?

A tool that I recommend to help diagnose a membership challenge from a systems thinking perspective is using a concept called the membership lifecycle.

The lifecycle breaks down each stage of the membership relationship. What I find is the most membership problems exist in one of the five lifecycle stages of awareness, recruitment, engagement, renewal, or reinstatement. Identifying the root membership problem can lead to a highly leveraged or efficient solution.

You can download a free whitepaper that outlines this concept using this link.

There is hope for a declining membership. Don’t give up. Step back and identify the key impediment to growth and work on fixing that nonobvious problem first.

1. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, by Peter M. Senge, p 58.
2. Ibid. p. 61
3. Ibid. p 63-64

Maximizing your Website as a Tool for Membership Recruitment

Many membership organizations invest a lot of time and energy in building web traffic through SEO and some also with SEM. But surprisingly few use a visit to a website as an opportunity to capture an opt-in from a prospective member.

Joel Book commented on this in DM News. He wrote, “Research from Web analytics technology provider Webtrends shows that on average, 95% of website visitors leave a site without indentifying who they are and taking some form of action, such as subscribing to your e-newsletter. That’s why subscriber conversion is one of the most important metrics that impacts marketing ROI.”1

When an opt-in is captured, we have found that these leads are some of the highest responding lists for membership recruitment campaigns.

So how do you get a visitor to opt-in to receiving additional information from an organization?

We recommend a concept that I call trading content for contact. This involves trading valuable information in exchange for the right to continue a dialogue with a prospective member. This information typically comes in the form of a free email newsletter or a white paper on an important topic of interest to visitors.  This process is fundemental in achieving the awarness stage of the membership lifecycle.  Here is one example of offering whitepapers or an email subscription to visitors of a website. 

If a visitor to your site desires to access valuable information, you do not have to give away the store.  It is not inappropriate to ask them to share who they are and have the opportunity to opt-in for future contact.

1. Joel Book, Advanced e-mail tactics can shed light on new customers, DM News, Strategic Content, October, 2010, page 10.

Here’s How to Engage Your Members

Much effort in membership engagement and retention is focused on informing members of all the great things an association does. But the research shows that giving members more information falls short. Engagement comes by impacting a member’s behavior.

That’s why I enjoyed the comments by David Gammel, in his May article in Associations Now, Connect. Engage. Accelerate. He writes, “I define member engagement as the following: Engagement is the result of a member investing time or money with the association in exchange for value.”1

I agree with his definition. And in fact from my research, it is not only a good definition, but it actually works.

Awhile back, I reported these results from a membership analysis that we did.

• Members who upgraded their membership in the past year to a higher level of service were 12% more likely to renew.
• Members who placed a product order in the past year were 28% more likely to renew than those who had not placed an order.
• Members who also maintained membership in an optional local chapter along with their national membership were 17 percent more likely to renew than those who were not a member of a chapter.
• Members who attended an association meeting in the past year were 19 percent more likely to renew than those who did not attend a meeting.
• Members who attended an association meeting at any time in the past were 7% more likely to renew than those who never attended a meeting.
• Members who attended four or more meetings were 30 percent more likely to renew than members who never attended a meeting.

But the engagement does not just need to be a financial exchange. Engaging interaction can be as simple as a phone call. In a presentation for ASAE and the Center that I did with Karen Gebhart, President of the AOPA Foundation, we reported that their research showed members who called the association’s '800' number compared to those who did not had an improved retention rate.

Gammel also highlights, “If you accept that engagement occurs when someone invests time or money with the organization in exchange for value, you can then consider opportunities to do so before that person becomes a members as well as after.”2

In my membership lifecycle vocabulary, I call the pre-membership engagement stage awareness, but the concept is basically the same. In essence it is helping a potential member to find you and initiating some level of relationship. One method is what I have come to call trading content for contact. If you want more information on this take a look at my post, The Push and Pull of Membership Recruitment and see how this strategy might be used at the introduction or awareness level.

The bottom line is that lots of information sent to a member does not build engagement. However, finding ways to get a member to interact, use, and take advantage of the value you offer builds your member relationship.

1. Associations Now, C. David Gammel, CAE, Connect. Engage. Accelerate. May, 2010.
2. Ibid.

Continue Efforts to Reinstate Former Members

The other day, I was presenting some of the membership research and one of the audience members expressed shock that our data suggested not giving up on trying to reinstate former members. “The former members left the organization. Why would you keep trying to bring them back?”

I thought that it might be of interest to share some real world response rates that support the point of working to restore the membership relationship with an expired member.

With one client organization, we regularly market to former members and ask them to reinstate their membership. In fact, we go back to members who expired in the year 2000. These members who have been gone for nine years still produce a very nice return -- 40% margin over marketing costs. On the other hand, for this organization, reaching out to those who have never been a member actually produces a return well below breakeven.

One note to remember, going back to former members only works if there has been good database hygiene practices in place. Running records through National Change of Address (NCOA) which corrects records going back for up to 48 months needs to be done on a regular basis. Also USPS Ancillary Service Endorsements should be used. "Ancillary service endorsements are used by mailers to request an addressee's new address and to provide the USPS with instructions on how to handle undeliverable-as-addressed pieces." There are a number of options available, so take a look at the link.

It is almost always a safe bet to reach out to former members as a first priority over prospects who have never been members.

The Growth of Loyalty Membership Programs

The other day, I received a question from one of the readers of this blog about the number of members in loyalty programs. I was able to access some excellent data and wanted to share it with you.

For background, membership loyalty programs are marketing initiatives to retain and reward customers. They can be offered by major retailers or financial service companies or by your local barber shop. The goal of these programs is to move customers from a transactional relationship to a continuity relationship. Loyalty memberships are cousins to association memberships, sharing many of the same strategies, tactics and analytics.

The source of this data is drawn from The 2009 Colloquy Loyalty Marketing Census.

“For those interested in the bottom line, this report reveals that, from 2006 to 2008, U.S. loyalty program memberships increased from 1.341 billion to 1.807 billion—an adjusted growth rate of nearly 25 percent since our last Census. This number translates into 14.1 loyalty program memberships per U.S. household.”[1]

However, since most loyalty memberships do not require a regular renewal, there is a big difference between the actual number of members and those who are actively engaged with the brand. “The percentage of overall active memberships in the U.S.—those memberships that demonstrate some type of engagement within a 12-month period—remains flat at 43.8 percent, with a blended average of 6.2 active memberships per household.”[2]

The census also provided counts for US membership loyalty programs by sectors. The top five are:

• Financial Services – 422.0 million


• Airline – 277.4 million


• Specialty Retail – 191.3 million


• Hotel – 161.9 million


• Grocery – 153.2 million[3]

When I teach about membership marketing, I focus on the five key touch points in the membership lifecycle. Each has its own challenges and opportunities. For many classic membership associations, recruitment is the number one challenge.
Based on this report, the challenge for building loyalty memberships is not so much recruiting new members, but in engaging them and getting them to take advantage of the membership. Using the report’s definition for engagement -- no interaction over the past year -- over 56 percent of the names in a loyalty member database are not active.

If you would like to download a copy of the report, here is the link for registration and download.

[1] Rick Ferguson and Kelly Hlavinka, The 2009 Colloquy Loyalty Marketing Census, Loyalty One, page 1.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid. page 5.

Top 10 Methods to Engage New Members

Part of my thinking in developing the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Survey was simply to find out what association marketers are doing. So it has been interesting going through over 400 responses to see all of the activities that are taking place in membership. This makes the seventh post on what I have found.

One question that we asked in the survey was to list all of the communications methods that were in use to engage or onboard new members. Here are the top ten as reported by survey respondents starting with the most used.

In addition to the most used methods, some of these engagement techniques also correlated with organizations that reported higher renew rates in the survey. (Please note, I am not saying that they caused higher renewal rates, but that they were more likely to be practices of groups that reported better renewal rates.)

The methods that correlated with higher renewals are what I would call “high touch’ contacts and include mailed welcome kits, volunteer or staff welcome calls, new member surveys, and a new member reception.

What is also of interest to me is that the associations with larger membership counts were the more likely to report on using volunteer or staff calls to new members compared to other sized groups. I had assumed that it would be associations with smaller memberships who could handle these personal calls.

Methods that were very rarely used to engage new members were telemarketing welcome calls, early bird or “At Birth” renewals, and a using custom new member renewal series.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for additional Membership Marketing Benchmark Survey findings.

Trade Content for Contact and Build your Database

One relationship building tool that I am a big fan of is initiating a relationship with a prospective member through a free email newsletter. This is a great way to build your prospect database and help people get to know your organization.

I shared a while ago how the National Science Teachers Association has built a list of over 200,000 prospective members by using this technique. They basically exchange content for contact.

A friend of this blog from Convio recently shared with me their non-profit online benchmarking survey that highlights many online practices of non-profits including email list building. You can find out more about the study here.

One statistic that they shared is the medium size of email lists that have been developed by different categories of non-profits. Here is the chart from their report. [1]

A key step in building these files is to convert visitors to your website into registered users. Convio shares in their report that associations on average are converting 3.05% of visitors into registered users by getting them to volunteer their email address.

Do you have an active registration and email program with your organization?

[1] Quinn Donovan, Convio Analytics Manager , Vinay Bhagat, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Brian Hauf, VP Client Success Services, The Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index™ Study, March 2009.

Successfully On Boarding and Engaging New Members

How can you increase the retention rate of your first year members by 12 percent?

Darryl Walter, formerly with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and now with The Wildlife Society shared how he did it in the November issue of DMAW Marketing Advents.

As you may have read in this blog before, the most likely members to leave an association are first year members. In marketing terms, these members are in their conversion year and need special care in order

The successful solution highlighted in the article featured a monthly ‘welcome’ telemarketing program. The new members were called and thanked for joining and asked if they had received their magazine and new member kit.

“In analyzing the effectiveness of the telemarketing call”, Walter writes, “we averaged a 12 percent increase in conversion rate for those who received the telemarketing call versus those we were unable to contact.”[1]

Why might this tactic have been so effective? Research shows that a key predictor of renewal for new members is generating a second interaction between the member and association after joining. So the goal of an engagement or on-boarding program needs to be to get additional interaction. The tactic used is not as important as the interaction that you need to achieve.

What are you doing to engage the new members in your organization?

[1] Darryl Walter, Show Your New Members Some Love, DMAW Marketing Advents, November 2008, page 5.

Building Your Constituency in order to Build Your Membership

You can call it branding, you can call it building awareness, you can even call it feeding your database, but it is an important new way to ultimately grow your paid membership.

Let me explain this by relating the recent membership success of my friend Howard Wahlberg.

Howard is the Assistant Executive Director at the National Science Teachers Association. He has seen his membership grow from 55,000 to over 60,000 during the past two years.

He is doing the right things: sending out marketing campaigns, testing messaging and packaging, segmenting his market, etc.

But he has another very powerful tool. The team at NSTA has established a electronic newsletter over the past few years that now includes over 280,000 subscribers – including his 60,000 members. The newsletter – NSTA Express – is automatically provided to members and is also offered free of charge to non-members. Subscribers come from visiting the NSTA home page or the “forward to a friend” button in the newsletter.

Obviously, it is a helpful resource to members. But what is really exciting about NSTA Express is how it exchanges some free information from the association in order to build the constituency or market mindshare for NSTA.

With the opt-in email relationship, NSTA gains some important opportunities.

1. Express builds awareness and allegiance to NSTA by informing and orienting prospective members to the services, activities, and resources available from NSTA.
2. Express allows NSTA build a database of those who are interested in Science education and since subscribers can self select the content from three versions; it helps NSTA to know people’s interest areas.
3. Express allows NSTA to take the pulse of what topics and issues are most important by reading click through reports.
4. Express provides a platform for NSTA to promote products and upcoming events, and yes, sell membership.

And since the newsletter was already created as a service to members, it costs very little to share it with the larger audience.

Sometimes we can become overly focused on making the membership sales instead of helping prospective members dip their toe into the water and more gradually become involved. But almost always building your network will translate into paid members.

The Levels of Membership Engagement

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What is my Career? Membership Development is Relationship Marketing

Do you work in membership development, membership retention, or membership marketing? If you do, you may have trouble explaining what you do to others, including prospective employers outside the non-profit or association fields.

I believe the answer to the question, “what is my career?” is that you are a professional engaged in “relationship marketing”.

The textbook description of relationship marketing from Philip Kotler follows.

“Relationship marketing has the aim of building long-term mutually satisfying relations with key parties – customers, suppliers, distributors – in order to earn and retain their long-term preference and business . . . The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is the building of a unique company asset called a marketing network. A marketing network consists of the company and its supporting stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, retailers, ad agencies, university scientists, and others) . . . The operating principle is simple: Build an effective network of relationship with key stakeholders, and profits will follow.”[1]

If that sounds familiar it is because that is what we do.

Kotler goes on to describe the progression in relationship marketing as moving people through eight stages of relationship starting with “Suspects” and moving to “Partners”.[2] Here are his stages.

• Suspects
• Prospects
• First Time Buyers
• Repeat Customers
• Clients
• Members
• Advocates
• Partners

All of these stages have relevance in membership development. However, in membership we tend to shorten the cycle and bring people into the membership relationship sooner. The relational marketing progression that I have recommended to use for associations is pictured below. You can read about it in my post titled, Five Phases of the Membership Life Cycle.

Here is the bottom line. If you are involved in membership marketing, you have a very valuable and transferable skill. You have developed hands on experience of establishing, building, upgrading, and retaining a customer. You are a relationship marketer.

[1] Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, Prentice Hall, page 13.
[2] Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, Prentice Hall, page 50.

Life Cycle V – Renewal

Renewal is the quantitative measurement of how successful you have been with the earlier components of your membership system. An aware, engaged, and interdependent member is much more likely to renew than one who is not.

But at the same time, there is a unique challenge to renewing members. Any renewal program needs to take into account that people are very busy and overwhelmed with communications.

Over the years, my analysis of why members’ lapse shows that the number one reason that people leave an organization is not that they are unhappy with the services or angry about customer service. No, the key reason most people do not renew their membership is because they “forgot”.

In some cases, the member moved and did not provide the association with a forwarding address. In other cases, the brand of the association did not stand out enough in the renewal notice, and it was overlooked. Whatever the reason, more members leave an organization by omission than commission.

In order to break through this omission challenge, renewal programs need to break through the clutter of competing communications.

Perhaps one of the simplest and often one of the most effective ways to improve renewals is simply to increase the frequency of notices. Increasing the number of notices sent to a member should be considered if tracking reveals that the final notices of the renewal program are generating a strong response or if subsequent reinstatement efforts produce good returns. I have met with organizations that do telemarketing to former members and have response rates in excess of 10 percent. This says to me that their renewal system is leaking members who communicated with properly are ready and willing to stay with the organization.

As a rule of thumb, the frequency of renewal notices should be increased until the cost of generating a renewing member through the system equals or exceeds the cost of acquiring a new member. In the rare event that tracking reveals the cost of renewing a member is higher than acquiring a new member, then decreasing the number of renewal notices would be appropriate.

A second tool to break through the challenge of members forgetting to renew is the use of multiple marketing media. In addition to mailed renewal notices, other channels like phone, FAX, and email can be employed.

A high frequency, multi-channel renewal program might look like the following.

Finally, an opportunity to positively impact renewals is to look at offering different options to actually eliminate the member’s renewal decision. This is accomplished by offering payment options like:

• Automatic credit card renewal
• Automatic electronic funds transfer renewal (EFT)
• Multiple year memberships
• Life memberships
• Automatic monthly/quarterly credit card installment billing

These payment options change the renewal dynamic from asking the member to act pro-actively to continue a membership to requiring the member to act proactively to end a membership. Associations that have members who accept some type of automatic debit or credit card charge can see renewal rates 10 points higher for these members than for typical members.

What techniques have you used to increase membership renewals? Please feel free to share them here.

By the way, you can read my first four posts on the Membership Life Cycle through the following links: Awareness, Recruitment, Engagement, and Interdependence.

Life Cycle IV -- Interdependence

In previous Life Cycle posts, we talked about the membership relationship beginning with awareness. I went on to discuss the importance of pro-active recruitment because of the “push product” nature of membership and the powerful contribution of engaging a new member to move them through their conversion year of membership.

The next season of the membership life cycle is interdependence. This level is the step above a simple transactional relationship. It is helping a member move to the point where his or her identity, livelihood, or safety is tied to your organization.

For a moment think of the association, charitable group, or faith organization with which you feel the most closely aligned. Why do you feel that alignment? Chances are because you are held by one of three 'glues' of interdependence.

I believe that these three elements or glues that build interdependence can be defined as: 1.) Common Vision, 2.) Reward, and 3.) Recognition. I have come to a better understanding of these over the past year through conversations with my colleague and friend Bill Jerome.

Common vision is a very powerful force that ties many of us to an organization. Many charitable groups are fully supported by selling their vision. Because we believe in the cause so much, we are happy to donate money with no expectation of reward or recognition.Have you established a common vision that you and your members are striving to accomplish together and that they can believe in and help you achieve? Members who are sold on the vision are interdependent with your association.

One of my colleagues at the United States Naval Institute once said to me: 'We don’t want someone to pay $39 to our organization solely to get a magazine, but to pay $39 because they also believe that through their membership, USNI is contributing to a better national defense for the United States of America.”

Reward is something that we all want. It is getting something back for our dollar.

The reward of membership in AAA that keeps renewal rates high is that if my car breaks down on a rainy night, someone will come and give me a tow or a jump. The 'towing' benefit is something that we would all like to have for our association.

Other organizations have succeeded in establishing interdependence through a very economically based reward system. One group accomplishes this deeper dependence through certification. Certification is required to practice in their field, and membership is required for certification. Clearly, interdependence exists here that has resulted in very high retention of members.

The most common reward that members look for from their professional association – according to Decision to Join -- is valuable training and information resources. Be sure to measure how your members think you are doing in these areas in order to establish their interdependence with you.

Recognition means that you know me, and I want to be known as one of you.It can be as personal as the great feeling of getting together with old friends at the annual convention or as technological as Amazon telling you what additional books you may want to purchase based on your previous selections. But the fact is that you are known, and this deepens your commitment and interdependence to the association.

Social media and Web 2.0 are perhaps the tools that will best help members connect with their association and build recognition going forward. Sara Costello, Manager, Global Strategy and Programs with the Society for Human Resource Management recently shared a great example of this on the ASAE International Listserv. She highlighted the just completed World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland which used blogs, flickr, You Tube, Podcasts, and Webcasts to build participation and recognition into the meeting.

Associations that have effectively applied all three of these glues of interdependence to their membership model have thrived.

How have you seen associations move from essentially a mailbox relationship to one of interdependence? Feel free to share your examples.

Why get help for Membership Acquisition?

Many organizations seek outside help from advertising agencies and marketing firms when they are looking to acquire new customer or members. Why is that?

I think that the main reason is that we are very comfortable with using our “inside” marketing media channels. But we may need help when we try to employ less familiar “outside” marketing media.

As the following chart highlights, the process of making prospective members aware of an organization and recruiting them is highly dependent on the use of marketing media that does not reside within the organization. Outside media can come into play once again when a member defects from an organization.

Membership Life Cycle Part III -- Membership Engagement

In earlier posts, I comment on the first two stages of the membership life cycle: Awareness and Membership Recruitment.
Now I want to focus on how we keep these new members from flying away from your association.

Once a member joins, he or she becomes the most likely member not to renew. Almost every association that I have worked with has its lowest renewal rate among new members. That’s why we call the first year of membership the conversion year.

Over the years, there have been many attempts at increasing renewals for these first year members. Some associations resort to sending the member a BIG new member kit to make them aware of all the association has to offer.

But there is a better solution. It is called engagement – encouraging and initiating interaction between the member and the association.

In a recent post on Growth through Membership Retention, I outlined the results from data analytics project that we conduction that showed for one association the powerful impact on renewals from different types of member interactions ranging from a member purchase to getting the member to call the association.

The survey results from ASAE and the Center’s, Decision to Join highlights the same concept. There is very little statistical difference between non-engaged members as lapsed members. “Those who are not involved lie perilously close to former members in their overarching assessments of the value they derive from associations. If former members are thought of as being dead, the uninvolved are close to comatose” (page 4).

So then how do we engage new members?

Many associations are now moving a conversion program which is a multi-step, multi-channel communication. The program is NOT built around informing the member about the association, but it is dedicated to generating a second interaction with the member. Essentially, a new member conversion program continues to “ping” the member until a response is achieved.

The program might include: a letter from the members personal member service representative asking them to call

• an email assisting the member with registering for the password protected membership web site
• a mailing with a dollars-off voucher for a first purchase
• an email survey verifying the use of member benefits
• a courtesy call to answer member questions

How important is getting a second purchase or interaction? In consumer marketing, customer-retention expert Jim Novo says, “If a customer has not made a second purchase by 30 days after the first purchase, the customer . . . is telling you something is wrong.”
Have you had experience in engaging members? Please share your thoughts.

Membership Life Cycle – Part II

Most associations have done a good job at building market awareness. Over the years, members and prospective members learned about the association from doing research, a professor, or a colleague.

After awareness, recruitment is the second part of the membership life cycle. It is the process of getting a member to join your association. Or perhaps better described, it is the process of getting a member to 'try' your association.Membership in professional associations is typically what marketers call a 'push' product rather than a 'pull' product.

A 'pull' product is best defined by the famous statement made in the movie Field of Dreams 'if you build it, they will come.' There are some products that consumers will spend hours seeking out. They do not need a lot of marketing. There are web sites dedicated to tracking down a “pull” product like the Nintendo Wii .

As opposed to the Wii, membership tends to be something that needs to be sold or pushed in order to get returns. Did you ask for a professional membership for Christmas?

A pro-active plan needs to be put in place in order to attract large numbers of new members to an association.

I believe that the single biggest reason that many associations are not growing membership is because of this lack of focus and funding for membership recruitment. I looked at this issue in more detail in an article that I did for ASAE and Center’s Associations Now.

When membership recruitment is done properly, most groups can see their membership blossom and grow.

The National Middle School Association is a good example of the importance of 'push,' or active recruitment.

Jeff Ward, the Deputy Executive Director of NMSA said ‘the association believed that it had a high level of awareness in the school market, but for many years we had experienced a flat membership.'Then the association settled on an aggressive membership recruitment program designed to take membership over a five-year period from 17,000 members to over 31,000. Once the acquisition program was launched, numerous tests were made to optimize both to the NMSA membership product and renewal system. The end result was that over this five-year period, NMSA indeed grew by over 80% and reached the new membership level of 31,000 members.

A solid recruitment plan requires an ongoing learning mindset that uses testing strategies to optimize three key areas:

• The marketing message - To determine what value proposition is most attractive to prospective members.


• The membership offer - To determine what price points, benefit packages, and special incentives will attract members.


• The target market - To determine what market segments or lists of prospective members are most responsive to the message and offer.

Next we will take a look at what you do with the new members once you get them.