Many association executives pose the question “How do I engage my members in a meaningful way?” The following are five ways that are relatively inexpensive and not overly time-consuming to start implementing now:
- Maintain a blog: Every association should have a blog that addresses key issues, provides opinions, and offers expert advice for their industry. Your communications department likely works diligently to put together a newsletter monthly that is distributed to your membership. But only those on the distribution list have the opportunity to read it, and the majority is likely not reading every installment. What if you took your content created for the newsletter and re-purposed it for your blog?
- Show off the stars: Start a member of the month (or, week) program. Advise your community about what they have done to earn the spot (through their volunteerism or research for the industry for example). Have a spot on your website home page that showcases the member; and link it back to your blog for a full article. Get your members involved once the program is up and running by starting an nomination process.
- Educate them: On their time. In many cases, the professional development programming is solely focused around a big conference. Keeping programming for your conference is OK, but many of your members will not be able to attend. Having regular webinars to help increase the chances of your members gaining their required credits, or just news regarding your industry, is a great way to keep them informed.
It can also be a new potential source of revenue for the organization – making them available on demand for purchase by your community can drive revenue to your organizations bottom line.
- Push the envelope: After inviting your community to join you online in either a public social media platform or private online community, start posting questions to get people talking. It is a great way to get your network talking to each other, sharing ideas, opinions and articles of relevance.
- Use video: Everyone likes watching videos, and you could incorporate this into your engagement strategy for many aspects within your organization. Your conference delegates, exhibitors and sponsors could be on video talking about your events and why they are a wonderful way to network and educate, your Executive Director could have a monthly vlog that is only available in the members-only section of your website (or, on a private online community).
Need help with your engagement program? From consulting on strategy, devising a plan to implementation, we can help! For more information please contact Meagan Rockett, Director of Client Solutions at 613-288-4517, or
meagan@greenfield-services.ca.
