How Many Memberships Do You Have?

There may have been a time when associations could keep their members engaged by crafting a single message, dropping it into a monthly or quarterly newsletter, and getting the word out by some combination of mail, fax, or e-blast.

It’s worth pondering whether that was ever the ideal strategy, even in the days when it was accepted practice. Today, with some pundits going so far as to declare the death of push marketing, you can and must do better.

It’s easy to find the right technology and the right advice to open a varied, creative conversation that will thrill your members and keep them passionately engaged with their association. The first step is to ask yourself how many “memberships” you actually have.

• Do veteran members, with many years in the organization and perhaps decades in your industry or sector, have the same needs and interests as new arrivals?
• Do all your members have the same educational needs?
• Are there specialist groups within the association who need careful attention to their own unique issues?
• Do all your members prefer the same mix of printed and electronic publications, of live and virtual events?

These and other differences are the hallmark of a healthy, diverse association. And they point to the need—and the opportunity—to delight, engage, and retain different membership segments by giving them:

• The information they want
• In the formats they prefer
• At the frequency they expect.

Your effectiveness in segmenting your market depends on the profile information you receive from your members and the insights you can gain by testing different messages with your various memberships. The most targeted approach, granular segmentation, is too expensive and sophisticated for most associations when it’s practiced at the level of an amazon.com.

But with the right stakeholder engagement program, you can create the same benefit for members who receive exactly what they need from their association. If you get this right, you won’t have to spend a lot of time telling your members how committed you are to engaging with them: They’ll be able to see and feel it, and the results will come back to you in their avid participation and continuing financial support.

Member Engagement: Keeping the Love Alive

With the economy just beginning to bounce back and everybody’s time at a premium, association members will only stay engaged and continue paying their dues if there’s something they love about their membership.

So finding that critical connection point and keeping the love alive has to be a top priority for your organization.

In the last edition of The Membership Engagement Blog, we listed the three questions you can ask to identify vulnerable members. The answers you receive will help you measure your success at two of the most important pursuits for any association:

• Keeping members engaged from the moment they join
• Pulling members back into the fold if their attention has begun to stray

Members might join the organization for any number of reasons—for professional development (whether it’s mandatory or self-directed), business networking, or career advancement. Their needs may also change as their relationship with the association evolves, or as they progress through your industry. That’s why it’s so important to segment your audience, to understand what information and resources each member needs and wants from the moment they join.

In Canada, the federal government has enacted a new set of privacy provisions that lay out a reasonably good roadmap for understanding your audience. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) establishes different levels of consent for sending information to members, prospects, or other contacts. The rules may look heavy-handed at first, but there’s a payoff:

• You can learn more about your members and why they joined by inviting them to choose the topics, formats, and frequency of communication they want to receive from you.
• You’ll have better touch points with more satisfied members if you periodically remind them that they get to choose the information they receive from you, and decide how often they want to hear from you.

How effectively do you segment your audience, to make sure each member receives the specific communication that s/he finds most useful and compelling? Drop us a line to tell us about it, and let us know if you’d like us to tell your story (anonymously) in a future blog post.

Understanding Member Needs - Before the Breakup

On any given day, some proportion of your members are probably a bit less engaged with your association than they were the day before.

Those ups and downs are natural. But when the relationship becomes weak enough, you run the risk that some members will leave the organization. Do you know how to read the signs of an impending breakup and rekindle the relationship before it’s too late?

Every member has their own excellent reason to connect with your association when they first join up. And it’s easy to spot the most engaged members, because you always see them—volunteering for committees, speaking at conferences, driving social media traffic, and playing other leadership roles in the life of the organization.

The majority of members are probably quieter, and that makes them harder to read. Many of them may be satisfied with the benefits they receive, but you won’t know for sure unless you listen carefully and reach out constantly.

In a 2010 white paper, Lebanon, Indiana-based Association Metrics suggested three questions to help you classify your members as loyal, neutral, or vulnerable, and are still very relevant today:

1.      If a friend or relative asked you about the association, how likely would you be to recommend they join?

2.      When your current membership is about to expire, how likely will you be to renew?

3.      How would you rate the overall value of your membership in this association against your dues?

A negative rating in response to any one of these questions is your signal that a member is vulnerable. And if you can spot a particular characteristic—age, income, educational level, years in your industry, or years in the association—that is more prevalent among vulnerable members, it may point to a cluster of members who are headed for a breakup.

Do you have an innovative strategy for keeping members loyal and engaged? Drop us a line to tell us about it, and let us know if you’d like us to tell your story (anonymously) in a future blog post.

A New Sheriff In Town: Part 3

We’ve been talking about Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), Bill C-28, and its impact on email marketing. We’ve seen that the difference between expressed and implied consent is going to be crucial for associations, and that it will take some time database management systems to catch up with the new legislation.

But while we’re looking at best practices for email marketing, here are a couple of other points to keep in mind:

·         Every bulk email you distribute should include an unsubscribe link. It should be conspicuous, in a clearly contrasting font colour, so anyone who’s looking for the link can find it right away.

·         Your unsubscribe system should get the job done in a single keystroke. You don’t have to confirm that they really, really meant to unsubscribe, and there’s probably no need to ask them why they’re leaving unless the information will support your future work. (There’s a difference here between unsubscribing from a distribution list and letting an association membership lapse.)

·         You can prevent a share of your future unsubscribes by clarifying peoples’ content preferences as soon as they join your organization or subscribe to a list. If you send each of your audiences the tailored information they need, at the frequency they prefer, and nothing more, you’ll be more likely to retain their confidence and their participation.

Consumer preference isn’t a new concept, and neither is privacy protection. Both re-emerged as business communications issues when email surged into the market. But if you want to comply with CASL and do the right thing for your members and subscribers, “do unto others…” is a surprisingly simple place to start.

Go back to earlier installments of this series: Part 1 and Part 2.

A New Sheriff In Town: Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, Part 2

When Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), Bill C-28, was implemented in December 2010, it took most associations by surprise. Now, the challenge is to make sure your database complies with the legislation.

The first post in our New Sheriff series explained the important issue of consent in email marketing, but understanding the rules is just the first step. Here are some questions to help you align your database with the new law:

·         How do you capture the information that goes into your database?

·         Does every member file distinguish between expressed and implied consent?

·         After a member consents, do you keep supporting proof on file, including the statement to which they consented?

·         Do you have a double opt-in process to make sure your members are really signing up?

If your database management system was designed before CASL was introduced, it may not be set up to easily accommodate the changes it requires. If you introduce a new management system in the near or more distant future, you’ll want to build CASL requirements into your plans. Until then, you can use user-defined fields or text boxes to keep the best records you can.

Once your records are organized, the next step is a plan for encouraging your contacts to convert from implied to expressed consent. If that sounds like a chore, we can help.

Still wondering why this is worth doing? Apart from staying within the law and preventing future complaints, a permission-based strategy really does make you a more effective marketer and deliver better results. You might start out complying with CASL because you have to. But some day, you may look back and decide the legislation was one of the best things that ever happened to your marketing strategy.

Ready to read more?  See Part 3 of this series.

A New Sheriff In Town: Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, Part 1

There’s a new sheriff in town for anyone involved in email marketing in Canada.

Its name is Bill C-28. It’s been setting up shop over the last year. Its main purpose is to enforce the email behaviour that Miss Manners would always expect of you.

Except that, since the government adopted Bill C-28, the new privacy provisions known as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), this is one area where good behaviour is now the law of the land.

We’re not lawyers, but we’ve already begun helping our clients navigate Bill C-28. Most of them have never heard of it—when the legislation passed in December 2010, they were too busy running their associations or businesses to notice. The government and the Canadian Marketing Association are still working out details of how the bill will be implemented. But it’s time to get ready, and the difference between implied and expressed consent is a good place to start.

·         If someone has joined your organization, they’ve given you expressed consent to receive your communications. You’ll have a more satisfied member if you invite them to choose the topics, formats, and frequency of communication they want to receive from you, and periodically remind them that the choice is theirs to make. But under CASL, you’re covered.

·         If you meet a prospective member at a dinner or collect their business card at a trade show, you have implied consent to communicate with them—but only for two years. That means your booth representatives have to note the date of contact and your database has to track it.

·         Expressed consent is only valid if you clearly explain what your contact is agreeing to receive, and provide a link to your privacy policy. After they agree, you have to send them a confirmation email, and we strongly recommend using a double opt-in format to make sure they’re sure about signing up.

The same distinction applies to funders, exhibitors, and all your other partners. If they sponsor an event, buy an ad, sign up for a booth, they’ve given you their expressed consent to communicate. If they haven’t signed up to a formal business relationship, the consent is implied, and the two-year clock is running.

On the surface, CASL sounds like a relief for anyone who’s been buried in a deluge of email spam. But implementation is complicated, and we’ve already begun advising our clients on the database issues that result. We’ll deal with those issues in Parts 2 and Part 3 of this blog series.

Greenfield Services to attend CSAE Tête-à-Tête

On Thursday, February 9^th, 2012 leaders of Associations, Not-For-Profits, Professional Meeting Planners as well as Government Producers will be heading to the Ottawa Convention Centre to attend 2012’s installment of CSAE’s Tête-à-Tête – and Greenfield Services Inc is thrilled to be joining them!

As a platinum sponsor of the event, Doreen Ashton Wagner (Chief Strategist & Managing Director) & Meagan Rockett (Director, Client Solutions) are looking forward to re-connecting with old friends, and establishing new relationships.

Every year Tête-à-Tête continues to grow, and 2012 is shaping up to be the best year yet!  For more information on the event, or to register, please click here.  Feel free to stop by our booth (#415), or contact us by email to pre-book an appointment.  We look forward to seeing you all at the show!