Regional Membership Development & Management
Declining or stagnant membership…..Mature products and services delivering less to the bottom line…..Harder to attract and keep volunteer leaders…..Costly delivery of products and services…..Ever increasing direct and indirect competition…..
You may be familiar with these signs. They occur more often among associations today than ever and we can expect only more of the same. Unless we recognize what is causing this deterioration and adapt new methods to create “essential value” and share it.
“Essential value” is something of value your members or customers feel they can’t do without. Or to put it another way, delivering a product or service that answers the question you put to your customer….”what keeps you up at night?”
Increasingly, the old methods of measuring a moment in time of customer or member need, expectation or desired outcome via surveys, focus groups, etc are not capable on their own to develop essential product and service experiences. Such intelligence gathering is too slow, too removed, too often misinterpreted, and too old to be useful in the design and delivery of products and services in a “real time”, customized world.
So we need to develop ways to not only harvest user data but also to make it actionable close to where your members and customers are. Devising a regional plan to implement ways to adapt or create new products based on local/regional customer need is becoming critical for those US associations who are serious about building and sustaining and global growth strategy whether you consider yourself to be a US association with an international membership segment or an international association based in the US.
One’s approach to entering new or expanding existing regions to membership is likely to be different based on the region itself.
In this section we shall examine a variety of approaches to building membership:
- A local member testimonial program with local volunteer support reduce costs while boosting retention
- Multi-year membership campaign targeted C-level executives attracting a 21% increase in local membership and 26% increase in annual meeting attendance
- A new “emerging leader” membership category opened a new market making membership more accessible and appealing to younger professionals
- Regional HQ for managing and planning member event, communications and membership promotion increased membership by 70%
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