Engaging Members Beyond the Board

Are you lucky enough to have a Board of Directors who are highly engaged? Does that engagement extend into the general membership? In other words, are your volunteers and your board the same people?

I ask these questions because I have worked at non profits where the Board is highly energized and engaged.  They have a passion, mission and vision for the future of the organization, which can be almost infectious.  A recent conversation I had with a client, they told me how excited and engaged their board was, but it's hard to bottle that enthusiasm and translate it into actionable items for both the board and the staff.  So how do we bridge the gap?

Here are some ideas that I have used in the past, in no particular order:

1. Provide your Board members with a script to call 5 members a month and ask them to volunteer, attend an event, renew their dues, sponsor a program.  Realizing that the Board often times have full time jobs that don't relate to their duties for your association's board providing them with the tools that they need build the organization will help your association.
   
2. Create an agenda for each Board meeting so that they can stay on topic and focused on improving the association.  At the start of each meeting agree that while we are all passionate about the association, in order to move the organization forward and stay relevant we need to focus. 
   
3. Create a list of Board/Association priorities.  During your creative brainstorming sessions you may come up with a host of great ideas.  How does this new idea fit into the strategic plan? Is it relevant to your membership, will it provide them a benefit that they cannot get anyplace else?
   
4.  Remember the mission.  At the end of the day, associations exist for one thing and one thing alone to serve their members needs.  By keeping this top-of-mind you will only help both your Board and your association. 

Got any ideas of your own that work? Feel free to share them here. 

I'll Be There For You!

These five words you swear to your members.  When they breathe, you want to be the air for them - or at the very least the one place they go when they need to know about your association's industry.  Did you just head bang? I thought about it when I was writing it, if that makes you feel better. 

Our members are our life blood, but what if we can't be there for them when they need us.  Is this a failure upon our part? As a communications scholar/student we frequently say that it's actually healthy for a couple in a romantic relationship to maintain other relationships outside of that couple.  So where I am going with this? Members are looking for diverse information that may not be your area of expertise.  How can you keep them from going to other places?

• Partner with associations in your space.  They aren't the enemy and you will both be better for an event, a seminar or whatever type of program you can agree on. 
• Invite guest speakers on topics that aren't your association's niche that are relevant to your membership's diverse needs. 
• Read blogs of professionals in the for-profit and non profit industry where your association was born from.

Keeping up with the trends for your members is just one part of your day-to-day job duties.   You do this so your members don't have to look elsewhere for this type of information.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only you and your members can decide. 

Like it, Tweet It, Pin it -- You decide

Facebook®,  Twitter®, Pinterest® and LinkedIn® are just a few places that you can engage with your members in the social media space.  The true value of being present in these spaces is hard to measure their true return on investment.  Check out a few ways that your association can start tracking your ROI today:

Google Analytics this provides you tools to track how members engage with your association’s website. When you set up your account, you indicate what page you’d like to track.  You can track items like: paid, organic, local, social, etc.  One of my former association clients did a “heat map” showing where they received the most traffic, thereby justifying their premium home page real estate.  In fact, the heat map, showed that their section of the website (career center) was the most viewed and visited page.  This built the business case for both a redesign of this section as well as increasing the prominence on other highly viewed pages. 

bitly makes your link both trackable and searchable.  This allows you to tweet shorter statuses on your association’s twitter account, as well as determine, who is out there listening to you.  This feature also allows you to customize your shortened URL so you can include keywords that you want to appear in search results.  The more you can track the more you can show the value of time(hopefully) well spent. 

Tweet Deck the largest advantage of this feature is the ability to schedule your tweets.  I usually open this up in the morning and after I check email I start crawling the web for stories about things I find interesting.  This could be anything from membership growth strategies, database best practices, interesting stories in the business world, as well as other things.  I spend about 30 minutes every morning finding these stories and then sharing them with the world via twitter. 

Klout helps you understand what the association’s sphere of influence is and how it’s changed.  The interesting thing is you can see who influences you, if you weren’t aware before.  I have a few go to’s in terms of blogs that I follow.  They are:

•  Katya’s Non-Profit Blog
•  Kindergarten Mind
•  Beth’s Blog
• ASAE’s Acronym
•  Harvard Business Review Blogs

With so many different ways to engage with your members out there, I think it’s important for someone to share what they’ve learned.  There may be easier ways to do it, but this is what I have learned.  Hope you find it helpful!

Experience, Curiosity & Questions

I recently read a post by Joe Rominiecki discussing his 5 years experience as an association executive at ASAE.  Coincidentally, I have double the experience of Joe and I have to tell you, I too have many unanswered questions.  For the sake of brevity, I won't dump them all here, instead I will chunk them into five questions.

1. How many people in marketing actually majored in business and or marketing? I spent 10 years doing marketing with or for non-profits, and my education had little to do with marketing.  My B.A is in American Studies, while my M.A is in Communications.  American Studies is based in history and likes to flirt with many other disciplines, it was heavy on reading and writing, which did serve me well.  Communications and marketing seem like they are closely related but if you had asked me 5 years ago which disciple I preferred, I would have told you marketing.  Today, professionals have to have more of a hybrid approach in the non-profit arena because you're dealing with limited resources and if you don't have a skill set you learn it.  Which leads me to my next question...
   
2. Experience or education? It's a follow up question to the one above, but what's more valuable your experience as a non-profit professional or a certificate in non-profit management? Here are some things that I learned on the job but not in school: managing vendors (designers, printers), understanding how to talk to those vendors so that it didn't cost you an arm and leg, politics (make nice with everyone, it makes your life easier, seriously), and try to make your boss look good no matter what.
    
3. Does anyone feel secure in their job? With the great recession, I can tell you I was not immune to being laid-off.  I worked for a small 6 staff association, and I was the last to be hired and the first to go when times got tough.  The association had never had someone do marketing for them, and the board didn't see the value in continuing it.  I spent three months of poorly paid government vacation being laid-off before I found my next gig.  What did it teach me? I shouldn't take my job for granted and I should do the best job that I can each and everyday.  Even with that, their are no guarantees. 
   
4.  Is change that hard? Perhaps it's my age, which isn't very old, but I don't find change to be that hard.  Just because you have always done something a certain way doesn't mean you should keep doing it that way.  However, when I find myself at the crossroads of making a change I am often lingering with doubt.  Is this the right decision? Should I choose this new vendor over the one I already know? What if this change doesn't go the way I want it to? So many follow up questions, and a lot here. 
   
5. How do we stay relevant with our members (customers)?  As former non-profit professional, keeping the association on the top of our member's minds was something that I spent a lot of time working on.  Emails, print, social media, I tried it all.  What did I find, people have so much information, that they rarely engaged with the association, or me.  I keep wondering, what do we as association professionals have to do to provide a service to members that they can't live without.  For your association the answer might be different.  

Basically, I think we all learn from our experience, in the end, my quest for additional knowledge always wins out.  How can I do better? What did I learn today? If I were my member, what would I think? 

Change is good...

In the non-profit world we're often slower to adopt to changes, and the most recent example of this is in social media.  Depending on the size of your association, your membership numbers and overall leadership associations are still thinking about dipping their toes into the social media water. 

Association members are using social media, regardless of the membership type, and believe it or not it is a way for them to engage.  Baby boomers engaged with their association by volunteering and becoming very active in the membership.  However the new generation, is engaging by sitting at their computers and updating their friends one status at a time.  If associations aren't at least listening to the conversation then they are missing out in engaging their future generation of members.  

One of the associations that I worked for is just getting in the social media mix, and when I spoke with my old supervisor over there, I told him that he was very late in the game.  He agreed and knew that the organization needed to supply a full time staff member to engage with their members in the social media stratosphere.  They have done as most associations do, hire a consultant to tell them what they don't know.  I offered my free advice, which was, get into the mix and don't do it "half-hearted." 

In order to be successful in the social media realm you must keep up your engagement.  With so many tools out there to engage members, what are you waiting for?