Ways to increase active membership in an organisation

What it takes to grow association memberships can be a challenge, yet it’s still the engine that pushes communities to be engaged and impactful. Members are the face of your organisation’s network, and it’s through them your association can standardise ethics and standards in any industry. Here are some ways to increase the membership-

• It’s important to know where your members hang out, assemble or otherwise cross paths with other potential members. This also doesn’t mean just physical locations, but online circles as well. LinkedIn is a great place to get started in discovering where your potential members are lying. It’s encouraged that you partake in regular discussions, commenting, and sharing your insights as well. Being a part of the community within an industry is priority number one when it comes to building your audience.
• Associations are not just known for hosting events. We dare say it’s an obligation to host high quality and regular events for an association even to survive. Events are perfect ways to force paying members into getting their money’s worth by engaging and interacting with other members, the public, and governments. This is how associations the world-over impact social, political, and economic changes in their communities and industries.
• Retaining your members are just as important as adding new ones to the association. You’ll never reach your membership goals if you keep losing members. The core reason members leave is that they are unhappy with something. There are ways to keep members happy with a blanket-engagement strategy that we’ll list out for you. Still, most importantly, you should look inward to how your association is organised and try to pinpoint what makes your members upset. There are some great ways to keep members happy, and the primary way is through constant high-quality engagement. Pumping out Events, Meet & Greets, Reward Programs, Implementing member feedback, social media engagement and more are great ways to keep everyone happy.
• Set up a system of regular, monthly is ideal, surveys to send out to your members, and get actionable feedback from the members themselves. This will always keep you in the loop for what changes your association needs to take to please members and improve your associations.
• With members joining at different times, with potentially varying lengths of memberships, it can be tedious to keep up with their activities, their exit dates, and when the best time to remind them is. There’s even a surprising amount of associations out there that are not automating this process. Even some sadly never remind members due to the sheer manual time-taking task that it is.
• Setting up time-based or limited count offers are a great way to push those potential members on the fence about joining your association to go through with the registration process finally.
• Welcome packages are a great way to engage new members. While they’re suitable for engaging members, the long-term effect of having committed members can influence how word-of-mouth spreads about your association. Association membership growth is based on a lot of factors, and while there are marketing ways to do so, word-of-mouth is always the winner.

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Dawor Deka