Category: Marketing

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How Well Are You Managing Your Online Community?

Posted on by Miranda Pruitt
How Well Are You Managing Your Online Community?

There’s a difference between “setting up” and “building” an online community – and the latter requires much more time, ongoing effort, and resources.

Private online communities have grown in popularity in the association world, and they can be a great tool for building engagement and connecting members.  But many resource-constrained membership organizations set them up only to find that it’s a lot harder to manage a community than they thought it would be.

A thriving online community requires a lot of time and attention. So before you launch, be sure you have the ingredients you need to make it successful!

A Purpose

What do you want to achieve? Most communities focus on information sharing, connecting members, staying in touch with members, and giving members a place where they can get answers to questions. Online communities thrive on content, but before you can determine what kind of content you want to distribute, you need to have some specific goals in mind.

A Strategy

It takes time to build a thriving community, so you need to think long term, rather than posting content on an ad hoc basis. Your strategy follows your purpose. Based on your goals, get something down on paper that provides some detail on what kind of content you’ll post, how often, how you’ll manage your community, and who will be responsible for managing it.

Exclusivity

With so much competition for your members’ attention on the web, you need to be sure you’re giving them relevant, timely information they can’t get anywhere else. Maybe it’s researching findings from studies you’ve conducted, quick tips from reputable experts within your organization, or videos that will teach your members something valuable.

Community Managers

Ideally, you’ll want to dedicate more than one person to creating and posting content, monitoring forums, and responding to questions. Choose people who know the industry really well, even if it means using a reliable volunteer. You want people who are up to speed on the latest industry trends so they can generate some discussion.

Content

Think varied and personal. Your content should touch upon the issues and challenges your members to encounter on a day-to-day basis so that they are compelled to read it, watch it, or listen to it. Use a mix of mediums, including written content, videos, and photos to keep things interesting for your members.

Contributors

Don’t do it alone. The most successful communities draw on the expertise of many contributors. This might mean including content from partner organizations, sponsors, board and staff members, and even enlisting some of your members to volunteer as contributors.

Patience

Your online community won’t grow overnight. Keep at it, monitor your progress, and re-assess your strategy from time to time. Be flexible – if something’s not working, acknowledge it and change your approach.

Put all these ingredients together, and over time your fledgling community will grow into a thriving, regularly visited hub for your members and prospective members.

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Data Rules, Assumptions Drool: Keeping Your Email Marketing Relevant

Posted on by Miranda Pruitt
Data Rules, Assumptions Drool: Keeping Your Email Marketing Relevant
Contributed by Mary Byers, CAE

Email marketing has long been the mainstay of an association’s marketing plan, but is it still effective? The popularity of smartphones and tablets has made email readily accessible but has also created some challenges. To be most effective you’ll need to do a little research to determine how and when your members read their email, and what type of content is most likely to engage them.

Lori Ely, Marketing Manager at Informz, Inc. says, “Behavior is huge and understanding what your individual members are doing in your emails, both on desktop and mobile, will help in creating the right strategy.” You can accomplish this fairly easily using analytics technology offered by most email marketing systems.

Ms. Ely offers the following tips for keeping your email campaigns relevant and effective:

  1. Utilize data you’ve collected from your members such as preferences, past behavior — both in purchasing and activity — in your emails. Don’t wait until your members complain. Be proactive. Use the technology that is widely available today for tracking and analyzing your email campaigns.
  2. Avoid email fatigue by segmenting your database. Blasting emails to everyone on your list and hoping you get a few members to take action will likely backfire. Targeting your emails to appropriate members is key to building trust among your subscribers.
  3. Ask the right questions. How can we make email more personal? Are our members reading on a desktop or a mobile device? Do we really need to send six emails for one course? How can we do more with less?
  4. Pay attention to mobile. Be aware of the limited time individuals have while reading on a mobile device and adjust your content length to encourage engagement quicker. Learn and understand the behaviors of those accessing your content on mobile devices. Think about what your call to action really is. Can they register from their phone, or do you include an option to receive an alert to remind them later when they return to their desk?

Many associations are taking notice of Ms. Ely’s advice and revamping their email marketing to meet the needs of their members. Here are a few examples of associations that made significant changes to their email marketing strategy to become more effective:

Toy Industry Association, Inc. – revamped their weekly newsletter through testing, re-engagement strategy and design.

Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association – transformed their monthly newsletter into a mobile-friendly version based on utilizing data to identify those who read on a mobile device.

The American Political Science Association – improved their customization of messaging by utilizing behavioral marketing.

The success of any email marketing strategy begins with understanding your members’ preferences and how to best engage them. Tracking and analyzing your email campaigns and utilizing behavioral marketing concepts will help to achieve a better response rate and more effective communication with your members.

– See more at: http://www.marybyers.com/data-rules-assumptions-drool-keeping-your-email-marketing-relevant/#sthash.KKD4nmFT.dpuf

About Mary Byers

Author. Speaker. Facilitator. Consultant. Provocateur. All describe Mary Byers, CAE.

Mary Byers helps associations gain clarity and focus through leadership conference training and facilitating strategic planning retreats, assisting task forces and work groups, and helping association staff and volunteers talk through tough issues. Visit www.marybyers.com.

Blog Category: Industry Trends & News, Marketing, Technology

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Social Media Associations’ Top Strategy for Member Engagement

Posted on by Miranda Pruitt
Social Media Associations’ Top Strategy for Member Engagement

Member engagement doesn’t happen randomly. Associations with increases in overall membership are “also more likely to have a strategic initiative in place for increasing engagement,” according to the 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report from Marketing General.

Those that have been most successful – according to this study – cite participation in public social networking as the engagement strategy that has been most effective for driving engagement – more than young professionals programs, webinar attendance, and members-only website areas.

This makes sense. You can offer all the value-adding programs and services you want, but you won’t get very far unless you aggressively promote them, and social media has become a go-to tool for doing just that.

According to the study, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the most-used platforms by hopeful associations looking to find new ways of connecting with members. Most of them have learned that the saying “if you build it they will come” doesn’t apply in the realm of social media. You have to actively build and nurture your social media page with timely, relevant content that’s helpful to your audience in order to increase exposure.

Association executives shared some of their best practices from their social media experience, including:

  • Ask volunteers to post on a regular basis to keep content fresh
  • Create Facebook groups based on interests or industry
  • Ask questions and actively stimulate discussion
  • Plan and post regular, original content – and make it relevant
  • Be more aggressive in encouraging members to participate on social media platforms by promoting more prominently on the website, in emails, and in monthly communications.
  • Follow and comment on influencers on Facebook
  • Instead of measuring “likes” or the number of people who join your community, look to increase how much interaction your posts are getting
  • Encourage members to post to Facebook and Twitter at events and conferences
  • Post Videos on YouTube as regularly as possible
  • Thank new and renewing members publicly on Facebook and Twitter – these posts are often liked and shared
  • Offer to help members at large conferences set up social media accounts
  • Showcase member-only content on public social networks to reinforce to non-members your value proposition
  • Vary your content – articles, videos, podcasts, quick quotes, and anything else you can think of that’s unique and original

One thing to add … don’t make your content all about you. People get tired of seeing promotional content constantly – and eventually, Facebook won’t even show your posts in your fans’ newsfeeds. Try to make the majority of your posts serve your members’ and prospective members’ interests – it’ll make them more likely to read the occasional post promoting your next event.

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The Right Questions to Ask on Your Next Membership Survey

Posted on by Miranda Pruitt
The Right Questions to Ask on Your Next Membership Survey
You might say, “I already know my members – I am constantly talking to them and getting their feedback.” That’s a great start, and will definitely help you make an overall assessment of your members’ needs. However, there’s a danger in assuming that the select group of people you are talking to all share the same common attitudes and opinions.

You’ll need to draw on more quantitative, objective information for your analysis. The insights that come out of your analysis should form the basis of the decisions you make from then on.

So how do you get to know your members? There are a lot of different research methods you can use. A combination of formal membership surveys and informal interviews is ideal. It’s best to start with broader surveys. Once you’ve analyzed the results, you can ask a handful of members to schedule informal interviews so that you can get a better understanding of why the survey participants responded the way they did.

An effective membership survey collects all of the information you need while being as short as possible. Respondents should be able to finish it in 10 minutes or less. Anything longer can cause them to drop off before completion.

It’s a good idea to have the survey available online and as a hard copy to increase response rates. Most membership management software has built-in survey tools, which allow you to connect your members’ responses to their demographic information. This is really useful when analyzing the information.

Getting the Right Information

If you’re looking at your members only in terms of their titles, industries, or membership levels, you are likely missing vital information that will help you create more value for your target members and prospects.

The truly valuable insights are reached when you evaluate your members and prospects based on their behaviors, needs, values, interests, motivations, and attitudes. Everything you do – from building membership packages to creating marketing messages – should be based on these key elements.

Demographic & Personal Information

In order to get your members and prospects to take positive actions, you must address their personal needs.  Access to demographic and personal information can help you connect your members’ actions – attending events, purchasing subscriptions, or discontinuing memberships – to the motivations and attitudes that triggered the actions. Demographic information also assists you in identifying the characteristics your key members and prospects have in common.

Every association is different, so the types of information you choose to collect will vary according to your objectives. Some examples of demographic or personal information include:

  • Demographics (age, gender, income, geography, education level, size of employer or practice)
  • Experience level (early-career, mid-career, or late-career)
  • Education level
  • Personality traits (outgoing or reserved, introverted or extroverted, planned or spontaneous, leader or follower)
  • Access to and familiarity with technology
  • Size of their organization
  • Other industry organizations they belong to
  • Other hobbies and interests.

To understand how this information is useful in practice, consider the example of two engineers belonging to an industry association. One of them is new to the field, and the other has 35 years of experience.

The young engineer joined so he could access educational resources and advance his career.  The more experienced electrician has already done all the learning he is interested in doing. To him, the value of being a member is having his interests represented through the organization’s advocacy work.

Promoting the value of advocacy to the young engineer would be totally ineffective because it doesn’t really matter to him. To attract and keep members, you need to find ways to express what matters to them. Demographic and personal data help you do that.

Be sure to check back next week, when we’ll cover what kinds of questions to ask your members to get an insight into how they perceive your organization, what kind of value they get from their membership, and the needs you should be meeting.

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Making Your Post-Event Debrief Worth Your Time

Posted on by Miranda Pruitt
Making Your Post-Event Debrief Worth Your Time

You put your blood, sweat, and tears into your events. So when things don’t go to plan, it can be hard to swallow. You might be tempted to put it behind you and never look back – but that’s the worst thing you can do.

Even if you think you already know what worked and what didn’t, holding a post-event debrief meeting to review the event while it’s fresh in your mind is absolutely essential. Be systematic about it, and take notes on what you want to repeat at your next event, and what you would change.

Making Your Post-Event Debrief Session Effective

Schedule a post-event debrief with your key stakeholders and event committee members within a few days of the event.  It can be helpful to set a date in everyone’s calendar before the event even happens. Debriefs aren’t just about pointing out the mistakes that were made, but celebrating successes.

We’ve all been to those debrief meetings that seem directionless. To avoid inefficient use of everyone’s time, assign a facilitator to ensure it’s well-structured.  With your facilitator, prepare some discussion questions in advance to promote open sharing of insights and opinions.

Here are a couple of questions you may want to think about:

  • What went well? What didn’t? Why?
  • What aspects of the event didn’t go according to plan? How will you prevent this next time?
  • How well did your committee work together leading up to the event?
  • Were there any parts of the planning process that could have been more efficient? How could you improve efficiency?
  • Did everyone have enough time to complete their tasks well and reach their individual and group goals?
  • Were instructions and expectations always clear?

You’ll want to assign someone to capture the key discussion points and distribute the notes to the whole group for review afterward. Once everyone has had an opportunity to give feedback and make suggestions to the document, re-distribute the final document and save it to refer to when you start the planning for your next event.