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Most membership bodies are finding it difficult to maintain membership levels in the face of economic and competitive pressures. There are many things you can do to retain your current membership and increase the uptake of new memberships but you do need to ensure that you have a clear strategy and stick to it. We believe that there are 3 key steps to keeping membership alive as follows:
1. Have regular meaningful contact with your membership to remind them you are there and above all to remind them that you are there to help them with their problems and issues. Contact needs to be structured but can take many forms and in the current age of Web 2 can be a two way dialogue as well. Examples of meaningful contact are:
• Forums – make sure you comment on them as well
• Newsletters – online, offline and via email
• Blogs – and encouraged comments
• RSS feeds
• Make your web site a meaningful place to visit with easily accessed information.
• Give some information away free to non members so they can see what they are missing out on.
2. Make sure that you align your benefit offerings to match your member and prospective member expectations and needs by creating offers that engage with them:
• Special Interest Groups
• Seminars
• Accessible CPD (too many Institutions make this expensive and too time consuming)
• White Papers
• Access to library and research documents
• Access to other members and their ideas – create your own social network.
3. Make membership essential, not a question of choice, and by this I mean that you need to develop a real desire for your members to want to contact you and use your resources. You can do this by:
• Ensuring you are the opinion and thought leaders within your sector, don’t just think you are, make sure you are.
• Get your members to contribute, formally as part of your communication to the outside world and informally amongst and too other members
• Create benefits that are of real value not just tokens because others offer them (travel insurance for example)
• Communicate the benefits for what they are, do not hide them, if they are not worth shouting about they are not worth offering.
• Use the the data you hold on members to tailor the benefits of membership to suit them, their business or their professional requirements
We are able to help you plan your strategy using the above plus other ideas and techniques both on and offline that will help you to maintain membership levels and to find new ways of growing your membership.
If you would like to know more about how we do this contact us now at more@purplefrog.co.uk or call me on 01844 295170.
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