Member Engagement Study

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At the core of every professional membership organization’s efforts is members – recruitment AND retention. And member engagement is crucial to sustaining and growing your member rolls. Not everyone’s talking about it, but they should be.

We set out to explore the topic of member engagement differently, with the intention of providing you with additional insight that may help to improve decision making and increase engagement for your member organization. In what we believe is an industry first, we’ve looked at the subject of member engagement through a new lens that compares how and why members actually engage with professional or membership organizations, alongside how associations think members engage with their organizations.

We set out to answer four essential questions:

What matters most to members when they join a professional member organization?
What makes members feel involved and engaged?
How can professional member organizations better communicate?
Are professional member organizations engaging members in a segmented, targeted, personal way?

We explored questions with 1,030 members in the United States ranging across all age segments – Millennials, Generation Xers, Boomers, and Matures, as well as 149 association professionals. Let’s just say that a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work in this highly personalized, tech-savvy world in which we live.

Download the full Member Engagement Study to find out what we learned.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a membership engagement strategy?

A membership engagement strategy is a plan your association develops and executes to ensure membership retention. An engagement strategy is meant to keep members active and interacting with the resources you offer them so that they continue their membership.

How do you create a membership strategy?

To develop a membership strategy, you’ll need to understand what benefits your members most value and how they impact renewal rates, what ways members engage with your organization and how the interactions relate to member loyalty, and how priorities and loyalty changes throughout the member career journey.

How do you engage association members?

You can engage association members through blog posts, a job widget on your homepage, newsletters, your social media channels, and printed flyers. Anywhere that you make a touchpoint with a member is an opportunity for your association to engage with them.

How is membership engagement calculated?

You can determine the engagement of your membership by understanding what matters most when members join your organization, determining what actions make your members feel engaged, identifying opportunities to communicate with your members, and targeting your communications to the member based upon their membership segmentation.