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Tag: member research

  • When In Doubt, Do SOMETHING!

    When In Doubt, Do SOMETHING!

    Granite Partners ‘ sole reason for being is to help trade and professional associations excel at what they do, to grow and thrive and move forward confidently in their work of improving their members’ professional and business lives. Many of the engagements we take involve marketing, and one of the most frequent things we’ve been asked to do is essentially play the role of “energizer” for the organization’s marketing efforts.

    They’ve done the same thing year after year, promoted the same conference the same way, recruited the same type of members in the same way for years, and are starting to see their results deteriorate. Their membership numbers are flat, retention is down, conference attendance is dwindling and fragmenting, and the whole organization is struggling as a result of curtailed budgets, reduced momentum, staff ennui, and a general lack of verve for the organization’s mission.

    We come into the organization, review all their efforts, work with senior management and staff to break down some of the reasons why things are done the way they are, maybe slaughter a few sacred cows, generate some ideas for new initiatives going forward, and then work with them to implement them. From 10,000 feet, that’s what our practice looks like. Under the hood, however, there’s a lot more going on. Counteracting all that inertia, brightening up the mission and the message, assessing member’s preferences and needs, researching new member segments, generating program initiatives, all takes time, resrouces and energy. But what it really takes is courage.

    There is often some long-standing doubt surrounding these new initiatives, some deeply-rooted skepticism among the staff, many of whom have been working there for years, and have seen initiatives come and go, to no apparent effect, and don’t expect these to be any different. The courage to change the status quo is difficult to locate and harder to draw out and nurture, to bring to light and expose for all to see, so that it can spread among the staff and be transmitted to the membership. That’s our real job.

    Often what it comes down to is this: Something is better than nothing, so when in doubt, do SOMETHING and we’ll figure out if it worked later. Getting this type of thinking started takes the courage of managers and rank and file alike, and is a cultural anomaly, especially among older employees. Asking forgiveness rather than permission is counter to most Association cultures, build up after years of top-down management and communication, lack of mid-level empowerment, long chains of budgetary approval and micromanagement. Breaking that paradigm (I hate that word, but it actually fits here), is a tough challenge, but the benefits are myriad and multifaceted.

    Marketers in many organizations have been working under this new “Do Something” regime for a while now, and the one’s who pull it off successfully have earned the respect and understanding, and in some cases the admiration, of senior management in their organizations, having proven themselves to be solid, reliable producers, despite what might be seen as the use of unorthodox methodologies. Unfortunately, this new disease is not highly contagious, and needs to be spread deliberately among other staff departments. The courage to take the initiative, to empower the staff to think for themselves, to solve problems pragmatically and immediately, takes time and effort to develop, but the results are unequivocally worth it.

    Do yourself a favor – when your marketing program seems stale, your efforts start to look tired and hackneyed, the results start to droop – DO SOMETHING! You’ll be glad you did.

  • Members Behave Like Consumers . . . and Make Decisions The Same Way!

    Members Behave Like Consumers . . . and Make Decisions The Same Way!

    As the debate rages on as to whether non-profits would be better off behaving more like for-profit corporations, it would be wise to keep in mind that the central reason most non-profits were formed was to serve the members, and in that aspect non-profits could learn a lot from their for-profit counterparts. If you were to substitute the word “member” for “customer” in much of the modern marketing and advertising literature, there is a deep mine of wisdom that non-profits could plumb in order to more adequately frame their value proposition, and find greater success in the ever-present quest to find, recruit, and keep members.

    There is an obvious schism in the way corporations reach out to consumers. The two schools of thought – the “logical” and the “emotional” – are forced to co-exist, and if done properly, can work cooperatively to achieve their goal of building customer base and consumer loyalty. The “Logical” school, promoting features of the products, and the benefits thereof, using statistics, facts, information to make a “case” for their product’s superiority; and the “Emotional” school, in which images and messaging that appeal to some of the more base emotional motivators to influence purchasing behavior appear.

    This can perhaps be seen most readily in the automotive industry, possibly due to the sheer volume of television and print ads for cars that pervade national media. In roughly half the ads, the manufacturers promote things like fuel efficiency, flexibility in seating arrangements, crash safety, popularity with consumers, cargo space, back-up cameras or parking assist, features that make it desirable to certain segments of the buying population. The other half feature imagery and messaging that promote how the car will make you look, feel, how it will make your neighbors envious, how you’ll be more popular or get more attention if you own one, how it will make your co-workers jealous, appealing to the base emotional drivers like need for recognition, elevation of status or popularity, vanity or need for acceptance.

    In nearly all the non-profits we’ve worked with or counseled, the value proposition has been of the “Logical” variety – here’s the benefits you get from joining and staying a member. The other half, and some would say the much more powerful half based on some recent consumer research on buying behavior, has been left out in the cold, as if because they are a professional organization appealing to other professional organizations or persons, there is no emotional reward for becoming a member. This bloodless approach is unfortunately too typical of B-to-B marketing in general, but the ethos surrounding non-profits is so laced with the need to be taken seriously, many cannot bring themselves to voice the benefits of membership in any sort of emotional way for fear of being seen as weak, or needy, or heaven forbid, unprofessional!

    By injecting some of the emotional component into their outreach approach, non-profits could certainly experience great success in their recruiting efforts, as they would find a much larger segment of the buying population would respond to their appeals. Even in a B-to-B purchase decision, there are one or more PEOPLE making that buying decision, people with emotions, feelings and attitudes that can drive behavior in a much stronger way than the typical “Franklin List” of pros versus cons of joining an organization. By taking a “business only” approach, membership marketers have sidestepped a huge driver of consumer behavior – the need to belong, for acceptance, for praise and recognition. Maybe they feel that the emotional appeal may not be strong enough to pry the dues check out of the fingers of hard-nosed business members, who need a business case to justify every decision. Maybe they’re uncomfortable using a more emotionally based appeal to reach their potential members because they can’t guarantee to “deliver” that type of benefit year after year. Whatever the reason, there would seem to be tremendous gains to be made by positioning their organizations emotionally as well as economically.

    Maybe a look at another area of their operation would yield some insights – many non-profit, member-based organizations have a charitable arm or foundation of some sort, and the search for donors is often not only more aggressive and better focused than the member recruitment effort, but the appeals tend to vacillate between the logical and the emotional appeal, doubling the reach of the organization and driving donations beyond what the membership could logically support. Much can be learned from corporate marketing efforts and applied to non-profit recruitment and retention efforts. Sometimes its a case of simply looking over the backyard fence . . .

  • How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

    How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

    There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

    It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

    The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]…each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.[/pullquote]

    Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

    Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More in-depth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi-page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

    Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include all current members on such a survey, to get a sizable enough number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t  purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each should have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant.[/pullquote]

    Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

    One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

    Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

    If you found this article valuable and informative, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“