5 Strategies to Grow Membership

Members are the lifeblood of any association. Your member community will be formed of creative leaders, knowledgeable professionals and dynamic influencers, all intrinsically connected in a unique alliance of talent. 

No association is static — each one is an evolving community that morphs to meet the needs of its members, continuously delivering new meaning and value. To maximize impact, you need a robust strategy to grow association membership. This means attracting new members while retaining existing ones. But time is precious, and professionals are constantly bombarded with marketing messages and advice — why should they listen to you? 

The key to staying relevant is to be uniquely useful. A modern association must be many things to each member — a community in which like-minded professionals can network, a space to solve challenges, a place to find the latest jobs, a hub for professional development, a source of industry knowledge, and much more. 

So, in this busy world, how can you employ membership growth strategies to attract and retain members and achieve your mission? 

Here are the top 5 strategies to grow membership, with insights and tips, including the ways in which career centers can help associations like yours expand their networks and retain members. 

Attract new members with a full-service career center

First and foremost, a full-service career center should be the main pillar of your membership growth strategy. 

Much more robust and comprehensive compared to a traditional job board, career centers offer a place not only to advertise job postings, but also to publish useful and engaging content for your target audience, and leverage SEO functionality to increase your visibility in search engines like Google, utilize email and social media marketing integrations, offer value with learning and development tools, events information, and a lot more.  

All of these can help to build your audience with increased reach into your community, offer value for your members, increase engagement with industry professionals and ultimately boost your membership. 

Get to know your members and craft content for them

How well do you know your association membership? Do you understand their challenges, their ambitions, their frustrations, and the issues that keep them up at night? 

If you don’t, how can you provide the services they need? With hundreds or thousands of members, this might seem like a daunting task, but technology can provide quick and easy solutions. 

Create surveys: These are quick and easy to produce. Combine approaches, using open-ended questions to dig deep into your members’ challenges and yes/no questions to gather a snapshot of a particular strategy or idea. Then generate reports and analyze the trends.

Track member activity: Web-tracking software can analyze the user journey as new and existing members move through your site. You’ll soon start to identify the pages that gain the most traffic — and the areas where users lose interest and drop out.

Monitor engagement: Track members’ engagement with social media posts and email marketing. Do certain topics prompt members to open campaigns or download whitepapers? Which posts receive more likes and, even better, more comments? Are certain events often oversubscribed? Use marketing automation software to target, tailor, and streamline engagement.

By understanding your members’ needs, you can create useful and relevant content tailored to them and deliver more conversions, which keeps current members coming back and attracts new ones.  

Network with prospective members

Another one of the top strategies to grow your membership is to network with prospective members in your industry.  

By getting to know your association membership, you’ll understand how and where they network. Your association will be an obvious meeting point, but there will be other places too, and where there are current members, there will be opportunities to recruit new ones. 

Online networking

Social media channels are key meeting places for strong, connected, and lively communities. As a professional association, you’ll probably lean more toward LinkedIn than Snapchat, but you may be surprised at the platforms many frequent.  

Before you jump into any new channels, run a few quick checks: 

Are your members active in these forums? Look for company accounts, individuals posting content, and plenty of engagement (views, likes and comments).

Are similar associations or competitors there too? Look for large followings and a lot of recent, relevant discussions.

Is the community forming groups and deeper networks? Look for specific groups discussing key issues, some of which may be large and very active.

If the channel looks relevant, become active in it. But don’t just set up a company account and start broadcasting messages as a means of recruiting new members. Actively engage with individuals, like and share contributors’ posts, contribute to discussions and provide authoritative insights. 

If possible, assign a team member responsibility for the channel and give them the time and resources to champion this activity. Members and prospects will soon see the real people behind the association and recognize the value of your contribution. 

Offline networking

Face-to-face networking is far from dead, your membership growth strategy should take this into account.  

There are many opportunities to get in front of prospects and use these channels for recruiting new members. Actively search for speaker opportunities, host events, get your leaders noticed by prospective members and show them what you have to offer. 

Partnering with other relevant organizations, including key employers in your industry, can also help with promotion. Co-partnering enables both parties to reach new audiences, and when these touchpoints come with member incentives, the relationship is even sweeter. 

Show — don't tell — value for your members

One of the most powerful membership growth strategies is to show your value. Broadcasting your benefits through advertisements will attract attention and entice new members, but it’s much more compelling to demonstrate how you solve challenges. 

Inbound marketing is a great way to do this — give away useful content to draw prospects to your website and career center, and add them to your marketing funnel. This content can be published anywhere your members and prospects are communicating, such as LinkedIn groups, online discussion boards or events. Content can be repurposed multiple times — perhaps as a whitepaper or cut into smaller blogs or social media quotes — making it accessible to a wider audience. 

Longform and valuable content can be gated, making it accessible only to those willing to provide a few details. Keeping the form short will ensure better data-capture rates. Both parties win here: The prospective member gets a valuable piece of insight, and you get more information to help connect. 

In terms of topics, use your member knowledge to target content and drive increased engagement. Write about what you know and what your audience wants to know. That’s the sweet spot. 

The journey doesn’t stop once the content is posted. Enable analytics and you can track the users’ journey through the website. Keep your web interface simple: show users the value of membership, the benefits of joining and how they can join in as few clicks as possible. Use short, impactful, reassuring marketing messages and simple forms and offer incentives to convince them to act. 

Once you’ve gathered user information, you can feed it into a marketing automation system. Even if a prospect doesn’t join right away, you can continue to send relevant and useful content that demonstrates the value your association brings. 

This approach works in the offline world too. Open events to non-members and you can show your value in a very real way. They’ll be able to network with your association membership and meet your staff on a “try before you buy” basis. 

Cultivate loyalty

A significant part of any membership growth strategy is attracting new members, but you forget your existing members at your peril. Growth isn’t just about bringing new people in — it's also about holding onto the association membership you already have. 

Associations are hardly ever static. Members’ needs and the macro-environment all change, which means you too must adapt. The way to gauge change is to keep talking with your members. Survey them regularly, particularly when a member leaves. It can be hard to hear the things you’re doing wrong as an association, but this is valuable knowledge when it comes to driving positive change. 

Once you’ve collected your survey results, communicate findings and actions back to your members. Addressing issues head-on will lead to stronger relationships and a sense that you are a force for positive, constructive transformation. Of course, you can’t address every issue raised — some suggestions may conflict with each other, and some may not support your overall mission or values. Take time to read, digest and prioritize the issues, and tackle them in a balanced and progressive way. You also don’t need to change everything all at once.   

Be aware that members are particularly susceptible to leaving during their renewal period. This is a key time for members to evaluate your relationship. At the renewal stage, remind your members why they need you: review the year, talk about the events they’ve attended, the value you’ve offered them, the changes you’ve made together and the development opportunities that have benefited them.  

Ensure that renewal is an opt-out, rather than opt-in, process. When you enroll new members, remind them that renewal is automated and allow them to opt out if they choose. 

New members are also particularly susceptible to membership churn within the first few months of joining. This is costly for associations, as the money spent on attracting new members might not be returned. 

As soon as members join, ensure they feel the value of their affiliation. Create a welcome pack with discounts, merchandise and helpful information. Encourage new members to network and attend events so they can connect with, and be inspired by, more established professionals in your association. 

If members do leave, take the time to try to win them back. These members are warmer and easier to win back than attracting new members: Once they have experienced the value of your association, you might be able to persuade them again. 

Put your members at the center of everything you do

Members are quite simply your reason for being. Without them, there is no association — they should be firmly at the heart of all your endeavors. Make sure the whole team sees this and works together to create a community that members are proud to be a part of. 

By implementing these effective strategies to grow membership, your association can position itself for growth.  

With the most experienced career center specialists on the market, Madgex is the leading provider of career center technology for associations and societies like yours. Our full-service career centers offer not only the most advanced job board technology on the market, but a full suite of tools that includes content creation and publishing, SEO functionality, built-in display advertising technology and much more to help your association grow its reach and boost its membership.