For years societies have relied on membership dues to help fuel their operational budgets and organizational goals. Members happily paid dues to gain access to their society’s valuable journal publications, admission into a prestigious community of scholars, or for discounts to conferences, for example

Over time this core society membership value proposition began to face difficult pressures. Institutions embarked on a publications access race to attract the best and brightest (thereby undermining a society’s monopoly on access to their flagship journal), and the arrival of the digital age massively changed how social communities take shape and created novel ways for information to be shared.

While these changes helped scientific communication progress in ways not previously possible, if your organization’s core revenue stream is feeling the pinch, you’re not alone! Given these pressures, many societies are looking for ways to increase non-dues revenue streams. In particular, they’re looking into what products and services they can uniquely offer. This is where a robust society career center can come into play.

The Career Center Advantage

When it comes to offering employers access to a single source of subject expert researchers and professionals, nothing beats a society community. No other organization or entity comes close to providing similar access to a community of highly qualified, specialized applicants with the exact, often hard-to-find qualities recruiters are seeking.

Furthermore, society career centers often have better engagement than “typical” commercial job sites: visitors stay longer, look at more pages, and have better application rates.

Unlocking More Value

When promoting your society career center to recruiters, it’s important to remember that access to a highly qualified, specialized community is the “product” you have to offer. The career center itself, and the means of communicating job openings—whether in print, online, or through email—are simply the wrapping around a great “product,” if you will.

Review Pricing

So, your community and membership base has some value, but just how much? The answer is: probably more than you think. In fact, we’ve found that most of the job advertising options that societies offer are underpriced and huge revenues are left on the table —so, review your pricing!

• Conduct market research – your prices should reflect the value of accessing your community
• Look at what other career sites in your field charge for job ads
• Experiment with different price points and packages

Offer Different Packages

Different employers have different needs and preferences, so when it comes to career center advertising, one size does not fit all. One recruiter may only want a 30-day job post on the career center site, while another may want an entire campaign that includes print and online ad components. Some recruiters may have time-sensitive positions that they need to fill immediately, while others may be willing to wait as long as they need for the perfect candidate to come along.

While it may seem like a lot of work to come up with multiple packages and even bespoke options, it’s important to remember that recruiters are coming to societies for their ability to target specialists. Therefore, the more specific the role, the greater the challenge to the recruiter, and the more he/she may be willing to spend to target the exact right audience. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Ecological Society of America (ESA) are great examples of talent recruitment options that vary by “recruiting difficulty.”

Widen Your Audience with Personalized Targeting

When a recruiter approaches you about advertising a highly specialized job, the more you can demonstrate an ability to target the job opportunity to relevant users, the better. Personalized targeting, also known as “audience targeting” or “behavioral targeting,” can help expand the audience segments—i.e., potential job applicants—your career center can offer. This is how it works: special software embedded in your site learns from your users’ behaviors and preferences—what pages they visit, what searches they perform, what links they click, and so on. As a result, your career center is able to offer these behavior-based segments to help match employers with users who would be most interested in a particular job opportunity. Employers are willing to pay top dollar to post their job openings when quality audience targeting is provided, making it key to your career center’s success. 

Earn More from Your Career Center

Career centers and professional development are often touted as member benefits, which they most certainly are, and important ones at that! But in addition to addressing members’ needs, a career center can also become a substantial driver of non-dues, non-publication-related income that supports a society’s sustainability well into the future. By unlocking the value of its community through a well-formed career center program, a society gains firmer footing to navigate the ever-changing scholarly landscape and sustain its mission.

To learn more about how your career center can become a strong non-dues revenue stream for your society, please contact David Kim.