Member Success is when your Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your organization.

To ensure your Members achieve their Desired Outcome – or what they need to achieve, the way they need to achieve it – and not just hope it happens, you need to actively work your Members toward that goal.

That’s where Member Success Management comes in.

At Memberships Matter!, we define Member Success Management as the process of moving Members toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome.

And Member Success Management is made up of the following things:

1. Segmentation

Member Segmentation is at the core of a sound – and scalable – Member Success Management strategy.

Segmenting Members based on how much they pay you (ARR, LTV, ACV, etc.) is one of those traps that a lot of Member Success organizations fall into.

It seems logical (from your perspective, at least), plus it’s what the industries have been doing for a long time (it’s a holdover from traditional Account Management).

Just because that’s how it’s been done, doesn’t mean it’s right!

Each Member segment has it’s own Appropriate Experience (AX) – even if they share the same Goal – so if you understand what their AX is, you’ll know the type and level of Member Success Management to get them there.

Segmenting your Members based on AX is the only way to both give the Member exactly what they need and the coverage levels to do that.

2. Orchestration

One of the simplest – and yet amazingly effective – things you can do to ensure your Members aren’t just on the path toward success, but to know what to expect along the way is what we call Orchestration.

Orchestration is made up of three main elements:

1. Properly Managed Expectations
2. Joint Accountabilities laid out at the start of the Relationship
3. The set-up of future Expansion and Advocacy

Managing Expectations with your Members during onboarding by telling them what to expect in the first 30, 60, 90-days as a Member and what the major Success Milestones are along the way are some very simple ways to reduce any anxiety they might have and to build trust in you.

Giving the Member a list of things they need to do – both in the product and outside of it, on their own – and what you need to do for and with them inside and outside the product – and showing that if both parties hold up their end of the agreement (that’s why I call it Joint Accountabilities) they’ll reach their goal.

But if they fail to do what they need to, and they made the commitment to do it, then they won’t reach their goal. Of course, you must do what you say you’ll do also… and if both parties complete their Joint Accountabilities, the Member should reach their goal.

Finally, letting the Member know that you rely on word of mouth (maybe you say to keep costs down, so you stay cheap; don’t say this if you’re the high-priced option!), and that once they hit a certain Success Milestone, you’ll ask them to give you a testimonial or do a case study.

Then you can start orchestrating Member Success – manage expectations, define joint accountabilities, and tee-up expansion and advocacy – right now; a very low-cost thing.

3. Intervention

To operationalize Member Success Management, you must proactively intervene in the appropriate way for that Member (a mix of technology and human touches; the “appropriate” part of AX will dictate the ratios therein) to get them to do the things they need to do to move from one Progress Milestone to the next.

If they do those things, great; they’re on their way to being successful members.

If they don’t do those things, however, you need to change up and/or escalate intervention to get them to act.

Intervention can be done on a timed basis (after x number of days, send an email or every three months do a Quarterly Mrmber Progress Review), based on data (the Member is not doing what they need to do to move to the next Pogress Milestone), or Triggers.

You’ll likely intervene based on a mix of all three of those factors, and the modalities for intervention (email, call, in-person meeting, etc.) will be determined by the Appropriate Experience of the Member (see Segmentation above).

4. Measurement

There are two types of measurement that must happen in a Member Success Management organization:

1. How are the Members doing?
2. How are we doing?

If the second one (how are we doing?) is not based off the first one (how are they doing?), you’re doing it wrong.

When it comes to Member Success, you actually want to pay attention to a financial metric (usually Net Revenue Retention or NRR) and a Member Success-specific metric like Success Vector, which we’ll discuss in a future article.

It doesn’t matter if we’re hitting our retention or expansion goals if we’re doing it in a way that’s not aligned with our Member’s success, that new (or renewed) revenue won’t stick around.

If you meet your NRR goals for the current time, but your Success Vector is getting worse, that could mean you did things to meet the financial KPIs in a way that had a negative impact on the Member.

5. Expansion (and Renewal)

It’s typically said that Renewal and Expansion (upsell, cross-sell, etc.) happen because a Member is successful.

But looking at it that way is what allows for the error of applying “new business” sales or traditional account management tactics to renewals and expansion when that’s exactly the wrong approach.

Rather, Renewal and Expansion are simply part of a Member’s success; in order for the Member to achieve their ever-evolving Desired Outcome, they’ll likely need to stay past a renewal and they’ll also likely need to consume more of your core product, adjacent products, etc.

This is part of Member Success Management because even if your organization decides to have a dedicated Member Success Manager (or Member Concierge) to handle Upsells, Cross-sells, and Renewals, those should be handled as primary parts of your Member Success Management plan.

Traditional Account Management fails because it treats Members like Accounts: as numbers. It is focused on Renewal and Expansion from the organization’s financial health perspective only. Account Management doesn’t care if the Member is “successful”, only that they would take the latest offer we’re trying to sell them on – and that is not Member Success Management.

Traditional Account Management doesn’t work anymore, but Member Success-driven Growth absolutely does, which is why this function should sit within, roll-up to, or otherwise be governed and monitored by Member Success Management.

6. Communication

It’s obvious that a major part of Member Success Management is to communicate with the Member (including champions, sponsors, and other personas).

Perhaps it’s proactively guiding the members to take the next logical step, giving the champion a status update, or scheduling the next Quarterly Member Review (QMR) with the executives or other appropriate personas.

Or maybe it’s intervening reactively when the Member hasn’t taken the action necessary to reach their next Progress Milestone.

Those are rather obvious times when Member communication is critical; but one type of communication with the Member that’s not so obvious is Member Marketing, of which there are two types:

Marketing to your existing Members to drive adoption and increase the breadth and depth (land and expand) of use, including upsells, add-ons, etc.

Using your Members in your marketing (case studies, testimonials, etc.)… combine 1 & 2 for a Member Marketing power play.

Member Marketing is either the responsibility of – or heavily influenced by – Member Success Management. Responsibility is ideal.

There is a fourth type of communication that Member Success Management is responsible for and that is internal communication.

It is critical that the Member Success Management team communicate what they’re learning from Members, how they’re impacting Members, and the value they’re bringing to the association by getting Members to stay longer, buy more, bring us into other parts of their company, and advocate for us externally.

Not only does that internal communication enrich the rest of the organization with Member intelligence, it also lets the rest of the association know just how valuable Member Success Management really is.

7. Instrumentation

Elements 1 – 6 really don’t require much technology or engineering work. Certainly, everything we’ve discussed can be greatly enhanced by leveraging technology.

But these final two are where you heavily start bringing technology into the mix.

Far too many organizations jump to buying a purpose-built Member Success Management software product assuming it’ll fix any problems they have, give them the structure they need, etc. But just like any other part of your business, if you select a piece of software without knowing what it is you’re trying to operationalize, you’ll end up building your strategy around the capabilities of that software.

Figure out what you need first, then find the solution that you think fits that model. Sure, you may not be 100% right out of the gate, but you’ll be a lot closer to where you need to be if you work in that direction.

Instrumentation is the process of collecting data on the Member’s interactions with your company, across their lifecycle.

From gathering usage data from your product to interaction records with the client, to Integration with other systems, Instrumentation is critical step in leveraging technology to guide your Members along the path toward success.

Context is everything when it comes to Member Success Management, so the more visibility you have into whether your Member is moving toward their Desired Outcome, the higher value your intervention will be.

What you collect all this data in – Excel, a BI tool, a purpose-built Member Success Management product (by the Way, we like the tools built on Microsoft Dynamics), is something you’ll need to figure out.

And the next, and last, Element on this list will help you figure out what that should be.

8. Operationalization

Wrapping all of this – Segmentation, Orchestration, Intervention, Measurement, Expansion, Communication, and Instrumentation – with processes – called Operationalization – is what takes Member Success Management in your company from a lovely thought experiment and turns it into the Growth Machine that it can be.

Operationalization is the simply the process of taking the data from Instrumentation and acting on it. Whether the system acts on it without human interaction or the system notifies a human within your organization to take a certain action should depend on the Appropriate Experience of the Member.

That’s why it’s so critical to have a clear idea of what the Appropriate Experience is for your various Member segments. If you try to operationalize across a normalized view of all Members, you’ll likely create a mix of technology and humans that is inappropriate for most of your Members.

Best case, you’ll over-deliver to Members that don’t need such high-touch and lower your profit margins. Worst case, you’ll provide an experience that is so incongruent with what the Members need, you’ll drive them away. The latter is bad, but don’t assume the former is okay; one of the biggest barriers to scaling that we’ve run into is when organizations over-deliver for their Members; don’t over-deliver, or just deliver an experience that is appropriate.

Member Success Management is not a technology-centric initiative; it requires you to understand what Member Success is, how Member Success Management is the orchestration of Member Success, and what all that means in the context of your Members.

From there, you can – and probably should – leverage technology to enable you to perform Member Success Management activities in a predictable, operationalized manner, which is absolutely required at scale. After that, the technology decisions will be easier as those that fit into your well-defined Member Success Management needs will be few.

Now that you know what Member Success Management is, the elements that make it up, and you have a general idea of what it will take your organization and your Member Success Team to be successful at it, you can dive in to the Processes and Training to be successful at Member Success Management.

Reach out to us soon, and let’s talk about training for your organization. We’d love to help you achieve Member Success.

Member Success is one of the most valuable concepts among associations and member-based organizations and it is constantly evolving. The more that Members have contact with the ideas and concepts underlying Member Success, the more learning occurs and the more those things evolve.

This real-time feedback loop of process development –> member contact –> learning –> iteration is powerful at the opportune level and feeds into the concept to cause a constant reimagining of what Member Success is at the conceptual level.

In this article we’ll share a list of the latest definitions of many of the core concepts and terms of Member Success, starting with higher-level ideas and moving down toward more actionable concepts.

Member Success Defined: The Concepts

• Member Success
• Member Success Management
• Desired Outcome (DO) (updated for 2023)
• Goal
• Conditions (addition for 2023)
• Appropriate Experience (AX) (updated for 2023)
• Coverage Model (addition for 2023)
• Relationship
• Engagement
• Context
• Account Ownership
• Progress Milestones (updated for 2023)
• Orchestration
• Joint Accountability
• Success Gap

Member Success

Our Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their Relationship with us, leading them to stay longer, buy more, and advocate for us.

Think of this as your Operating Philosophy. It’s not a belief system. It’s a business function. But this definition is what you can build your organization’s culture around. To take this to an operational level, you’ll want to take a look at Member Success Management – They are two different things, and its important you understand that one is not the other, and vice versa.

Member Success Management

Operating within the context of the Relationship with our members, Member Success Management is the People, Processes, Workflows, Data, and Systems used to move the Member toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome.

In contrast to the Operating Philosophy that is Member Success, this is the Operating Model. Most of the time people are talking about Member Success Management when they say Member Success, but remember: – They are two different things.

Desired Outcome – Updated

Desired outcome is the reason the Member has joined your organization. They have a specific thing they are trying to accomplish, or a problem they are trying to resolve by using one – or several – of the tools and resources your association provides to them, and that is precisely why they have become a member.

It is expressed on paper as this: Desired Outcome (DO) = Goal + Appropriate Experience (AX)

Goal

Objective + Conditions + Time Frame

Much like Relationship, which we’ll define shortly, most people equate Goal with Objective, and omit the time element, which is critical. Without a timeframe, a goal is just a wish.

Remember, members always have goals they’re trying to reach or accomplish – evolving, new, and stacked – so don’t lose sight of what really matters to them. It’s up to you to uncover those goals and help them achieve them. This requires a big shift in thinking, but it is transformative when you get there.

Conditions

Conditions are specific qualities of the Goal that are essential to the feeling of success. If these are not met, even though the Goal was achieved, the member will still feel unsuccessful.

Example: You’re a CRM vendor and your customer tells you they want to increase sales by $250k by the end of the 4th quarter. That’s a specific Goal (Objective + Time Frame). However, you ask them what would cause them to still feel unsuccessful even if they reached that Goal, and you learn that they need those customers to have an average ARR of $12k. If they reached that goal with fewer $50k customers or a ton of $500 customers they wouldn’t feel successful. Dig into why that matters to them so you can provide better guidance.

Appropriate Experience (AX)

Primarily the specific elements in reaching the goal that a member requires to “feel” successful.

The full AX includes everything the member would need to experience in reaching their success, but keep in mind that much of this is actually outside the arena of what Member Success Management can control.

One thing to keep in mind with AX is the “Appropriate” part. There is no such thing as a “high-touch” or “low-touch” member. There are members in your organization, as well as prospects, for whom a certain experience – likely one that involves elements you’d see in both of those old-school “touch” level designations – is Appropriate. 

Coverage Model

How your Resources are Organized, Operationalized, and Mobilized to deliver your Customer’s Desired Outcome.

These resources include: Your team, Their playbooks, Tasks, Automation, Communication, etc.

Relationship

Engagement + Context

Do we need to define what a Relationship is? Yes. Just like Goal above, it seems obvious, but it’s not.

All relationships exist on a spectrum between Engagement-only and Context-only; Member relationships generally fall somewhere in the middle.

Engagement-only Relationship Example: You and the bus driver. You see them every day, you say hello, but other than the bus, you have no real context to your relationship.

Context-only Relationship Example: You and a distant relative you never see. Your interactions are minimal and infrequent, but your family context makes this relationship significant to you.

Engagement

Engagement is… just that. Interactions with your members. To ensure Engagement is effective and appropriate, consider:

• Is it ‘context-driven’?
  • See the definition of Context below
  • What appears to be the same Engagement with one member or Cohort of members might actually be quite different with another based on Context
• What is the Direction of the Engagement?
  • Inbound – Reactive
    • A Member contacts you because they need something. MSMs (Member Success Managers) often spend too much time here; work to move beyond this. Think of this as treading water.
  • Outbound – Reactive
    • The MSM (or a different person or system) sees something – positive or negative – with the Member, and initiates communication. MSMs should be spending much more time here than in Inbound-Reactive mode
    • Think of this as pushing the Member toward success
  • Outbound – Proactive
    • World-class MSMs in high-performing organizations are able to actually get out in front of the Member, allowing for longer-term, strategic planning both with the Member but also at the account-level (Expansion Planning).
    • Think of this as pulling the Member to the success you’ve clearly laid out for them
• Engagement Types (a few examples; not exhaustive)
  • 1:1 Meeting
  • Asynchronous 1:1 or 1:Many on Video
  • Broadcast or Recorded 1:Many on Video
  • Email
  • Chat

Context

All of the data that you can use to determine whether a Member is on the path toward success.

Examples include:

• Progress – Milestones
• Activity – Joint Accountability
• Usage – Product-centricity
• Changes – Team, Company, etc.
• Goals – Changes to current, pivot to new
• Membership – Renewal, Up/Downgrade (if applicable in your Membership structure at you organization), etc.

Account Ownership

Maintaining Context

Progress Milestones – Updated

An action or event marking a significant change or stage in the Member’s journey toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome

Progress Milestones come in four types:

• Functional – Actions taken in the product
• Operational – Actions supported / enabled by the product
• Opportune – Event supported by the Operational progress
• Strategic – Their Goal

Orchestration

Properly managing expectations with Members that certain things are going to happen in the future and ensuring that when they do, they’re not just expected, but anticipated.

This is arguably the single most important thing on this list. Orchestration is critical to rapid, exponential expansion.

Joint Accountability

The shared obligation or willingness to accept responsibility for each party’s actions leading to an outcome, including the consequences of inaction or insufficient action

There are four parts to Joint Accountability:

• What Members need to do on their own outside of your resource offerings
  • Exists in every scenario but is almost always a total blind spot for MSMs (often considered “out of scope”)
• What Members need to do on their own inside of your resource offerings
  • Most of what the customer does exists here
• What you’ll do with them inside your resource offerings
  • Don’t spend too much time here. If you want your MSMs to be looked at as strategically valuable peers and not “glorified support reps” push as much work back to the member as possible and use meetings for training, check work and planning next steps to move the Member toward their Desired Outcome.
  • World-class MS orgs position their MSMs better by shifting the value metric from “meetings” to progress
• What we’ll do for them inside the product behind the scenes
  • Generally reserved for Professional Services, but might be included in Onboarding/Implementation

We mentioned earlier that Orchestration is the single most important thing on this list, but Joint Accountability is right below it.

Success Gap

Success Gap is that void that exists between your Member functionally completing the tasks necessary in your product to be “successful” – from your point of view – as the provider, and the Member actually achieving their Desired Outcome.

Now that you know what Member Success is, the elements that make it up, and you have a general idea of what it will take your organization and your Member Success Team to be successful at it, you can dive in to the Processes and Training to be successful at Member Success Management.

Reach out to us soon, and let’s talk about training for your organization. We’d love to help you achieve Member Success.

How concierge Onboarding plusses Member Engagement, Member Retention, and Member Success

Concierge Onboarding can be explained simply by using a concept you’re already familiar with: a hotel concierge. The concierge is usually found near the entrance of the hotel; ensuring that guests feel as comfortable as possible from the moment they arrive. Whether it’s a restaurant recommendation, adding a personalized note to the room, or even just a friendly smile – all will go a long way for the arriving guest. It may seem like hard work (and it often is) but the rewards are invaluable. 

The Member Success Team’s Concierge Onboarding Coordinator concept works just the same. The onboarding concierge’s job is to attend to recruitment /retention through Member Success and attend to a member’s – or potential member’s every need (within reason, of course).

“Do you have a question about the product? Would you like to understand how to use a feature? Maybe all you need is an explanation of how our product meets your primary needs.”

The concierge is available to be there for the potential member or incumbent member for specific, critical service needs, while leaving the remainder of the membership staff to work in member marketing, and the day-to-day tasks of membership without bogging them down in minutia.

As of that moment, there are two onboarding phases potential members or incumbent members will enter with the concierge. Lets take a 30,000 foot view of each Phase:

1 Research Phase

The association offers several beneficial tools and resources to help the agency be better at what they do, which means that a potential / member will benefit from an explanation of how the resource fits their use-case. The Member Concierge would also set-up demonstrations of the resource. This is where you talk about the tool / resource and show what an Association membership has to offer. The concierge will answer questions the potential member or incumbent member may have as you explore the resource with them.

2 Implementation Phase

Once the potential member or incumbent member decides to use the tool or resource, the concierge will enroll if needed, and continue to guide them. The concierge will help members set up the tool or resource and personalize it (where possible) according to their wants and needs.

The concierge service would be part of all new and current Memberships. Members will receive benefit and resource consultancy (concierge onboarding – intro, overview, and training) that ensures each member becomes an expert at managing their association benefits.

How Member Engagement Translates to the Success of your Organization

Why is Member Engagement important?

Member Engagement is equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10 years ago, so why do we need it?

We need it because competition in the association world is harsh and we need Member Engagement in place to reduce churn and keep members around for the long haul.

Let’s take a closer look at these points.

Member Engagement connects promise to reality

Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.

Imagine I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it.

I go in, and within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.

In an ideal world, the association’s Member Engagement manager should be on the phone to me the same day of my purchase, guiding me through the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.

You don’t want your member having to work harder to get what was promised by the Membership Coordinator because your product should be easy to implement for all members and deliver value from day one.

Your resource’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to Everyone – we know that members span the age range gamut from baby boomers to Gen X-ers to Millennials, and so on. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs change over time — every time the annual dues bill for their membership comes through, the member is questioning whether they really need to stay with you.

With every member renewal being an opportunity to cancel, it’s obvious that the Member Engagement process doesn’t stop after the initial set up.  Member Engagement teams need to be constantly available to keep members from falling out of love with their membership, no matter what.

Member Engagement should be ‘uncomfortably close’. While an exaggeration, it’s a good way of imagining how easily reachable and responsive your service should be.

Your competitors will steal your unhappy Members

Disgruntled members who didn’t get the support (or even explanations) they wanted will seek out your competitors.

If your competitor is smart, they’ll have a great Member Engagement team who will get them set up with the product the same day the enrollment goes through. They’ll make certain that the member is happy and set up to get the most value they can out of the product.

Since 2009, the popularity of Member Engagement has increased 800%. It’s not becoming something which differentiates a great association from a good one — it’s becoming a requirement.

It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is or how many deals you close, if members experience the disconnect between promise and reality and it isn’t patched up by a Member Engagement team, you’re going to get a high rate of churn.

Member Engagement is a method of making members happy and keeping them that way.

If a member is happy with their membership, there’s no need for them to stop using it — what’s known as ‘churning out’. The number of members you lose each month is known as your monthly churn rate.

Member Engagement isn’t just about the un-scientific art of making people feel warm and fuzzy. Like all business processes, it’s about helping your members reach their Desired Outcomes, and renewing year after year, creating loyalty and revenue for the association.

A watertight Member Engagement process reduces churn and increases your revenue. Even a churn reduction of 4% can double your Annual Revenue Return (ARR).

Member Engagement is where 90% of association revenue is. It doesn’t just mean that members keep paying their annual dues, it also means that they will be inclined to promote the member product to others in their industry and become advocates for your association. And that’s viral growth!

With association memberships, engaged members compound your revenue massively because they are the ones who encourage their peers to join your association, give you member prospect referrals, and are promoters of your products and services.

Once your association becomes the go-to solution for a large company, that one member could be paying your entire Member Engagement team’s salaries every month!

Once again: Why is Member Engagement important?

Let’s look over the key points again.

Member Engagement teams help connect your new member’s expectations with the promises made by your Membership Coordinator.

By offering a go-between for your resources and members, your members always have someone to turn to who will be willing to work closely with them to solve any issues.

If you offer a product or resource to your members you need someone to work with them and get it set up for them right from Day 1.

Your competition is doing it! They’re holding onto the members you lost and killing you with kindness.

A watertight Member Engagement process reduces churn and increases your revenue. Even a churn reduction of 4% can double your ARR.

Member Success and Member Engagement.

Sometimes we discover that we have a segment of our membership that, while they are not “bad” members, or “content” members, they are the ones who pay their dues year after year, but rarely participate in any of our events or don’t use any of our products, tools or resources – short of maybe their E&O.

They pay their dues annually, and we just don’t hear from them – they’re happy to bear the banner: “Proud Member of the {Your Association’s name here…}”.

And that’s fine from a revenue standpoint, but without communication with that member, without some engagement with that member, they also will over time become less and less complacent about their membership and will churn-out having become a Detractor – or, one of the low-scorers on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. We’ll talk more about that in just a minute.

The first thing you want to do with your current membership is measure their engagement with the association.

The heading for this tactic should read: Measure Member Happiness, but that is hard to do.

Figure out what features make your membership product “sticky”.

Are you familiar with HubSpot? HubSpot is a developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales. Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.

In the early days at HubSpot the company suffered from high churn. The reason for this was that a key focus of the initial product was SEO, and once a customer had finished search-optimizing their website, they didn’t see a need to pay for keeping it optimized. HubSpot had work to identify what features they could add that would be sticky. The belief was that anything that became a core part of that customer’s regular workflow was one way to get stickiness, and the other was to become the repository for some critical resource or tool they needed.

Once you become the go-to source for that resource, it is much harder for the member to non-renew their membership.

What every association on the planet must do is: Ask yourself if you know what are the key features that make your membership sticky, and then use measurements of member engagement to see which members are not using those sticky features. Those are the members most at risk of churning-out.

Behind every member’s decision to stop using your member benefits, there are forces at work that can be controlled, and those that cannot.

Uncontrollable Forces:

• Not the right features or price for the Business.
• Business’s resource manager or even the CFO wants to switch technology or move to the provider that has what they’re looking for.
• Member wants features that were never intended to be a part of your product . They thought it was one thing, but then realized it was not what they were looking for.
• Business goes bankrupt, insolvent, or is merged or closed because the owner retires and didn’t have any perpetuation plan.

Controllable Forces:

• Member doesn’t understand how to get the full use of out the product.
• Members have a false impression of what the product does (they might sign up after just reading the headline of the website).
• The member doesn’t use the product frequently enough.
• The member isn’t onboarded to membership or the resource quickly enough.
• The member doesn’t understand the value.

Resource onboarding can be a smooth process when you address these controllable reasons.

Here are some reassuring words – what looks to be churn could simply be a long onboarding process:

If the implementation process for a resource is short (less than 30 days), the likelihood is that every member is using the product in a very similar way, or at least with a very similar configuration.

Longer onboarding projects, in general, typically mean that there is a lot of complexity or configurability in your product, and that each member may have some use cases that are very specific to their needs, therefore requiring a customized onboarding for that member.

Essential metrics

There is one basic metric for Member Success, and it’s not a particularly mathematical one:

Feedback!

To make feedback into numerical data, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is here to help.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a single number metric that represents the entire member base of your association. You can gather this data and formulate it into an NPS score yourself — this is the easy part.

The idea is to ask your members one question: On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us (or a membership with us) to others?

NPS works on the basis that members can be divided into three categories based on their numerical answer to the question:

Promoters (9-10)
Passives (7-8)
Detractors (1-6)

Perfectly engaged members who are good fits for your association should always be in the 9-10 range, while anything below might either be a bad fit or a member that needs more care and attention. 

Using NPS (the Net Promoter Score, more on this later) to get an overall pulse on your members is one thing but reviewing each member’s feedback individually is where the real power lies.

Recognizing immediate value with your association will help you retain members. Whether or not what they do first is valuable at all is less important at this stage than just that feeling of accomplishment. How they define the support they get during the onboarding process & in the months following the beginning of their membership will determine their answer to the “One Question” (the question asked in the survey to gain your Net Promoter Score).

Back to Engagement. Once we have a better Idea of which members are engaged, and which ones are not, we can then begin to communicate with the passive members, and try to create in them a better sense of what their ROI is – or  can be – by finding out what the association has that will make them want to shun the thought of considering ending their membership with us.

SO, what must we do?

Make your members happy and keep them paying the dues. Simple right? Not always so.

But for now, here are some prerequisites.

1. Gather member feedback

This is monumentally important. For starters, it can be as simple as attaching a survey to your automated email that gets sent out when a Member cancels.  I like to do the NPS score survey twice, annually. Mid-year to gauge How We’re Doing, and about 8 weeks before dues bills go out at the end of the year, so that we can reach out to anyone who’s fallen into the “passive” category of members and become a risk for non-renewal, and rescue that membership if at all possible.

2. Work out what your membership’s Aha! Moment is

The journey from awareness to long-term use is a rocky one.

You need to get your member from their first few seconds inside your website to their moment of first value as quickly as you can. When you begin to think about the ways you can do this, your brain should boggle at how many different strategies there are.

One good way that straddles the member experience and member success disciplines is analyzing what today’s power member did with your resource when they signed up.

What do your best members all have in common? How did they start out with your resource? Answer that, and you’ll know what to emphasize during your tool’s first-time use.

3. Start targeting the right kinds of members

Let’s suppose we look at our data one day and find that from our best Members, 90% of them are marketing professionals. That means that there’s something particularly appealing about our resource Trusted Choice to that segment, even if we don’t know specifically what it is.

So, what would we do? Probably get in touch with them for a start. Ask them what they like about TrustedChoice.com and its collection of resources — have a chat with them or send them a survey.

Then, we’d gear our marketing material for individual passive members (or category of members) to point them towards that resource or tool. We’d start writing content they’d be searching for, and maybe even make custom landing pages targeting keywords they’d search for on the website. From the survey responses we’d get back we’d know which features are most important to them, and we would be able to emphasize them early on, develop them further and make the ultimate marketing operations tool for us.

The main thing is to communicate regularly with your members. And my program implements for your team how to do that.

Our program Member Success & Concierge Onboarding will teach and put into place a System for you that will show you how to stop members from abandoning your association before they’ve seen how awesome it is. Won’t you reach out to us and set up a time to discuss this with you?

You’ve put 90% of your effort into building and promoting your association…

…But it all goes to waste if you’ve not got a system to manage existing members. This includes a proper onboarding, support and success process aimed at making sure that the most recent dues payment you got won’t be the last.

Guest Contributor – KIM SORIN   written 4.18.2016

Members are the backbone of any association – they’re the reason your organization exists. In many professions, membership to an association is mandatory, but most of association members out there join for networking, access to industry publications, status, or for discounted continuing education from a trusted source.

It’s becoming increasingly important for associations to demonstrate to members the value membership offers them and continue to do so throughout the lifespan of their relationship with you. After all, members ensure the legacy of your association lives on (and often drive a significant percentage of your revenue).

Of course, demonstrating membership value is one of the biggest challenges associations face. Robbie Kellman Baxter, President and CEO of Peninsula Strategies and author of The Membership Economy, identifies a strong onboarding process for new members as one of the key steps to creating a loyal and happy member.

Last week, Baxter hosted some 400 attendees of an Abila webinar, during which she broke down the onboarding process and provided actionable steps association professionals can take to ensure members get started on the right path immediately after joining, During the webinar “Don’t Miss the Boat: Onboarding for New Member Success,” Baxter helped a few association professionals – right then and there – overcome obstacles, and she left the audience with some pro tips for achieving overall success.

She distilled onboarding process into 10 simple steps you can take to create the necessary hooks to make your members love you. Here’s a snapshot of her recommendations:

1. Market to the right people.
2. Remove all friction from the signup process.
3. Understand your best members.
4. Have a serious heart-to-heart with your board.
5. Provide instant value when someone joins.
6. Immediately reinforce new members’ “good decision” to join.
7. Show new members how “people like them” have made your organization part of their routine.
8. Track engagement and follow up with those showing a lack of activity.
9. Build a culture that welcomes new members.
10. Designate a “Member Success Lead” on your team.

An Association’s values, mission, and organizational structures exist for the member, not the management or the staff of the organization. The bottom line is that a member-centric association truly exists and is for the perpetuation of its members.

The member’s  journey

Devising creative strategies to recruit members is the beginning of the member journey. What social channels are you currently present on, and are you reaching the right audience? Is the information you are sharing relevant to their interests? For current members, is it easy for them to communicate with one another? With software integration playing an increasingly common role with associations, how simple is it for potential members to inquire about or sign up with your association? Consider how accessible you are to your members so you can provide a more engaging and timely experience.

Data access

Understanding your members and their behaviors is another consideration for developing a stronger member-centric association. What type of information are you collecting from your members? What are their interests? What type of content do they engage with online? Are they engaged with other community members? How active or inactive are they? How long have they been a member for? Are there milestones or achievements you can highlight and celebrate? Knowing your audience can help you identify key players whom you can leverage that have influence within your association’s network.

Built-in social communities

More associations are offering member management systems that allow staff to manage websites and social media platforms. How are you currently engaging with your members in the social space? Some association management system vendors integrate with third-party social media tools, while others have their own built-in social media channels, called “community” platforms, which offer chat rooms, blogs, wikis, and other social media tools. This integration allows for a more flexible and controlled space to engage with your members in a timely and more intimate way, without the potential mistake of missing a notification from one of your members.

Membership culture

Culture is another strong factor for member-centric associations. Define the approach for your staff to engage with your members: is there a motto that your association lives by? Does your culture have a more personal touch to its professionalism? What is the tone of voice that is encouraged: friendly or serious? Do you encourage your staff to ask for member feedback to create a more collaborative environment? How often are members able to be a part of the creative process within your association? Nurturing relationships with your members can help drive success for your association.

Access to opportunities

Offering incentives, such as free online courses or webinars, as well as access to conferences and events, can provide great opportunities for you to engage with your current members and entice potential new ones. What if you offered your members a guest pass to the next conference they attend? Providing positive experiences for your members (and in some cases, extending them to their own networks) may also increase positive sentiment for your association.