Your association offers great value for members. To attract and engage with even more members, it’s important to really let that value shine through multiple channels.
We’re not just talking about multiple communications channels here (although that’s important, too!). We’re talking about using various approaches to understand what your members value most, reach out to them in ways that attract and engage them, and give them new opportunities to grow professionally.
Here are some powerful ways to attract and engage members with a multi-channel approach:
Understand your audiences better.
Effective member marketing and engagement starts with understanding your audience. It’s important to understand who you’re communicating with so that you use the right content, tone, length, and channels for your communications and that you offer them the right resources and support. One of the best ways to know your audience better is to develop personas.
Personas are fictional, generalized characters that represent your audience’s various needs, goals, and challenges. They can help you think of your prospective members as groups of people with similar characteristics so you can design content for and market to them in ways that grab their attention.
Create these fictional characters to represent each type of prospective member you’re communicating with. Have a persona in mind (just as you would think about a friend as you write a letter to him or her) as you develop offerings, content, and communications for the group each persona represents.
Use personalized approaches to deliver greater member value.
Association trends research by Community Brands suggests that members value targeted content from their association. Findings also show that members place high value on job opportunities and help with advancing their careers. At the same time, members value various types of content to different degrees in different stages of their careers.
So, how can you provide a more personalized experience to attract and engage members? To start, make sure you have the right technologies in place to deliver a personalized experience.
For example, job boards are especially effective for those in the early and middle stages of their careers, who place higher value job opportunities as a member benefit. Using job board software like YM Careers you can deliver job alerts, personalized job searches, and job recommendations – allowing you to deliver a benefit your members seek in a more personalized way.
Think “tech integrations”.
A multi-channel approach to attracting and engaging members includes not only which technologies you use, but also how you use them together to reach members. For example, use your technologies together to optimize your job board for visibility and limited access to non-members – in effect, using the job board to drive membership.
One way you can achieve this is by integrating your job board with your association management software (AMS). For example, YM Careers online job board software integrates with Aptify, NetForum, Nimble, and YourMembership AMS solutions by Community Brands. With this type of integration, non-members who visit your job board and sign up as job seekers via job alerts or account registration can be automatically delivered to your AMS as a list of new member prospects for your use in member marketing and acquisition efforts.
Another approach: Connect your online career center with your learning management system (LMS). For example, YM Careers integrates with Crowd Wisdom, the award-winning LMS from Community Brands. With this type of integration, members and non-members visiting your job board can receive recommendations for courses and continuing education tied directly to your association’s learning offerings.
Offer career support in other ways.
As your members look to grow their careers, you can go beyond your association’s online career center to support them with career resources while attracting new members. For example, host virtual or in-person networking happy hours so that members and invited non-members can connect with others in their profession in a casual environment. Another idea: Host a career fair that’s open to all professionals in your industry (not just members). Extending your reach in this way can help you to attract non-members to join your association while providing value to members.
