How to Implement Member Engagement Scoring

The top goal of membership organizations in 2025 is to increase engagement (source: 2025 Membership Performance Benchmark Report). This has been goal #1 for the past several years. It's no surprise, as engaged members are more likely to renew, participate, advocate, and invest in your mission.

But improving member engagement isn’t just about offering more programs or sending more emails. To make smart, strategic improvements, you need a way to measure engagement objectively. That’s where engagement scoring comes in.

What is an engagement score?

An engagement score is an objective measure of an individual's participation and resulting alignment with the desired results. The desired results may be member retention, for example.

Engagement scoring helps you pinpoint who’s thriving, who’s slipping, and where your outreach efforts are having the biggest impact. It gives you clarity to act, whether that's celebrating your loyal members, re-engaging at-risk ones, or adjusting your programs to deliver more value. With a solid scoring strategy in place, you’ll stop guessing and start growing engagement with purpose.

What's your goal for engagement scoring?

Before you jump into engagement scoring, think about what's important to your membership organization. What's the bigger goal? What's your why? Here are some common goals for associations, unions, and nonprofits:

• Reduce attrition
• Maintain and/or increase revenue
• Enhance loyalty
• Identify and nurture future leaders
• Encourage more activity in programs
• Energize the profession
• Identify "at-risk" supporters

You can't set your strategy and know what to measure unless you think this through and decide what your motivation is.

7 Steps to Implement Member Engagement Scoring:

1. Decide who to include
   
2. Take stock of your areas of engagement
3. Select your initial set of engagement areas to score and the time frame
4. Confirm the required data is available
5. Determine the scoring method: basic or weighted scores
6. Run the scoring rules on your data
7. (Optional) Use the score ranges to create 3 or 4 engagement segments

1. Decide who to include

Who will you be scoring, the company? All individual members? Just the key contact at each organization? Maybe the leaders of each organization?

2. Take stock of your areas of engagement

Next up, inventory possible elements to count in your engagement score. That means writing down all member touchpoints. Don't worry, we're not suggesting that you include every possible activity in your engagement scoring. But writing out the list will give you an overall idea that will prepare you for step 3.

Here are some examples for a typical association. Use these to get started:

3. Select your initial set of engagement areas to score and the time frame

What are the areas you'll include? Ask yourself what activities are important to your membership organization. Start by using just 5-7 touchpoints. You can later expand your scoring formula as you gain confidence in its results. But don't focus on making it perfect the first time.

What is the time frame? Maybe it's over the course of a year. You likely don't want a member's current score to be high because they engaged a lot five years ago, so decide accordingly.

4. Confirm the required data is available

Where is the data located? How readily available is that data? If you have to manually pull data, you won't be able to have dynamic engagement scores. Not to mention the administrative strain that would put on your staff.

Example of a member engagement data summary report:

Here is an example from Authorised iMIS Solution Partner, Causeis, of a member engagement data summary report. It's simple and straightforward. It confirms that the data on each touchpoint is available, lists where it's available, and notes some relevant info.

5. Determine the scoring method: basic or weighted scores

When you get into creating/adjusting your own model, you need to determine what scoring elements to use. There are 3 types to consider:

• Basic: a yes or no question. Did they engage with something or not? A simple yes or no answer here. Are they on a committee? Have they logged into the website in the last month?
• Total frequency: a count. For example, how many committees are they on? How many emails have they clicked in the past year?
• Add weightings to activities. Will you weight some engagement points more than others? This allows you to add a multiplier to the count to measure importance in the total score. For example, if committee involvement is especially important, you might multiply those points by 3 to reflect its higher value to your association.

6. Run the scoring rules on your data

Once you've set up your scoring model, run the rules to generate your members' scores. Take this data to use in charts, graphs, and dashboards and share with your leadership team and any relevant departments.

How frequently do you run the scores so you can compare and identify trends? Hopefully, your scoring tool will automatically update the scores. This way, you can simply share the dashboard with stakeholders, rather than having to pull a new report each time to share.

This data will help you make better decisions for your organization and member segments.

As your proficiency in creating scoring models develop, you will use the scores to meaningfully identify trends, and even predict what members will do next.

3-Minute Product Tour

Easily measure, track, and improve engagement with your members and supporters natively in iMIS.

• Measure individual and company engagement
• Define engagement based on your own components and weightings
• Track engagement scores by week, month, or year
• Use engagement scores to create badges and awards for members to display

Take a 3-Minute Quick Tour of iMIS

7. (Optional) Use the score ranges to create 3 or 4 engagement segments

Many associations, unions, and nonprofits have various member segments. Student members, mid-career members, and late-career members is just one example of the division.

Example: The National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) created customized scoring buckets. The association segments by annual revenue, allowing them to better assess engagement for key member groups.