Learn how to create effective member journey maps to improve the member experience and drive positive outcomes for membership organisations.
In this article:
A member journey map is a visualisation of a member’s experience with your brand/organisation from awareness, to joining, and beyond. If you’re already using modern association software, like the iMIS Engagement Management System, then you have some structured member journeys to map out already. Your platform should allow you to quickly and easily implement any improvements you identify.
An example of a member journey map for the George the Graduate Member Persona from the article, "Is Your Member Onboarding Journey Magical or Miserable?"
You’d be surprised at how many results for “customer journey map” or “user journey map” come up when you search “member journey map”. Are these all the same?
Not quite. As a membership organization, your members are more than just customers, even if you have an online shop or other purchase options.
And your members are more than just users as well. If part of your online service offering is a member portal, then yes, they’re a “user” of your website and a part of your online community. But this all falls under membership.
I think that’s what makes member journey mapping so interesting – it brings so many pieces together to create the best possible experience and keep members coming back.
Touch points – interactions with your member. These may result from an action on their part, such as registering for an event or making a purchase. Or, the association may initiate the interaction, like reaching out to encourage a member to renew.
Member sentiments – the emotions associated with the user's experience at each of the touchpoints through their journey.
Pain points – any issue that the member may encounter during their journey. Some may be outside of your organisation’s control, but this can provide an opportunity to interact with your member and be a helpful resource to them.
Actions – The steps that your potential, current or past member has to go through to accomplish their aim.
Insights – The core of the process, the analysis which should lead to actions and a plan to deliver an improved member journey. If you’re using iMIS, then this is the point where you would create a plan to adapt your internal processes by updating elements of the staff site, or to enhance the member experience by updating the member portal.
These different types of journey maps are particularly useful in membership organisations with many potential touch points or a wide variety of reasons for members and potential members to interact with your organisation.
Current State member journey maps: these are an opportunity to think about the current reasons and ways that a member might interact with your organisation. They provide the ideal framework for working through the current state of your interactions and, from the analysis of those, help you identify the sentiments, pain points and actions. By looking at the current member journey, you’ll identify ways to improve the member experience, maybe even taking a completely new approach. This leads us to...
Future State member journey maps: These concentrate on what the journey should look like. They focus on future goals, rather than what’s currently happening. This is an ideal opportunity to ask “what if” questions about your members and explore new ways to provide value and manage your organisation. Taking a step back to look at the big picture will be more effective than diving right into scattered improvements.
Day in the Life member journey maps: The trick with this type of map is not to focus just on your members’ engagement with you, but an average schedule for your member personas. This is an opportunity to think about how your organisation fits into their daily life. It’s even a chance to think “does it fit” into their daily life? What might happen on any given day to cause a member to need to interact with your organisation? Where are they emotionally at that point and does their experience at that point help or exacerbate those emotions? Putting yourself into your members’ shoes will give you insight on how your organisation can better serve them.
Service Blueprints: Service Blueprints switch the focus from the member over to your organisation. These map out what your staff needs to do to enable the various member touchpoints. This makes it simpler to assign tasks to departments and individual staff members. It also creates better communication between different departments and shows your organisation how various departments are working together toward one goal: a better member experience.
Circular: In my opinion, most membership organisations will have at least one circular member journey. Circular member journeys relate to membership organisations where there is a subscription (a membership fee) that needs to be paid and then renewed on a regular basis. So there may well be one member journey that talks about attracting new members and getting them to the point where they make the commitment to their first year’s membership. But then there’s a circular one that talks about that year on year on year process of delivering enough benefit that they rejoin the next year and the year after. Build an effective member onboarding map
Other: There are many other types of member journey maps that you might find useful. For instance, you’ll find examples of empathy maps which look at understanding the wants, needs, thought and actions of a particular group of members or member experience maps which help you understand your members' behaviour.
Hopefully you’ll have started to think about how some of these different types of member journey map might relate to your organisation. One of the things you’ve probably thought is that no single one of these will work for everything you need to map. There are too many things your members want to achieve and too many touch points to describe it all in a single map. However, the process for creating each of these different types of member journey maps is very similar.
“Journey maps are successful when everyone from top to bottom, from product to sales via marketing, contributes and therefore feels involved. Involving others helps to create buy-in and ensure that the findings are known and understood by many people.”
The first part of member journey mapping starts with bringing the team together. A member journey map isn’t something you do on your own and then, after 6 months of hard work, present to your team with a flourish. They are a team project. That’s because you need their input, their perspective, their experiences. You need their buy in to the process and the result. You need them to feel ownership of the result so that they are enthusiastic about the changes that are needed to implement your improved member journeys. You’ll also want to think about involving some of your members in the process. This will provide more honest feedback about the pain points in your current processes if you do.
Learn how they would use the member journey map or what you’d need to include in the map to make it something useful that will drive change. You’ll also identify the key touchpoints at this stage. Depending on the size of your operation, you might need to whittle that list down or prioritise. You’ll then move onto interviewing the key stakeholders within your working group. Ask them general questions around areas of the member journey that are less understood and identify where there’s friction. Then you’ll have more specific questions and topics related to the areas your stakeholders work within.
Member personas are representations of key audience segments. This could be things like Student, Graduate, Applicant, Complainant, depending on the area you work in. But they should represent the broad categories of your prospective, current and past membership around which you can build a story and journey. Some of this information would come from member data from your association software. It may be helpful to look at membership types you offer and build personas around each of them. Or you could look at your member portal and ask “why is this here” or “who is it for” and build a persona around that intended audience. It’s also worth stepping back having looked at your personas to see if you’ve got any gaps.
Examples of Member Personas
You’ll have already done your stakeholder interviews at this point but this is an opportunity to cast your net wider. Bring in real members from your community - you could conduct a survey or you might even buy in some research. But the purpose of this research is to answer questions like “how does the member feel at this point in the journey?” or “why did they do that?”. Apart from member interviews, drill down into your data to find potential opportunities and pain points. For example, Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your pain points, like at what point people drop off your website.
“An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to create a shared understanding of user needs, and aid in decision making."
From the Nielsen Norman Group's article, Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
The goal of an empathy map is to learn more about how a certain persona experiences things. This can inform what touchpoints you add, and at what point in the journey.
This is an opportunity to start to see your findings on paper. At this stage, it’s just a rough sketch that should help you identify gaps or areas that need more work and identify what you might ultimately want the member journey map to look like.
You’ll find that you’ll need different types of maps for the different member journeys you’re mapping. Here's a site with over 150 templates you can browse to find one that works for you.
There are so many to choose from. This article on journey mapping from the Nielsen Norman Group may help you select a tool.
This bit should be easy - you have your research, you have your selected tool and template. You just need to fill it in and make it look nice! Then you need to present it to your team to make sure it’s of use.
There’s no point in having done all this work if the end result isn’t an improvement in your member experience, an increase in your new member joins, or an improvement in your member retention. Your member journey map should show the pain points, so what can you do to improve or lessen those? If you’ve done a current state member journey map, then maybe also do a future member journey map and work on the steps needed to transition from the current state to the future state. This is where iMIS EMS can help you implement your changes. The flexibility you have in building your member journeys via iMIS websites and in easily updating your staff site to allows you to dynamically respond to members’ and prospects’ changing needs.
The important thing to remember in all this is that your member journey maps shouldn’t be a pretty set of documents to show to your board. They should lead to an action plan for improvement and have a measurable impact on your membership.
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