Make your membership organization indispensable. Map out an effective onboarding journey and create member personas to boost your retention rates.
The onboarding process can sometimes be intimidating, so make the journey as welcoming as possible. Let's take a look at the benefits of an onboarding plan and the elements involved. We’ll also share tips to help make your association impossible for members to do without.
In this article:
So, you’ve got a fresh group of new members — yay! They’ve completed the forms, paid their dues, and are ready to dive in. The hard part is over, right? Not quite. Your next hurdle is getting them engaged early to ensure you can keep the new people you worked so hard to attract.
The 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report by Marketing General, Inc. (MGI) showed that about half (46%) of organizations lose 20% of first-year members. The bright side is that it's up from 49% of organizations seeing a 40% loss in 2021 (source)!
Churn is incredibly expensive for associations. This is why a formal member onboarding plan is critical to guide your members through the initial stages of membership.
As with any plan, it’s important to first define what you want to accomplish and determine how you’ll measure success. This doesn’t have to be elaborate. Here are some simple examples of goals for your member onboarding strategy:
The key is to set attainable, measurable goals you and your entire team can work toward.
Personas are representations of members with specific characteristics, such as attitudes/beliefs, backgrounds, wants/desires, opinions, skills, behavior patterns, goals, or personalities. For example:
Personas help you understand the motivations behind your members. And you don’t have to do it all at once — you can slowly add in more personas.
As you’re starting out, don’t confuse personas with membership segments. A persona is the entire personality of certain members. Segments are simply categories and classifications of your membership base, such as demographic details.
Building personas helps you personalize your communications and make your members feel valued. As you’re building the personas, it’s important to uncover:
Tap into your members' needs, concerns, and goals. This will help you better serve them and drive member retention.
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The ideal onboarding process should outline exactly how you will interact with the member for the first year. It might look like this:
You can document the onboarding journey but building a visual map is extremely powerful. Consider creating one for each persona. It should be something that all staff can readily access and keep in mind as they go about their jobs. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but a visual representation can help you identify gaps and opportunities.
Prospective members typically visit your website to learn about membership benefits and resources. If they download a resource and share their email, your member management system should be able to track:
This data is particularly valuable once they’ve joined. You can begin to build a profile and assign them to one of your member personas.
You can tap into a wealth of information if your member management system is purpose-built for associations. It can be particularly helpful to look closely at the data and ask:
Your member management software should make this easy, especially if you’ve built out your personas. You can automate:
See how iMIS helps you learn from every member interaction. You'll be ready to streamline processes, automate mundane tasks, and unlock new opportunities.
What’s the best way to learn what your members think of your association, and which benefits they really value? Ask them often.
Some organizations survey members once a year on a bunch of topics. But waiting a year to get the data you need can put you at a disadvantage. Your association needs to be agile and ready to respond to real-time feedback.
It’s easy to post a one- or two-question poll in your year-round mobile app. This gets you get instant results you can use to make important decisions. If you’re considering a mobile app, see our article, 7 Mobile Tactics Every Association Professional Needs to Know.
No organization is perfect, and you may never reach 100% retention. But you can come close by tapping into what works and what doesn’t. It can be uncomfortable to ask the tough questions. But if you’re open to hearing the answers, you can use the information to lower churn rates and generate more revenue.
Learn how to gather and use feedback with our article, Enhancing the Member Experience Through Feedback.
The onboarding process should include numerous touchpoints to ensure retention. While we covered ways you can automate touchpoints, you can also use staff and volunteers. This combination will help members feel valued and part of something larger than themselves.
For key members showing signs of quitting, consider creating a team of executives and/or Board members to reach out to them. Hearing from an executive can help keep members in the fold.
Joining a new organization can daunting for some — particularly if they’re new to the sector. One of the best ways to get them involved is to ask your established members to serve as “buddies” or mentors. The mentors can:
In this case, the new member doesn’t feel as isolated. Plus the buddy/mentor feels needed, so they're more likely to renew. This isn’t a new idea — many organizations have a mentoring program for recent graduates entering the profession. But it's just as effective in shepherding other new members through the socializing process regardless of experience.
Like any association, you want to create an environment where people can’t afford to not be a member. Here are a few ideas to enhance your member value proposition:
One of the best ways to ensure members remain “sticky” is to offer benefits they can’t get elsewhere. For example: If your most valuable resource is an industry report, don’t make it available to non-members. Or charge them a rate that’s greater than the cost of membership to encourage them to join.
If your website and member management system are aligned, you can offer a personalized website and other content. Millennial and Gen Z in particular don’t want to feel like a number. They're looking for information and resources tailored to their interests.
With a year-round mobile app, you can easily send push notifications to particular personas. You can create forums that reflect persona interests and encourage networking. You can poll them to learn what’s on their minds, send alerts they might appreciate, and simply use the app to make them feel special. Learn more from the experts at Clowder with "The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Engagement."
We explore 5 specific touchpoints to personalize and enhance.
Most associations offer an auxiliary membership level for industry vendors. These partners often sponsor events, awards, and resources. You might be able to negotiate discounts/perks from these partners that are exclusive to your membership. This increases the partners’ visibility and enhances the value you deliver to members.
You may develop justification letters for attendance at your annual events or training. But have you tried this for member retention as well? Offering first-year members a justification letter can be highly effective for both individual member organizations and trade associations.
Show the ROI they'll receive and the potential cost of non-membership. You can easily include these justification documents in your automated processes and the onboarding journey map.
Be sure to remember the following as you craft or enhance your onboarding process:
Your member management system can help you understand why your members left and what you can do to win them back. Our 6-point plan shows you how.
As a learning organization, you learn from every member interaction and act on these insights to drive member retention and engagement.
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