2012 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Results -- Reinstatements

As you know, we are feverishly working on the 2012 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report. In my review of the data, I discovered that associations with renewal rates over 80% would rather increase their budgets in member recruitment and awareness while associations with renewal rates under 80% would increase their engagement and renewal budgets.

Not to be unexpected. However...what is telling here is that a 5.2% of the associations with a greater than 80% renewal rate would increase their reinstatement budgets while only 2.5% of those associations with a reported renewal rate of less than 80%.

In my thought, a small percentage of associations with an 80% renewal rate believe that this area may offer greater opportunity for ROI than recruitement, awareness, engagement or renewal. This is most interesting as I find many associations don't have a coordinated or strategic approach to their reinstatement program...this in the face of the data we have collected at MGI (working with hundreds of associations) indicating that reinstatement programs are LOW HANGING FRUIT!!

What have been your experiences with reinstatement programs? Let me know.

A Master Strategist Gives Us a Successful Strategy

John Day, the Director of Membership Development for IEEE, is most likely one of the best membership pros that I'm fortunate enough to call a friend. A real "strategist" in every sense of the word. We met a few years ago at CESSE and have exchanged ideas for a while now. Recently he related to me that he has had tremendous success this past year in growing membership. I asked "how?" The following is what he wrote back . I hope that you'll find it useful information.

"The growth came from different channels, and fortunately compensated for the decline in year-over-year recruitment in professional grade members. We instituted a massive and well-coordinated reinstatement campaign, that returned about 3,000 members more than the prior and uncoordinated year (a large proportion professional grade members).

We instituted a campaign for members who did not complete the online application, which brought in 16,000 members (a large proportion students). And, through an intricate and expansive renewal campaign, we increased professional grade retention by 1%.

Between e-mail and postal direct outreach, 3+ million contacts - furthermore, we concurrently mobilized our Volunteer ranks worldwide in ways we hadn't before. All messaging reinforced career-related benefits, job site, and reduced-dues assistance provided to unemployed members. Our thought better to keep them, albeit at a lower amount, than lose them."

John, thanks for sharing this.

I think that we can agree that this was a well coordinated, multi-channel strategy that took into consideration several different niche-markets within a pretty expansive base. What's important to look at here is that, while John does work for a power-house of an association, his strategy could be implemented by any one of us who has taken the time to understand the markets he is serving and develop the offers, tactics and channels to attract and effectively communicate with them.

If you'd like to communicate with John, I'll be happy to forward your information to him.

Are Your Member Communications Relevant?

In discussions centered around the Membership Lifecycle, a key ingredient from the perspective of the member is 'relevance.' I know that this is a "blinding flash of the obvious" as an old friend from my Tyson Foods days would say, but I'm always astounded by how quickly marketers forget about it in their promotions.

If we follow the Membership Lifecycle, starting at "Awareness," the only reason we become aware or acknowledge an association or a product is that, at that point in time, it became relevant to us - in either a good OR bad way. We continue to grow that awareness by continually proving the relevance of the membership or product to the individual.

At some point, we "ask for the sale" but not until we usually demonstrate one final point of relevance to the now member/customer. They "Join."

We then ask them to "Engage" with the association by filling out surveys, buying more product, attending conferences or participating in delivery of some value that the association provides to its membership (committees, articles, etc.). Again, relevancy is key to continued engagement. If the Annual Softball outing is not relevant to me, why would I participate?

At "Renewal," we ask the member/customer to continue our relationship. But, if we're not relevant to the member, why would he/she? Therefore, many of the most successful renewal programs continually remind the member of why they are relevant to them.

Now to my point...

If we agree on the importance of relevancy in our on-going, ever increasing, communications with our members/customers, why do we continue to offer up one-size-fits-all tactics? While many don't have the technology necessary to subset their data based upon buying behavior, age, sex, length of membership...or the like...that doesn't mean that they can't do some level of personalization using simple overlays (that don't cost an arm-and-a-leg), or by source, or other ways. It simply takes a little imagination and some time.

If doing this will increase your renewal rate a few points, isn't that 'relevant' to you?