Membership Growth Blog

Note: This series will be devoted to the Membership Connection Model that I have been developing the past few years. It will be a synthesis of a number of different concepts and ideas I have presented to multiple groups over the past two years. My desire is that this model gives a complete picture of what you need to do as a membership organization leader in order to connect with your members and create an organization that benefits your members.

Introduction to the Membership Connection Model

In order to connect with your members both potential and current, you need to make sure that you are satisfying the four types of connection:

1. Intellectual
2. Financial
3. Physical
4. Emotional

Having all four types of connection with your membership is vital to building a strong membership organization. Read these four types again and be aware that they are organized in difficulty to achieve.

Intellectual – This portion of the model covers the information that you provide your members. This could be the conferences, meetings, programs, or content that you distribute. The intellectual portion of the Membership Connection Model is the content that your members want to have to do something with their lives.

Financial – Nothing in life is free and people that make a financial commitment are more likely to see value in the membership you are offering. Think about the largest membership organizations that you are a member in. Have you made a financial commitment? Doesn’t that make you feel more connected?

Physical – Though there are some very successful online communities. There is something to be said for having the ability for your members to be physically connected to your organization. This could take many forms, but what is most important is that your members have physical connections.

Emotional – Make them laugh, make them cry, or for goodness sake, make them feel something! Without the emotional connection, you might be able to attract new members, but you are not going to be able to keep them.

That is the basis for the Membership Connection Model. Stick with me as I go into depth on each of the four touch points for Membership Connection so that I can help you succeed in growing your membership organization.

I am a member of many different organizations; however some of them get more of my time and most importantly, money, then the others. What separates the organizations that get my money from the organizations that don’t?

The ones that get the money are learning organizations helping me gain knowledge, apply the knowledge, and facilitate making the connections I need to advance my career.

What Learning Organizations Provide

Content – A learning organization has produced a lot of content that provides useful information to all members that have joined that organization. An example is Toastmasters. They have manuals, books, and forms that allow you to explore many different leadership and public speaking topics within the club. The only downside is that most of the materials will help you in Toastmasters and more tools are needed to help people apply what they have learned outside of the club.

Application – Does the organization give you the tools you need to apply the information you have learned? Where a learning organization like Toastmasters does a good job of providing content, it does not always do a good job of connecting that learning to making money. A good example of an organization that enables members to apply their knowledge is the National Speakers Association. They do a good job at providing their members the tools that they need to help them grow their speaking business. The only problem is that the tools they provide are expensive and they don’t always do a great job connecting their members with people that are seeking their members.

Connections – This is the point that most learning organizations have fallen short. They have built a brand around the content and teach you how to apply the content, but then what? How do you promote your members so that they can use the connection to your brand to succeed? There are only a few organizations that I have recently investigated that does a good job at this.

Example of a Good Learning Organization that provides Content, Application, And Connection

The American Hypnosis Association -
An organization that does all three is the American Hypnosis Association
(AHA). The AHA provides its members a ton of recorded seminars and documents to help them learn to be better hypnotists, they give members the tools to apply that in practice, and they have a great directory that helps the members publicize their practice. While the organization does do a good job of helping advanced therapists connect with clients, I find that there is still a need for the organization to help junior members connect and collaborate in order to increase their knowledge and better learn what it takes to be successful.

Point of Improvement for all Organizations

This is one of the same issues with many organizations, they promote their advanced members, which make junior members feel left out of the opportunities that advanced members have. There is a great need out there in many organizations to help junior or new members really connect with all levels of the organization, develop their knowledge, and learn to apply that knowledge to grow as individuals. Not doing this is what I believe causes the high turnover that membership organizations report.

The organizations that can deliver content, teach how to apply the content, and allow members to connect and share their knowledge will be immensely successful in the future.

Imagine the following scenario, you are given the opportunity to attend a favored local sporting event or you can attend a meeting of a group that might improve your abilities. You can go to one or the other for free?

Imagine a grand opening of an IKEA or another major destination retailer or the meeting that could improve your life, if you put as much in as you expect to get out.

Are you able to see where I am going with this?

Why are sporting events and destination store openings more attractive than a meeting of an organization that could help you with your speaking, find a job, build community, or save the environment? What is it that drives people away from organizations and into the cold embrace of corporations?

It has to do with the self image that people prescribe to themselves and their desire to be a part of something larger and greater then themselves. A conversation I had with a co-worker lead me to this thought and further study of the research behind the thought lead me to confirm what he was saying.

Psychologically when talking about self image, people have an identity. Whether that identity is related to being a trendy person or a sports fan, people have an identity of self that they feel compelled to maintain either personally or socially. When then trying to find time in their schedule to take part in activities, people will tend to take part in social activity that is in line with that self image.

That self image is then reinforced when you find yourself part of something greater than yourself. There is an element of pride or ego boosting involved when you can say to someone, “I was at that game” or “I was at that IKEA opening where people waited in line for 7 days.”

Even though your potential members had nothing to do with winning the game, with building the store, or any number of activities, those events make people feel greater than themselves where you membership organization may not.

So the question is, how can you make your membership organization activities events? How can you still deliver value to your members while making them feel in line with their self identity and part of something greater than themselves?

Deliver that to your members, and you will have no problem with growth.

Many people talk about A, V, and K learners. That is short for:

A – Auditory – Listen, hear, audio
V – Visual – See, read, images
K – Kinesthetic – Do, touch, feel

What the models try to explain is that different people learn in different ways. When communicating with your members, it is important to stop and think if you are reaching all three of the learning types with your message.

Let’s start with the easiest, the visual learner. What forms of communication work best for the visual learners? E-mails, letters, and blog postings. Communicating in those forms makes it easy for those learners to grasp the message you are trying to communicate. This is the way that is most common and easiest to transmit at this time. Get your message on their feed reader and you will capture their attention.

Auditory learners are also quite easy to reach with current technologies, but online organizations will have to develop the tools needed to communicate with them through podcasts, audio postcards, and videos with the messages that you want them to receive. This is what I call the new media learner. This is the method of communicating with people who spend all day with their video iPod in their ears. Get your message on that iPod and you will capture their attention.

In a digital world, how are we supposed to capture the kinesthetic learner? It is actually much easier than you would think. When we think of touch or do, we think of a physical interaction. How is that accomplished in a digital age? I suggest interactive exercises, demonstrations, and meetings using online tools. The kinesthetic has to be able to do something interactive to absorb the message, so think of the tools you can develop that allow your members to interact with your message without changing the meaning you are trying to get across.

Now, the trick to save time and energy in your communications is to integrate all three modes into the same communication. Can you think of places where this happens? I think that blogs with integrated You Tube videos are a start. Think about it this way, you have the blog post describing in text the message, a video with audio and pictures that also explains the message, then you encourage through asking questions that have to be answered in the comments on the blog for the users to interact and respond to the message.

I wonder if that is why blogging has become such an important medium and why sites that allow interaction with all forms of media have become the most popular member sites on the web….hmmmmm

Which approach is better for driving membership growth targeted at organizations, top down or bottom up?

When trying to reach a corporate or business audience for your membership, do you head straight for the CEO’s door? How is your success? If you are like many organizations, then I am guessing that you are not successful at getting meetings with CEOs of major corporations. Why not?

In order to get the mindshare of a CEO, you need two things: 1. A connection 2. Proof. To have a connection, you need an in with the CEO. Whether it is a friend, associate, board member, or a church member you need to find a way that you can get in front of the CEO. For more information on how to connect, check out Keith Ferrazari’s book Never Eat Alone.

Once you have an audience, what are you going to show them? Are you going to tell them how great your organization is? That is not going to work. If you really want their support, then you are going to have to prove to them that being a part or supporting your organization is going to help them improve their image or bottom line. That is all it takes.

Another tactic is to start from the bottom and work your way to the top. Start recruiting members at the lower level of an organization and use their experience and connection to gain interest over time. This might not be a quick fix, but in the long run if you get enough members within one organization, then you will have a huge momentum push to get in contact with more senior members.

So which way is better?

Are you decisive and a great connector? Go for the top.

Are you good at keeping all types of people in your organization? Then I would recommend starting from the bottom and work your way to the top.

Which ever method you choose, just choose, make a plan, and prove to everyone that your organization is worth joining.

Keep growing,

Chris