Membership Growth Blog

Take a good hard look at your membership. Are you serving them or are they serving you?

The more I get involved with more organizations; I am finding many that are focused more on themselves then their members. Traveling the country talking to people about what they are doing and why they are doing it, one finds it difficult to get people interested in joining a mainstream organization. Why is that?

I think a lot of it comes from the feeling that they organization is serving itself before its members. Think about the organizations you belong to, and ask yourself if you really feel like you are special in the organization. When was the last time someone from the organization called you to check up on your satisfaction? When was the last time they did something that made you feel great?

Are you a board member for an organization that is helping itself? What can you do today to reach out to your members, give them a hand, and let them know how much you appreciate their contribution to the organization.

Are you truly passionate about your organization? If not, how do you expect others to be interested in joining?

Passion and purpose are linked when trying to attract new members to your organization. Think about the last time you went into a store to make a major purchase. That is the same attitude that people are going to approach a member based organizations. They are going to want to know all the facts, the benefits, and costs up front but most importantly, your potential members want all of that information delivered with passion.

Walk into an Apple Store with me and see the difference between the employees there versus the nearby Best Buy. Think of the neatly dressed, smiling faces of the Apple employees ready to show you the latest gizmo from the labs. You are encouraged to touch, play, and ask questions. All the prices are laid out, and you are treated like a person.

Now go into Best Buy. Have you found anyone to talk to about a computer? Most likely someone was at the door to make sure people weren’t stealing anything, but all the employees I see are standing around gossiping or trying to look like they aren’t interested in helping. When you go to ask them a question, do they really know the product or does it feel like they are reading the features list off of the side of the box you were looking at?

Are you Apple or Best Buy when someone is coming to see your organization? When you are presenting, are you really showing your passion for your mission, goals, and direction? When you hand out materials, is everything up front and easy to understand?

People are becoming much more cynical towards anyone trying to sell them anything. Because of the increasing numbers of scam artists out there, people are putting up their shields faster than ever. If you are upfront, honest, and open about what your organization offers and any costs involved, then you will be respected. Remember, not everyone wants or needs to join your organization, so don’t waste energy trying to attract people who will not be interested.

Be honest, be open, and most importantly, be passionate. Whether you attract more people or not, people will remember someone with passion.

What is your conversion rate? In Internet marketing speak they call when a user clicks from the front page to a sales page the click-through. In terms of membership organizations, the conversion rate is the rate at which you turn visitors into members? It is a little similar.

So what is the best way to convert guests to members? An Open House.

Open houses give you an opportunity to show off what your organization has to offer without the rigid formality of a standard meeting. It also might add an element that many college students find important, free food. I remember during undergrad and grad school, the organizations that had the most new members were the ones that had the best free food.

A lot of churches have forgotten this important membership building tool. My 93 year old Great Uncle has told me many stories of his famous pancake breakfasts. At these events, hundreds of people would come through the doors to have some free pancakes. Did they get every one of those people through the door to become members? No, but for open houses you are looking at the numbers.

It could be that you find your normal conversion rate is 1 in 5. So for every five visitors you get 1 new member. What if you are only getting one guest at each meeting? That means it takes 5 meetings before you convert a guest. What happens at a well organized and publicized open house? Maybe you get 100 guests? It could so happen that due to the nature of the event you get 1 in 10 guests to join your organization. That is still 10 new members in 1 meeting instead of 1 new member in five meetings. Under you old method it might have taken 50 meetings to get that many new members.

Think about if you made it a goal to have an open house every quarter? Even if you were at 1 in 20, you would still beat your old membership conversion rates. So I ask you, when was the last time you had an open house?

Are you finding it harder to attract new members?

With so many diverse organizations vying for the public’s mind share, I am certain that you working harder to get a few more people to sign up. What if it was easy to attract new members to your organization? Would that knowledge be worth something to your organization?

What you are missing is WOW!

WOW!

It is the feeling you get when you realize that something fits your desires, when something is “cool”, or when something surprises you with a size much larger than expected. I got the WOW feeling the first time I heard a real professional speaker give a presentation. I got the WOW feeling the first time I visited the World Trade Center Site.

When was the last time you gave someone a WOW?

Having a hard time remembering?

Then you don’t have it. If you want your organization to grow, then you are going to have to find it.

Keep WOWing,

Chris

In a world of choices, how does your membership organization stand out from the rest? What value do you give to your members that they cannot get anywhere else? What is your niche?

Dear Readers,

In a world of ever expanding choices, most organizations are going to have to stop targeting everyone and focus on a niche for growth. If you don’t focus on explosive growth in a core market, then you might only grow a little spreading yourself too thinly. It takes a lot of value, effort, and marketing to drive growth across all markets, but you will find with the right value set and pitch, that you can drive growth where it is most important to your organization.

Questions to ponder today?

1. What is the market for my membership organization?
2. How many people are in that market?
3. What is their most common method for my potential members to learn about my organization?
4. What is the most cost effective method to reach my audience?

The questions you are going to ponder will take some work to answer. You might even need to hire a professional. However, if you take the time to think about who you are targeting and how you are going to reach them, you will be on the path to sustainable growth.

My goal is to help organizations realize that. I have seen to many non-profits and subscription based businesses get some press, boom, and then lose a majority of their membership due to unsustainable growth. They stopped service the core niche that allowed them to get known and now are no more.

Good luck and keep growing,
Chris