Membership: Five Tips for a Path to Growth

Five Tips for a Path to Growth

The world we live in today is much different than when we started the 2019-2020 term. COVID-19 will forever leave its mark in history, especially for all levels of our organization. It is hard to recruit while social distancing. But, as resourceful as we can be, now would be a good time to review your Auxiliary’s unpaid or lapsed members.

Adopt-A-Member, those members that are unpaid for 2020 may have recently lost their job or been laid off due to COVID-19. Your Auxiliary could consider “adopting” them. Many Auxiliaries are having virtual meetings, so bring it up at your next meeting!

The Auxiliary Membership Committee can contact the members who have lapsed to ask them to remain a member.

Once we return to our “new normal,” start planning for the next Program year and your recruiting efforts to grow our membership. Here are some tips to help you get started on your path to growth.

1. Contact members many times and in many ways for renewals
   Ask: who is likely not to renew? What is my outreach to them? Formulate an outreach plan to reach those people. No longer do you just give three renewal notices and that is it. You should have a complete renewal system that includes email, mail, phone and any other types of channels you can think of. Offering incentives and discounts is another way to go about it.

2. Use best practices for membership recruiting
   Do not start creating new membership recruiting strategies – there are time-tested tactics that have been growing memberships for years. While your organization may have challenges specific to you, that doesn’t mean strategies that have stood the test of time won’t work for you – set aside a few minutes to understand them and use those best practices. Here are some points to building a membership recruitment strategy:

• • Target Market: who you want to reach
  • Membership Offer: what a member will receive
  • Recruiting Message: why a member should join
  • Promotional Tactics: how a member will be reached
  • Testing and Tracking: where to take future efforts

3. Track all your membership activities
   Keep track of your membership recruiting; it will not make a difference if you do not track it. Measuring results carefully allows resources, contacts, efficiency, and more. Using these tools will make tracking your recruiting activities a success.
4. Encourage a second interaction
   The more personal your follow-ups are with a new member, the more likely that member is to renew their membership. Encourage more interactions between new members and the Auxiliary – getting any interaction from a new member, whether by phone, email, completing a survey and the like, will increase the chances of renewal.

5. Invite, Include, Invest – to recruit members
   Even if you have a great retention program, members will still leave – it is crucial that your top priority is recruiting over retaining.

Integration with social media, and public and private blogs can also help you to spread the word about the Auxiliary. Here are some more online community features that can improve your member recruitment and retention:

• Member website: Having a dynamic and interactive website is important. Keep it interesting, update information and allow members to be involved. This will keep them interested, engaged and talking about it with other people.
• Content: It’s important to post great content and have an efficient way to handle it. Keeping your members excited and impressed with awesome posts helps inspire more good content that can lead to more traffic – also more members.
• Email: Make sure you send out email blasts and keep in touch with your members via email. This will help you develop a more personal relationship with your members and give them the opportunity to respond to you directly.
• Public and Private Blogs: Members are going to have opinions, so why not have a place for them to write about these things within your online member community so other members can easily access, read and share them?

It’s May, and the 2020 Membership year does not end until June 30, 2020.

Can’t Stop the Feeling

We can do this!

100% Plus is within reach for many Auxiliaries, Districts and Departments. Since the pandemic began in the United States, we have been hovering at 98.6% and need 6,700 members to be 100%+ to end the 2019-2020 term…that’s less than two members per Auxiliary! TOGETHER, WE CAN DO THIS!

National President Peggy, Mahalo for this rewarding opportunity!

Thank you to the Membership Conference Coaches

Eastern Conference:  Nina Lefrois
Western Conference:  Miriam Fernandez
Southern Conference:  Becky Lamb
Big Ten Conference:  Patsy Hilderbrandt

Aloha and Mahalo Department Membership Chairmen, what outstanding Programs you put together to promote Membership. You are all winners in my book!

Mahalo plenty to the staff at National Headquarters for your guidance and assistance.

“The STRENGTH of the TEAM is each individual MEMBER.
The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson