4 ways to reach your member recruitment goals
Member recruitment is critically important to your organization’s long-term success.
Here are four tips based on recent association industry research to help you attract more members.
For associations and other membership-based organizations, keeping new members coming in is vitally important to long-term success. You need to backfill those that leave each year due to job loss, job change, retirement, and other reasons. You also must maintain an ongoing stream of new members to grow your organization.
Findings from the 2022 Association Trends Study by Community Brands point to multiple ways you can attract more members by aligning your organization’s efforts with what members value most.
Let’s look at three ideas from the study that can help you reach your member recruitment goals:
1. Re-think your member value proposition. 
Findings from the study indicate that while member loyalty remains strong, it might be softening. About half of members (48 percent) say their organization is more important than in the past, down from 56 percent in the 2021 study.
This finding suggests that membership-based organizations must continue to demonstrate value and not just go back to business as usual, even as the world emerges from the effects of the pandemic.
Set aside time to review your value proposition to ensure it’s still relevant to today’s members. Keep in mind that the study shows a shift in member priorities – from broader industry-related benefits to more personal benefits. Reassess your member benefits and engagement opportunities to ensure they continue to provide the value that members seek.
TIP: Aptify AMS by Community Brands includes a full-featured marketing application that allows you to create and manage targeted communications and campaigns that help you reach prospective members with your value proposition.
2. Make career advancement opportunities a priority.
The 2022 Association Trends Study builds on previous studies by Community Brands. Throughout the past five years, findings consistently show that members value job and career advancement opportunities. They’re among the top reasons that members join an organization.
But the study also indicates that association professionals (Pros) continue to underestimate the value of job opportunities and career advancement to their members.
The bottom line: If you want to be the go-to resource for your industry or profession, you must provide members with resources to help them advance their careers.
With the right technology and approaches, you can easily create an online career center that helps members achieve career success. Offer an online job board that allows members to easily search and apply for relevant opportunities. Take it a step further by providing career advancement resources, such as career advice, with relevant articles that guide job seekers in their search; online coaching that provides job strategies and tips on résumés and interviewing; and career insights and placement services that help members secure their dream job.
TIP: YM Careers by Community Brands offers online job board software for membership-based organizations. It helps you build a robust job board so that members can easily search and apply for job opportunities. It also makes it easy for you to provide valuable career advancement resources. Aptify integrates easily with YM Careers to help you manage all of your member interactions in one system.
3. Make better use of your member data.
Insights from your member data help you to uncover opportunities for membership growth and drive more informed business decisions. The 2022 Association Trends Study suggests that while associations understand the importance of data analytics, many still are not investing in and using data analytics tools to advance their mission.
Be sure to have reliable reporting tools in place that allow you to view, report on, and interact with your member data. For example, your reporting tools should help you to:
- Monitor key performance indicators of membership acquisition success through at-a-glance dashboards and more detailed reports.
Click into data in dashboards for more details to find new opportunities for targeted member acquisition campaigns.
Determine how well your member acquisition efforts are performing.
TIP: Aptify lets you view, report on, and interact with data in real time. You can use more than 250 built-in reports and dashboards, many of which allow you to drill down into data for more details.
4. Invest in technology
As in studies from previous years, there remains a strong correlation between technology and member loyalty. Members who view their organization as an early adopter of technology are more satisfied, more connected, more likely to renew, and more likely to promote their organization. While Members’ evaluations of their organization’s technology remain strong, they have remained flat from five years ago. This lack of movement indicates an opportunity for organizations to improve their use of technology to create a more positive MX.
TIP: Aptify is configurable and flexible enough to grow with you and integrate with other platforms to create the Member Experience MX your organization needs to achieve membership goals. And with easy integrations with Zoom, end-to-end event management functionalities and more, Aptify can help membership organizations meet today’s technology needs. Request a personal demo here.
Learn more.
Discover more insights into how to deliver more of what members want. Read the 2022 Association Trends Study.
