Membership

Monday Buzz: Hybrid Theory

What your association needs to know about the hybrid membership model. Also: When event covenants falter.

Not every member fits into a single category: That’s the simple reason why hybrid membership won’t go away.

Over at Abila’s Forward Together blog, the company’s associate product marketing manager, Anna Toon, breaks down some important considerations about the hybrid membership model. The biggest? What you need to know about your audience in building out a hybrid model.

“Our recent research suggests there are opportunities within membership if you look at the benefits as they’re valued by different generations (or by members who are in different stages in their career),” she writes in the post. “For example, they will use technology differently, expect varying levels of personalization within their member experience, and view their careers differently.”

This requires some data research to know what works best for your membership, as well as an analysis of the different types of models out there. (You want this thing to be a good fit.)

“Hybrid memberships have been trending for some time, and the adoption of these models for associations is expected to continually increase,” she adds. “The portfolio model is widely appealing and can strongly impact membership engagement while attracting new members.”

Check the Abila website for more insights.

Covenant Competition

Author and consultant Adrian Segar is a big fan of event covenants—a set of rules for attendees to follow when taking part in a session.

But sometimes those rules compete with one another—as Segar learned when someone tried to ask a question (something always allowed under his covenant with attendees) when the session was already running behind (something that isn’t).

The person asked the question, and Segar learned something.

“I suspect it’s impossible to have a set of covenants that won’t occasionally clash—and I think that’s actually a good thing,” he wrote in his blog post about the encounter.

Other Links of Note

Treat your digital assets like physical ones: At SocialFish, Tanzen Consulting’s Carrie Hane makes the case for thinking of running a website like owning a home.

Eric Lanke, CEO of the National Fluid Power Association, recently had a conversation about values with a new employee. Lanke ended up learning something important about himself.

Interesting startup of the day: A firm called CoinOut wants to make loose change a lot less frustrating. Here’s how it plans to do that, according to Fast Company.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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