Scaling New Member Engagement - Part 2

Last week, I waxed poetic about how email scales but warned that email messages are easy to ignore, so I offered some tips to make your messaging and campaigns unignorable. You can find that article here.

And you may be wondering what other new member strategies and tactics scale.

We have more than 150,000 members. Any advice on how to engage or onboard new members on a large scale? Asks Erica.

When I say “scale,” I mean how do we ensure each member gets a lovely, warm welcome? Well, one way to do that is by having members welcoming members.

In the New Member Engagement Study, the team at Dynamic Benchmarking and I found that more associations were considering starting New Member Ambassador programs. These programs can train and charge existing members to help with onboarding.

Large associations also focus on that personal touch by helping their chapters, affiliates, and committees onboard new members. Many associations with large member bases still have small staff teams, so arm volunteer leaders with the knowledge and tactics to offer those warm welcomes.

Large associations can also disperse onboarding duties throughout the staff. In the benchmarking research, we see that onboarding is not the sole responsibility of the membership department. Onboarding occurs in large association’s online communities and at virtual and in-person events. I bet there are also examples of onboarding in editorial, research, advocacy, and other departments throughout associations.

In an interesting article about Loom, an idea caught my eye, “Community wasn’t just the job of the customer service or marketing teams; it was up to anyone and everyone to respond to customer feedback or product issues.” In the same way, large associations may have more new member onboarding success by making onboarding the goal for every department, every committee, and every sub-group - every staff member and every member.

New members are critical to each member community's success. New members are also one of the most fragile member sub-segments, but the good news is that we have many opportunities to help smooth the path toward engagement. Have you got a lot of new members? Get many welcomers to help you.