7: Membership 101: Exit Surveys

neon blue "exit" sign

In position number 7 of the top ten all time Spark blog posts: Membership 101: Exit Surveys.

(I told you the Membership 101 series would be back!)

Once again, the advice in the initial post remains solid. To this day, I regularly recommend conducting an exit survey as part of client projects, or as something they should start doing on their own after we’re done, or both.

It’s important to remember that exit surveys are not a formal statistically valid instrument – they’re a pulse check.

That said, they can, as I wrote nearly four years ago, provide useful clues to emerging problems with your member value proposition, as well as providing one last chance to recapture folks who might not have realized they lapsed.

One thing I would like to highlight that I missed in the initial post is: Are people leaving for reasons that are under your control or NOT under your control?

“I left the profession” is a good example of the second. “A customer service staff person was rude to me” is a good example of the first.

You genuinely can’t do anything about the someone leaving the profession. That person is appropriately gone from membership, and all you can do is wish her good luck in her new ventures.

For the second example, that’s a clue for further investigation. But don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that the staffer in question needs to be retrained – or fired. Maybe the member is just a jerk (it happens). Maybe you’ve set up a system that’s rewarding the wrong behaviors (i.e., how many complaints the staff person can handle in a day, how quickly the staff person can conclude the interaction). Maybe your customer service team is under-staffed, or you’ve tasked them with responsibility (to fix problems) without authority (to actually do anything meaningful about problems). Or maybe that person – or the entire team – needs refresher training on things like empathy, listening, follow through, warm handoffs, checking back in to ensure the problem was solved, and how to debrief as a team effectively.

But many reasons are not so clear-cut. Example: “My employer stopped paying for my dues.”

Is that under your control?

Well, no – you can’t make any given employer pay employees’ association membership dues.

But also, yes – what you’re offering isn’t valuable enough that the employee is willing to pay out of her own pocket. Why is that?

In short, keep running those exit surveys, and keep looking for clues to the *next* question you should ask based on what you learn.

Photo by Dustin Tramel on Unsplash