NEW! Brown Bag Lunch Series for Membership-based Organizations - Starting April 3rd!
What marketing issues are you focusing on in your organization? The Nonprofit Federation is hosting a brown bag lunch to introduce the membership-based and association organizations to what we hope will be the first of a series of new networking opportunities Mark your calendar now for Thursday, April 3rd noon to 1:30 at our offices. Bring your sandwich and we will provide beverages and sweets.
The session will be moderated by Kevin Whorton, the Nonprofit Federation’s current Vice Chair. We will discuss key topics and trends that are affecting us in membership-based organizations.
Note, space is limited, so please sign up ASAP to Alicia Osgood at aosgood@the-dma.org if you plan to attend.
Join our Associations & Membership Listserve!
The DMA Nonprofit Federation Association & Membership Organizations listserve is for those membership based organizations within the Nonprofit Federation. It is a place for those in the association and membership arenas to freely share information, ask questions and get answers specific to their segment of the nonprofit community.
I often get questions from membership organizations about how certain marketing principles apply to them - the benefit exchange, call to action, etc. So, for any membership-based nonprofits out here, here are some useful questions to ask yourself and three quick tips for staying on track.
1.) Do your marketing materials (brochure, website, appeals, etc.) start by talking about what your organization does or what you do for the people who join? Make it about your members, not you, and you’ll get more people to join.
2.) When you talk about what you do for members, do you talk about process or results? Are you talking about far-off goals like advocacy, policy, preserving the arts, etc. or immediate benefits like passage of a certain bill, help preparing taxes (check out AARP’s positioning this time of year) or great programs people can listen to now (NPR fund drives have this down pat!)? Focus on the things you do for your members in there here and now, rather than lofty goals that may not be achieved in our lifetimes.
3.) Are you promising or are you previewing what membership gets you? Don’t simply ask people to join—send them free resources, invite them to useful workshops or fun events, and prove you do something valuable for them. Then hit them up for money.
The five major touch points in the life cycle for an association member are:
1. Awareness
Membership development starts with one very important question. Do prospective members know who you are? Awareness is the measure of how successful your branding efforts have been to gain share of mind in your target audience. Until someone knows you, they are not likely to become a member or a customer.
2. Recruitment
Recruitment is the second part of the membership life cycle. It is the process of getting a member to join your association. Or perhaps better described, it is the process of getting a member to 'try' your association.
3. Engagement
An organization that has good awareness and a successful recruitment program will next want to focus on engaging new members. A definition of member engagement is as simple as initializing a second transaction or interaction with your member.
4. Interdependence
The next level of the membership system or life cycle is interdependence. This level is the step above a simple transactional relationship. It is a relationship where a member has his or her identity, livelihood, or safety tied to your organization.
5. Renewal
Renewal is the quantitative evaluation of how successful you have been with the earlier components of your membership system. An aware, engaged, and interdependent member is much more likely to renew than one who is not.
Tapping into Association MarketingFrom MIT/Sloan Management Review
Reprint 4441; Summer 2003, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 89
Conceptual frameworks provide insight into creating marketing strategies targeted at groups
Americans are joiners — nine out of 10 belong to at least one group or association, such as the American Automobile Association and the AARP, and these groups provide a potent mechanism for developing, marketing and distributing a host of products and services. For associations, new product offerings provide additional revenue and help attract and retain members. For companies, associations help leverage marketing efforts, allow access to exclusive association channels, and encourage tailored product developments.
In a recent working paper, "Marketing To and Through Associations: A Descriptive Analysis and Research Domains," authors Abhijit Roy, assistant professor of marketing at the Sellinger School of Business and Management, Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, and Paul D. Berger, professor of marketing at Boston University's School of Management, claim that there is a dearth of research in the field, and they introduce conceptual frameworks to help create strategies and marketing approaches to the increasingly important association audience.
The authors cite the success of branded affinity credit cards as evidence of the power of marketing to associations. For example, Visa USA discovered it could get a response rate of 3% to 8% pitching association-based cards, far higher than the 1% to 2% for standard credit card offers. Association-based cards now account for over a third of the market — jumping from 20.8 million cards in circulation in 1990 to over 250 million in 2002. Roy and Berger also cite the impact of association marketing in the insurance industry — Travelers Property Casualty of Hartford, Connecticut, whose single largest affinity customer is the AAA, predicts that by 2010 association marketing activities will bring in 20% of its total premiums.
Roy and Berger contend that, in order to market to associations effectively, marketers must first understand the motivation, structure and environment in which these associations operate. Taking cues from modes of existing social science research, the authors infer that understanding the importance of a member's commitment to an association is essential. Citing a 2000 study that concluded that behavior within associations is connected to the members' commitment, the authors suggest that how members perceive their group's unique qualities, social status and size each affect the strength of the members' affiliation and thereby their receptivity to association-related marketing.
The authors propose frameworks for analyzing association structures to understand how embedded group dynamics affect responsiveness to marketing pitches. These include how and why associations are organized, the various archetypal groups they form, and the "structural features and social processes" that make up and motivate an association. The authors suggest several paths for future research on the basis of leadership-member theory, which proposes that association leaders exchange socially and economically in different ways with lower-ranking members than they do with one another, or on the basis of network-exchange theory, which provides insight into how consumer behavior is strongly connected to its social context.
The authors categorize associations into professional, common interest, cause-based and demographically based groups, as well as marketer-generated groups, which are usually focused around a specific product, brand or retail store (such as Harley-Davidson Inc.). These categories can be further broken down into "identity" and "interest" subsets: Professional associations allow members to reflect on their work identity; demographically based groups allow members to reflect on who they are as defined by physical and social characteristics; common interest groups allow members to focus on favored activities; and cause-based associations allow them to focus on their social concerns. Within each subcategory, there are different reasons for joining — to network, for education, advocacy for issues, a search for identity — as well as different membership profiles. Through these increasingly specific classifications, researchers can help businesses better develop, segment and manage their marketing efforts, tailoring specific approaches to a specific group profile.
Roy and Berger advise marketers to acquire a greater sense of how societal trends, voting patterns, civic participation, race and social class affect association membership and participation. For example, they cite a study showing that African-Americans are twice as likely as Caucasians to be association members, especially at lower income levels. The authors also suggest that technology and business trends, such as use of the Internet, have a significant effect on association-based marketing strategy. Of particular interest to marketers seeking to introduce innovative new products, the authors suggest that the structures and "cultural underpinnings" of different types of association may affect how quickly new ideas spread throughout such organizations.
