ASAE | August 9, 2023
Ten Ways To Future Proof Your Membership
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Transforming Nonmember Customers into Loyal Members: Unlocking Association Success
Reading Time: 4 minutes
This article first appeared in Sidecar as Are Your Members Your Best Customers?
Your Nonmember Customers May Be Your Best Future Members
How to grow engagement? It’s a law of nature in marketing: Your best prospect is the customer you already have. Research consistently shows that it costs six to seven times more to get a new customer than to keep one, and in membership terms, smart associations understand what that means for retention. A dollar spent on retention goes much further than a dollar spent on recruitment.
It goes further than current members, too. Your second-best customers are likely to be your lapsed members – strange as it may sound. Members who have left you may be the easiest to recruit again because they know you, and you know them, which is half the battle in acquisition.
However, are these the only groups that associations should be thinking about to grow engagement? What about your nonmember customers?
Looking Beyond Your Membership To Grow Engagement
Are members your only customers? The answer is no, but most associations don’t think that way. After all, they’re membership organizations, and members matter most. While that might be true, they’re not the only ones who matter.
What about all the others you serve who are not members? People who attend your events, take your training, buy your publications, and more? These are your nonmember customers.
Unfortunately, associations don't cultivate customer relationships and leave a lot of money on the table.
Understanding The Impact of NonMember Customers
In purely financial terms, these customers are possibly more valuable than most of your members. How? Someone who attends two to three events each year, every year is probably contributing more revenue than a member who simply pays their dues. They will probably be more loyal than unengaged members, too.
“But they should become members!” you say. Of course they should. They might be your best prospects of all. After all, non-member customers know you, have a relationship with you, and get value from you. More importantly, you know who they are and how to talk to them. They should be prime targets for recruitment, and they are. One large engineering association tested marketing specifically to non-member customers and found they responded three to five times better than the general market.
The Challenge for NonMember cUSTOMER Engagement
But what if they don’t want to be members? This is where most associations fall down. They push the non-responders to the side and move on to the next prospective member. In reality, there is plenty of upside in growing those non-member relationships. The people most likely to come to an event are those who come to other events. People who like your events will likely enjoy your training and vice versa.
Unfortunately, associations don’t think this way, so they don’t cultivate customer relationships and leave a lot of money on the table.
Associations make significant investments in technology to manage their member relationships: to communicate with, engage and renew them. Very few make similar investments in managing non-member customer relationships.
Building a Customer Engagement Plan
The first part is hard for most associations. Events, training, subscription, and membership data are usually not kept in one place. If they are, they are generally not looked at with a single view of the customer, namely, the big picture of their relationship.
The first step would be to figure out how many customers you have. If you add up all of the people who have transacted with you in the last five years, including lapsed members, how big is your audience? Your customer universe will likely dwarf your current membership. How much untapped growth opportunity is there?
If you think of membership as one opportunity among others for nonmember customers,
you unlock many new avenues to deliver value and grow engagement.
Consolidating Customer Data
The first part is hard for most associations. Events, training, subscription, and membership data are usually not kept in one place. If they are, they are generally not looked at with a single view of the customer, namely, the big picture of their relationship.
The first step would be to figure out how many customers you have. If you add up all of the people who have transacted with you in the last five years, including lapsed members, how big is your audience? Your customer universe will likely dwarf your current membership. How much untapped growth opportunity is there?
Setting Goals for NonMember Customer Interaction
The second part of managing a customer relationship is making it into what you want it to be. What do you want from your customers besides membership? Is it to maximize revenue right now? To cross-sell your offerings? To grow engagement and repeat business? Only managed customer relationships achieve these things. Unfortunately, that is what most associations leave on the table.
Making the Most of Your Association’s Relationships
While many associations only focus on their members, a customer-centered strategy is just a mental leap away. You have thousands, if not tens of thousands of relationships today with customers who will never be members. So how will you make the most of them?
If your best prospects are the customers you already have, your best customers are the ones you treat like customers. If you think of membership as one opportunity among others for nonmember customers, you unlock many new avenues to deliver value and grow engagement.
For more on how to grow engagement see: Member Engagement: Three Big Problems and Three Ways to Fix Them and How To Improve Member Engagement.
Unlocking Growth: Embracing Organizational Membership for the Future
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This article was first published in Associations Evolve: 2023 & Beyond
Organizational Membership: The Future Of Membership Growth
Group Membership is Not a Growth Strategy
Many associations have “group” membership, which usually amounts to a modest volume discount, sometimes with a single invoice. The idea is that companies will want to pay for their employees’ memberships if they get a price break and a convenient way to pay. Unfortunately, these group membership plans do not do very well and are mostly an afterthought in the membership strategy.
The problem is that companies don’t want to pay for any employee’s membership. Or at least far fewer companies do. Most organizations stopped paying employees’ membership dues when times got tough and never started again. Eventually, organizations realized it was unnecessary since employees who really want a membership are willing to pay for it themselves.
Organizational Membership is the New Path to Growth
Organizational membership is an entirely different value proposition. It is a B2B offering designed with the executive decision-maker in mind. Discounts on individual memberships are but a part of it. The real magic in the offering is a distinct set of benefits that speak to the needs of the executives who make the decision. These are things that benefit the company and the executives themselves.
What kinds of things? They must be things that have demonstrable financial value and elevate the decision-maker’s profile. They could include:
- Positive PR in publications highlighting the great things their organization is doing
- Access to advocacy and policy leaders to be in the know and have their voices heard
- A seat at the table on an Executive Advisory Council with the CEO
- Help in recruiting employees with exclusive data and priority promotional opportunities
- Substantial savings on education and events they have to pay for (e.g., continuing ed, training events)
There are two things to note about this list. First, these are things that only the association can provide but doesn’t offer now. Second, they have real bottom-line value to a corporation at a minimal cost to the association to deliver.
This kind of offer works because it is a great business decision for the company. It has clear value and is easy to justify financially.
Organizational Value is Worth Far More Than Dues
Associations think about dues, which is exactly right for the individual lens and dead wrong for organizations. Why? The value to the organization is not a matter of how many employees they sign up for membership; it is the tangible financial impact they will receive. How much is $1 million in savings worth to an organization?
Corporations expect to pay for things this way—the greater the value, the more things cost. In organizational membership, larger companies generally get more value than smaller ones and thus pay more. A large organization might pay $100K for that $1 million in value. A smaller one might get less and so pay less.
This value-based pricing is uncomfortable for many associations, but it is critical to effectively selling organizational memberships.
An Explosive Growth Opportunity
A prominent medical society Sequence worked with launched an organizational membership with overwhelming success. They designed the membership for large health systems that employ physicians. They offer a suite of benefits, including inside access, publicity, burnout prevention, early access to residents for recruiting, and free continuing education. In addition, all of the physicians in the system are eligible for individual membership at no cost.
The cost is value-based, ranging from a flat fee of $15k for smaller systems to $100K for large ones. The price does not depend on the number of individual memberships. Health systems sign up for the tangible financial value they receive.
In the first year, 5,000 new physicians came in through enterprise membership, so many that they had to pause the program because they could not onboard them fast enough. Some of the largest systems have enrolled as many as 15K physicians. The association projects that more than half of its new members will join through organizational membership in a few years.
The Key is to Sell It the Right Way
What were the keys to success? First, an incredibly attractive set of benefits based on thorough research. Second, a convincing financial case. Finally, and most importantly, sales.
Organizational membership is a B2B sale. It takes time and skill to reach and persuade the right buyers. In this case, it meant a sales resource dedicated to building this program, armed with the quality of sales materials executive buyers expect. It also meant solid executive support: the CEO will personally engage with executives at large systems to help convince them.
Their vision and investment paid off. Other Sequence clients have had equivalent success with organizational membership programs custom-tailored for their markets. For example, the Executive’s Club of Chicago doubled its membership in three years after rolling out a new Enterprise Member value proposition.
In another example, SAE International launched a subsidiary focused solely on the needs of companies in their industry and grew their non-dues revenue ten times over.
How to Minimize the Risk
While the payoff can be very substantial, it can come with some risks. One concern is how much it might “cannibalize” individual membership. The risk is that organizational membership might ultimately decrease net revenue by offering discounted memberships to individuals who would have paid full price.
It is a valid question that one can answer with good data analysis. Unless market penetration is exceptionally high, the revenue gains will outweigh the discounts in most cases.
There is also a risk that big groups that join at once might leave at once, creating excessive volatility in membership. To reduce this risk, one can mitigate this with thoughtful multi-year contracts that include extended notice provisions and other safeguards.
The Future of Membership Growth
For many associations, individual membership has reached a plateau. Growth is meager, despite their best efforts, and it is unrealistic to expect big jumps in growth from doing the same old things. A new model is needed.
Organizational membership allows associations to repurpose assets they already have to enter a new market where they have an immediate competitive advantage — and do so at a very low cost. The revenue and membership growth opportunities are significant. Too significant not to explore seriously.
For more on membership growth strategy see Association Success: 7 Ways to Thrive Not Just Survive.
Mastering Membership Marketing: 5 Game-Changing Breakthroughs You Need to Know
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This article first appeared in Associations Now as “Five Breakthroughs in Membership Marketing“
It's Time for a Breakthrough in Membership Marketing
Traditional membership marketing is predictably low return and has stayed the same for years. Most associations were slow to adopt email marketing when it came on the scene in the mid-90s. Today, 85% of associations use email, and 48% say it is one of their most productive channels.12022 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report,
Marketing General Still, click rates remain low, on average less than 2%.2Average Industry Rates for Email as of April 2023, Constant Contact
Many associations have delved into social and digital advertising but have failed. Only 14% say social media is effective, and 10% say the same of paid digital.
The good news is that membership marketers can expect a lot better. We have recently tested innovations in membership segmentation, targeting, messaging, and advertising that performed four to nine times better — in one case, twenty-seven times better — than the old-school tactics they replaced.
1. FOCUS ON YOUR "CUSTOMERS"
As I have written previously, your members are not your only customers. Your organization has relationships with many other people who interact with you differently. They attend your events, take your training, and write for your journals. One client calls them “ghost members,” people who are with you in spirit but not in membership.
It is a truism in marketing that your best prospect is the customer you already have. Why? On the one hand, they know you, so you don’t have to work hard to introduce yourself. This is even more important than you might think. Most associations have less than 35% awareness across their trade or profession.
Moreover, your customers see you as valuable in some way, so you don’t have to do so much to convince them. Most importantly, you know them. You know who they are and what they like, which is more than half the battle in marketing.
If true, your non-member customers should be your best membership prospects. But are they? We tested sending the same emails to a list of non-member customers and a rented email list of cold contacts. The emails sent to non-member customers performed 8.6X better than emails sent to cold lists. Not to mention, the rented list was expensive, and the customer list was free.
What does this tell you? First, you should be marketing membership to your non-member customers. But also, you should be actively cultivating your list of those customers by capturing opted-in emails at every touchpoint you can.
2. LAPSED MEMBERS CAN BE YOUR EASIEST NEW MEMBERS
In a previous article, I explained why lapsed members are an even more under-tapped audience. Most associations move on from members who don’t renew after a month or two. Some may try to win them back but then give up. This is often short-sighted.
Lapsed members do ghost members one better: They not only know your organization, they know your membership experience and saw value in it when they joined. Members don’t lapse because they hate you. They lapse because they don’t see your value at that moment.
Are lapsed members a lost cause, or can you remind them of your value and bring them back again?
At the American Lung Association (ALA), 75% of their donor file had been dormant for as long as two years. Historically, ALA had forgotten about them and focused all their efforts on finding new donors.
We helped ALA develop an email campaign that built on what ALA knew about these donors, namely, what they cared about. Of all ALA’s great work, people gravitate to four significant issues: clean air, lung health, and smoking cessation. They sent messages that spoke to lapsed donors about what they cared about – and only what they cared about – inviting them to be part of the solution again.
The result? In one year, they reactivated 7% of their lapsed members. In two years, ALA grew their donor file by 50% — over 600K active donors – by focusing on long-forgotten lost causes.
3. SEGMENT BY INTERESTS
A significant reason for ALA’s success was segmentation by interest. Sending clean air messaging to people they knew to care about clean air was many times more effective than their old, unfocused messaging. As we have found before, organizations do not segment their messaging or segment based on career stage or employment setting, which is seldom effective.
In another powerful example, we helped American Medical Association (AMA) analyze their member data to arrive at four interest-based segments: Advocacy, Practice Improvement, Patient Outcomes, and Medical Education. Segmenting their marketing this way helped triple their member growth in one year.
This is one way targeting your customers and lapsed members can pay off big. Because you know their interests, you can segment them effectively. In our most recent test, a leading engineering society used data they had collected on “ghost” members to identify the specific technical interests of their prospects. It tested interest-based messaging against their standard “generic” messaging. The interest-specific messages performed four times better than the generic ones.
4. Make EMAIL PERSONAL AGAIn
Email is the mainstay of many membership marketing programs, but it has become less effective as people have tuned email out. Of the nearly 145 billion emails sent daily, 84% are considered spam. A full 54% of email users delete or ignore spam.3What Percentage of Email is Spam In 2023?, Earthweb You don’t think your membership emails are spam, but your prospects probably do because it looks like commercial email.
People like personal email, however, and a more personal approach to membership email can be far more effective. In another recent test, we sent a series of emails to prospective members that appeared to come from a well-known member of the society (with their permission, of course). The subject line was personalized, and the body of the email was a short, personal invitation to join the organization.
This straightforward approach has powerful results when done correctly. In our test, people clicked through personal emails twenty-seven times more often than impersonal messages and enrolled five times more often.
5. take another look at digital
At the beginning of this article, I pointed out that most associations need better results from digital advertising. Traditional banner and search ads are expensive, and the results could be better. Newer, less conventional advertising can be far more effective when correctly integrated with email campaigns.
All major digital advertising platforms (Google, LinkedIn, Meta) can target custom audiences. That is, provide them with a list of individuals you want to reach and advertise only to them. Because it is so targeted, it is a far more efficient way to advertise. We have found that the most effective way to use custom audiences is to support your email campaigns.
Using this approach, prospects who receive your emails are exposed to your digital ads simultaneously. The ads increase awareness and offer another way to respond, improving the success of your campaign.
In one recent test, we created a custom audience on LinkedIn comprised of prospective members identified using the tactics discussed above. These individuals received membership marketing emails and were exposed to LinkedIn ads simultaneously.
The emails with digital ad support performed 22% better than emails without digital help. Because LinkedIn ads are pay-per-click and the primary purpose of the test was to drive email response, the cost of the ads was significantly lower than a stand-alone digital ad campaign.
LinkedIn also offers Sponsored Messaging, which allows you to reach prospective members in your custom audience via direct messages that appear to come from another LinkedIn member. In another recent test, we sent personal messages to a custom audience, like the personal emails discussed above, personally inviting prospective members to join the organization.
This tactic yielded open rates as high as 56% — more than seven better than traditional emails sent to the same list. This approach was far more efficient than regular LinkedIn ads, yielding three times more click-throughs at only 6% of the cost.
Conclusion
These next-level membership marketing techniques deliver transformational membership results. New ways of targeting the best prospects, segmenting your audience, and reaching them in new ways with new messages can revolutionize recruitment. Best of all, they are well within reach of any association that wants to take their marketing to the next level.
Cracking the Code: How to Turn Your Customers into Your Best Members
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Are Your Members Your Best Customers?
It’s a law of nature in marketing: your best prospect is the customer you already have. Research consistently shows that it costs six to seven times more to get a new customer than to keep one, and in membership terms, smart associations understand what that means for retention. A dollar spent on retention goes much further than a dollar spent on recruitment.
It goes further than current members, too. Your second-best customers are likely to be your lapsed members – strange as it may sound. Members who have left you may be the easiest to recruit again because they know you, and you know them, which is half the battle in acquisition.
However, are these the only groups that associations should be thinking about?
Looking Beyond Your Membership
Are members your only customers? The answer is no, but most associations don’t think that way. After all, they’re membership organizations, and members matter most. While that might be true, they’re not the only ones who matter.
What about all the others you serve who are non-members? People who attend your events, take your training, buy your publications, and more? These are your non-member customers.
Understanding the Impact of Non-Member Customers
In purely financial terms, these customers are possibly more valuable than most of your members. How? Someone who attends two to three events each year, every year is probably contributing more revenue than a member who simply pays their dues. They will probably be more loyal than unengaged members, too.
“But they should become members!” you say. Of course they should. They might be your best prospects of all. After all, non-member customers know you, have a relationship with you, and get value from you. More importantly, you know who they are and how to talk to them. They should be prime targets for recruitment, and they are. One large engineering association tested marketing specifically to non-member customers and found they responded three to five times better than the general market.
The Challenge for Non-Member Engagement
But what if they don’t want to be members? This is where most associations fall down. They push the non-responders to the side and move on to the next prospective member. In reality, there is plenty of upside in growing those non-member relationships. The people most likely to come to an event are those who come to other events. People who like your events will likely enjoy your training and vice versa. Unfortunately, associations don’t think this way, so they don’t cultivate customer relationships and leave a lot of money on the table.
Associations make significant investments in technology to manage their member relationships: to communicate with, engage and renew them. Very few make similar investments in managing relationships with non-members.
Building a Non-Member Engagement Plan
The few who do manage their relationships with non-member customers are generally those that don’t depend on dues revenue. Organizations with hugely successful publications or event businesses, for example, manage their customers well because that is what it takes to be successful.
You may not be one of those organizations, but there are lessons to learn from them that will help you grow your non-dues revenue streams. So what does it mean to manage a customer relationship? Fundamentally, it means gaining insight into your current relationship and building a strategy for what you want it to be.
Consolidating Customer Data
The first part is hard for most associations. Events, training, subscription, and membership data are usually not kept in one place. If they are, they are generally not looked at with a single view of the customer, namely, the big picture of their relationship.
The first step would be to figure out how many customers you have. If you add up all of the people who have transacted with you in the last five years, including non-members and lapsed members, how big is your audience? Your non-member customers will likely dwarf your current membership. How much untapped growth opportunity is there?
Setting Goals for Your Non-Member Interactions
The second part of managing a customer relationship is making it into what you want it to be. What do you want from your customers besides membership? Is it to maximize revenue right now? To cross-sell your offerings? To build loyalty and repeat business? Only managed customer relationships achieve these things. Unfortunately, that is what most associations leave on the table.
Making the Most of Your Association's Relationships
While many associations only focus on their members, a customer-centered strategy is just a mental leap away. You have thousands, if not tens of thousands of relationships today with customers who will never be members. So how will you make the most of them?
If your best prospects are the customers you already have, your best customers are the ones you treat like customers. If you think of membership as one opportunity among others for customers, you unlock many new avenues to deliver value and drive growth.
This article originally appeared in Sidecar as Are Your Members Your Best Customers?
For an example of explosive growth from non-member customers, see SAE international multiplied non-dues revenue 10 times
Is Your Member Segmentation Strategy Holding You Back?
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Is Your Member Segmentation Strategy Wrong?
Most associations segment their membership in the same way: by career stage. So young professionals might be one segment, mid-career folks another, and so on into retirement. They do it this way because it seems obvious, and it’s easy – but is there a chance it’s wrong?
When determining whether or not your member segmentation strategy is helping increase member engagement, ask yourself: Do our different segments act differently?
The Problem With Career-Stage Member Segmentation
If career stage has been the category used for your member segmentation, it’s likely been difficult to spot any trends or changes. For example, do mid-career and late-career members respond to different messages or engage with different things? They probably don’t.
Career-stage segmentation does not work because it doesn’t tell you how to treat people differently to get the best response – It is not actionable.
What you need to know are the ways your audience is different, which often falls into two distinct categories: what interests them and their relationship with you.
- Education
- Patient Outcomes
- Practice Improvement
- Advocacy
These groups were very distinct. For example, many physicians were not interested in advocacy, but those who were were extremely passionate. So, talking about advocacy to the wrong people may have led to unsubscribes while talking about advocacy to the right people got an enormous response.
Segmenting By Interests
One of the most effective ways to segment your audience is by interests – after all, people will always respond better to things that interest them. Moreover, some things your association does are far more interesting to certain people than others. So how can you know which things and which people?
For starters, let your email be your guide. Cluster your email by topic and look at which members respond to what. You will begin to see patterns and that’s where your member segmentation should start.
In an analysis we completed at Sequence for the American Medical Association, we found that there were four principal areas that physicians responded to:
Understanding Interests Through Action
How do you know what people belong in which segment? If you know what emails and content a member responds to, that will tell you. If you don’t, you can analyze your data for “look-alikes.” That is, members likely to respond to advocacy because they look like advocates in other ways. For example, they may open the same emails or visit the same pages. They may even have similar demographics.
Taking it one step further, an outside data shop can help you use consumer data to segment non-members by interest, too. For example, the medical society in the story above doubled its member growth rate in this way.
The Loyalty Ladder
The other member segmentation strategy that always applies is how engaged your members are with you. Picture a ladder with your most engaged members on the top. These are your Super Fans. They are longtime members active in everything you do. They are your governance and volunteers. You wish every member were like them.
On the bottom are the unengaged. They joined but have not done anything. These are your Window Shoppers. In between are increasing levels of engagement. Members have more lifetime value at each level and become more likely to renew, which is why your goal is to move your members up the ladder.
Members at each rung of the ladder will react to different things. But, more importantly, you want them to respond to different things.
- Lower on the ladder, you want them to engage with the “stickiest,” most high-value things you have to offer (Your data can tell you what the high-value things are, which will be the topic for our next article.) For example, volunteering, free webinars and resources, along with member benefits including insurance.
- Higher up the ladder, you do not need to drive more engagement; you want to appreciate them and keep them excited. Part of your strategy should be a concerted effort to recognize them and give them special opportunities.
This approach allows you to concentrate your resources where they will do the most good and engage the members methodically to increase loyalty.
Don't Ignore Non-Members Either
You can also extend this approach to non-members. People come to your events, subscribe to publications, and contribute to journals – yet they aren’t members yet. More often than not, these non-member “constituents” make up a larger group than members.
For example, you can look at non-members who attended your event and infer their interests from what they did there or how they are similar to members whose interests you know. Once you have that information, your segmentation strategy can be to send more of those resources via email with a call to action aimed at turning them into members.
Thinking about non-member interactions as rungs on the ladder gives you a pathway to walk them up to a membership.
Member Segmentation In Action
You do not have to choose between these approaches. Some of the most successful associations combine these segmentation strategies to attract new members and increase loyalty as effectively as possible. A winning acquisition and retention strategy allows interests to guide messaging and loyalty to inform offers.
It used to be that only the largest, data-savvy associations could achieve this kind of member segmentation. That is not true today. Better technology makes data analysis easier and less expensive every day, even in-house.
Could you be doing your member segmentation wrong? There is no reason not to start doing it right.
This article originally appeared in Sidecar as Is Your Member Segmentation Strategy Wrong?
Mission-driven Membership Growth: Strategies That Work
Reading Time: 3 minutes
How Can You Make Your Mission Drive Membership?
Associations are “mission first” in word and often in deed. Yet many lead less and less with their mission to revitalize their membership. Instead, enhancing member value and experience has been the guiding light for association growth. Rightly so. We often reduce the mission to believing that “what’s in it for me” is the only key to nonprofit marketing success in membership messaging. Guided by research, many organizations have sought to imitate for-profit marketers. They promote “features and benefits” and enticing offers that often disappoint expectations and don’t drive membership.
Some of the best-performing associations are doubling down on their missions. They know that personal alignment with the mission creates feelings of belonging and influence, which drive membership in ways that no transaction can. It builds increased relevance and growth. Your mission is the one competitive advantage to drive membership for which there is no for-profit alternative.
Millennials are skeptical, with a very high bar for trusting a brand. They demand authenticity, consistency, and shared values. They want opportunities to participate. Brands that meet these requirements get rewarded with emotionally invested, long-term customers. Aspects of this mindset cross generations. A recent survey found that:
- 78% of people want companies to address social justice issues
- 87% of consumers would be willing to buy a product or service based on a company’s advocacy for a social issue
- 76% said they would decline to do business with a company if it supported issues that conflicted with their beliefs. (2)
Your association can drive membership by recognizing the millennial mindset and adopting it in your marketing strategy.
Appeal to Self-Directed Consumers
It’s never been faster or easier to research products and brands before buying. Comparison shopping extends beyond price and reviews. It now includes corporate practices on a host of social issues. There are even apps developed to help consumers do exactly that. Good on You rates fashion brands’ impact on people, animals, and the environment. Good Guide scores over 200,000 products on health, environment, and social justice. The power to buy based on beliefs is at consumers’ fingertips. [3]
Self-direction also extends to charitable giving. In response to the 2016 flooding in Louisiana, GoFundMe users raised more than $11M through more than 6,000 flood-related campaigns. The Salvation Army only raised $4M, in contrast. These micro-campaigns were about individuals and families with compelling, relatable stories. They dovetail perfectly with the Millennial mindset.
Market your mission, then act on it. Doing so will prove to the self-directed consumers of today that your association is serious about their beliefs.
Leverage Technology to Drive Membership
Technology makes it possible to research purchases and choose causes with great specificity. It also allows consumers to shift allegiances immediately. Providing a consistently positive brand experience has never been more critical. The growing adoption of voice assistants forces businesses and nonprofits alike to figure out yet another way to connect. Google awarded $25M to a proposal to use AI to tackle some of the world’s most significant social, humanitarian, and environmental challenges. With moves like this, we can only expect the rate of change to increase.[4]
Connecting with members through the channels they use most will allow your association to highlight your mission and encourage members to be an active part of it.
Technology makes it possible to research purchases and choose causes with great specificity. It also allows consumers to shift allegiances immediately. Providing a consistently positive brand experience has never been more critical. The growing adoption of voice assistants forces businesses and nonprofits alike to figure out yet another way to connect. Google awarded $25M to a proposal to use AI to tackle some of the world’s most significant social, humanitarian, and environmental challenges. With moves like this, we can only expect the rate of change to increase.[4]
Connecting with members through the channels they use most will allow your association to highlight your mission and encourage members to be an active part of it.
Your mission — to advance a field, protect your people, and make the world better – is your most powerful platform to connect with members. It should be an emotional rallying point that inspires action and invites belonging. The best way to do that is to attune to the Millennial mindset. By highlighting real people and their stories, you put a human face on how you serve them. That lets members see themselves in your picture.
To learn more about how to drive membership, see our complete research report, Sailing Through the Headwinds: Strategies for Association Growth
[1] Komornicki, Sophie. “Cone Communications CSR Study.”
[2] Curtin, Melanie. “45 Percent of Millennials Expect This From Brands (It Can Also Help Grow Your Business).”
[3] Lessler, Faye. “5 Apps and Online Tools for Conscious Shopping.”
[4] Gershgorn, Dave. “Google Is Giving $25 Million to People Who Want to Use AI for Good.”
From Mediocre to Memorable: Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Brand with These 3 Steps
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Think Fast: What is Your Nonprofit Brand Strategy?
It is not just a mission or vision. A nonprofit brand strategy is how your organization shows up in the world, and how you want existing and potential members to see and feel about you. It is a promise about who you will be to them, and a promise they expect you to fulfill.
Far more than a logo or tagline, a great brand strategy is a compass by which you navigate your future.
Our research has shown that most organizations never think about their brand promise, but high-performing organizations are invested in their brand strategy and intentionally orient to it in every big decision they make.
Our most recent research report found that 4 out of 5 organizations that came through 2020 the strongest did so by explicitly leaning into their brand promise as the No. 1 yardstick of what they would and would not do.
So, how can you create your own nonprofit brand strategy?
Step 1: Build a Pyramid
When building your brand strategy from the ground up, think about it taking the shape of a pyramid, with a line drawn in the middle from top to bottom.
On one side of the pyramid, you have the rational aspects — the “thinking” reasons a member would join. That is, your value exchange of benefits. Most organizations stop there with a list of what members get for their dues; that’s important, but it is only half of your brand story.
On the other side of the pyramid, you have the emotional aspects of your strategy — the “feeling” reasons members are drawn to you and want to belong. These are harder to think about but they are actually the first reasons members are drawn to you. It is why they even consider the benefits you offer. People want to belong, to connect, to have a sense of identity, to feel influential. How does your organization feel for potential members? How does it feel to belong?
The way the rational and emotional converge at the peak of the pyramid is your brand promise. It should boil down to one clear, compelling umbrella statement that ties everything you do together.
For example, Subaru tells us that “Love is what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” Everything they say and do shows they don’t only care about making you love your Subaru, they care about supporting you in loving your family and community, as well. Subaru owners know that and they feel that. As a result, Subaru has some of the most loyal customers in the world.
Great association brands have that power, too.
Step 2: Show, Don't Tell
Think about your brand promise and ask yourself, why should members believe you?
What do you do every day that “pays off” on that promise? Our research shows that for more than 80% of associations, the overwhelming majority of members don’t really know what the organization does. But when they do learn about it, their feelings are far more positive and they are much more likely to belong.
Think about your “proof points” – strong, simple examples of how you deliver on your promise to your members. The most powerful proof you have is the great work you do. Most organizations underuse it. Tell stories about how you make a difference. Don’t just tell them who you are, show them.
Let’s go back to our Subaru example. Subaru shares not just their safety awards but stories of how their cars have protected real people. They show you examples of people doing what they love because their Subaru made it possible. They show you that love really does make a Subaru a Subaru.
Highlighting your proof points makes your brand tangible and relatable. It helps your members “get” you and makes them feel drawn to know more.
Step 3: Live It
How do you put your promise and your proof points to work?
Sure, you show it on your website but it goes much further than that. Your brand is not just about how you talk. It is about the things you choose to do. A great brand lives its strategy. Their people feel it and believe it and put it to work every day as they serve their members. This becomes crystal clear in times of crisis when tough choices must be made. The strongest organizations ask themselves out loud “What is the best way to keep our brand promise?”
Before the crisis, the American Medical Association rebuilt their nonprofit brand strategy around the promise to be: “The Physician’s Powerful Ally in Health Care.” They have 20 clear and compelling proof points of how they do that in their work fighting the opioid crisis, reducing hypertension, advocating for physician confidentiality and fair reimbursements, and much more. They make sure physicians hear them and give them reasons every day to believe them. Their renewed brand focus has led to a massive shift in physicians’ perceptions of AMA — and their strongest member growth ever.
The power of a strong nonprofit brand strategy is just one of the success lessons in our most recent research. You can read more about nonprofit brand strategy and other lessons in our full report.
This article originally appeared Sidecar as 3 Steps to a Great Nonprofit Brand Strategy
