Novice membership managers tend to gauge success by looking at overall member participation levels. While this does provide some insight, it’s rarely the best method. Instead, it’s much more helpful to measure the actual engagement of your membership base. Having an AMS that allows you to capture and report on these metrics is invaluable, so choose an AMS like Impexium’s that includes this functionality.
When trying to determine overall member participation, you should focus on studying membership engagement instead of individual activities and contributions. Not only does this provide a more accurate picture, but it also gives you further insight into the relationships of your most engaged members.
Although it’s difficult to measure member engagement, and different companies use various strategies, several approaches are common.
Tracking activities that your constituents participate in is a good way to boost future member engagement. Offer them a fulfilling experience as a member of your association based on a data-driven approach.
These can include:
To improve your results, start tracking the number of interactions each member has with your staff. Pay extra attention to interactions specifically initiated by the member, as this can give you an idea of what they’re most interested in and how to get them more involved.
Regardless of the method you choose to track membership activity, the following are important metrics to focus on.
Churn rate. This metric lets you know the rate at which you are currently losing members on a monthly basis. While it should be your goal to get this number as low as possible, anything up to 10% is still considered a normal churn rate. At the end of your fiscal year, check your churn rate for the entire year and compare it to the previous year.
Growth rate. In contrast, the growth rate indicates how much your membership is growing on a monthly basis. This is helpful when setting up your association for future success. You can look at a number of different metrics to determine your growth rate to get the fullest picture of your membership possible:
Segmenting your members into different groups helps you understand the most common denominator amongst your members and can inform your recruiting processes and decisions going forward. Collect metrics for the following segments and see if it offers any insight into what your association does well and where it needs to improve on:
Don’t forget to follow up your online membership tracking activities with offline measures, too. It’s easy to do – with so much focus on the internet, offline strategies are sometimes neglected. However, there’s still a lot of value in the traditional channels.
Moreover, some of your members may not be active online at all. While rare, it’s still common in some social circles – particularly among older generations. If this is the case, offline tracking might be your only recourse.
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