 Good afternoon and thank you for joining today's webinar, The Art of Membership, How to Create and Cement Lifelong Relationships. My name is Iza Hakik. I am an employee of RedBat Confluencing and your facilitator for today's session. Today's webinar is presented by Sheree Jacobs, CAE, who is the president and CEO at Avenue M Group, a full service marketing agency. Sheree has nearly 20 years of experience in research, marketing, strategy and branding projects. Now I will pass it on to her. How are you today, Sheree? Very good. Thank you very much. Well, I'm very excited to be here today and to share with you some of the insights that I have learned over the years. But really it's a little bit more recent, the information I'll be sharing. I have conducted hundreds of surveys with members, with individuals and with companies. I have interviewed many CEOs and membership directors and others who work in the association industry. And then even outside of the industry to help hold together as much data as I can to understand how to attract, retain and cement member loyalty. Now I will give you an opportunity to, you can ask questions at any time during this. So I actually encourage you that when a question comes up, to type in your question. And I will pause throughout the presentation so that you don't have to wait all the way until the end to have it answered. So with that, why don't we get started? So the first story I want to start with is, it's a story about a hockey player that played in the United States. He played for the National Hockey League and he was pretty famous that I suspect that you may have heard of him. His name was Wayne Gretzky. And what a lot of people don't realize about this, this unbelievable hockey player was that when he was first drafted in 1979, the critic said, this guy isn't going to last. He's too small, he doesn't have the right size, he's not fast enough, he's not going to make it. And interestingly enough, every year his team would run tests. And they would test every single player for their speed, for their stamina, for their endurance, for their vision. And he would come in last. And so you may wonder how does this individual who comes in last on all of these tests, who the critics say he's too small and he's not fast enough to play in the National Hockey League, how did he break nearly every record in the league and in hockey? And it was because he would look not just to where the puck was, but to where the puck was going to be. And in being able to do this and being able to have this foresight, this vision of not just where things are happening today, but where things might be in the future and then keep an eye on his goal, which was scoring the goal, getting the puck into the goal, he was able to score more goals and have more assists than any other hockey player. And in sports, success on the field isn't the result of talent or strength alone, rather it comes from being able to pick up on the visual cues and anticipate what's going to happen next. So when I started doing this book and it was interviewing different groups, I noticed there were some trends. So this one state medical association, they were able to have double digit membership growth when the other state medical associations weren't having the same success. They were in the exact same industry, in the same field. And it wasn't just in that area. I looked at a large global organization that works in the industry of IT, and this organization also grew from 11,000 members to more than 50,000 members worldwide. So why were these two groups able to grow and have such unbelievable success while some of their counterparts weren't? And what I discovered was that they rarely looked to what was going on today and tried to address it. Rather, they would look at a couple things. They would look at what were trends going on in the marketplace. They would look at what were the problems that people in their industries were facing and what solutions out there did they provide people with what they needed. And they found from this type of investigation is that the current membership structure that they had in place was completely out of date, that in healthcare, actually in the United States, it used to be that a doctor would graduate his medical school and his residency and join a small practice. And now the majority of them are actually going and working as an employee for a hospital system. And it's not just that they're no longer making decisions about what membership they wanted or what dues they pay, but their needs had actually changed. And thinking through that and creating a structure and a new benefit system that had addressed it was how this one organization was able to succeed, and the other one as well, looking at trends. Now, before I worked in the association industry for a long time, but there's one company that I worked for, and I interviewed them, and it's called Share Payroll. And in the year 2000, they decided they were going to open up this new company and offer online payroll. And while it feels like we've all been online forever, back then nobody was doing financial transactions online. And there were all these other huge payroll companies out there. And there were so many reasons why somebody would advise against working at or starting up this kind of company. Yet there were problems that needed to be solved, and there weren't solutions for them. One was that people wanted control over the payroll. They wanted convenience for it. They wanted to save time, and they didn't want to pay as much. And so this new company was created, and it provided those solutions. And as a result, they actually became the largest online payroll company in the world. But after they became really big, they had to keep that, let's try new things. How do we stay a head attitude? And so I interviewed the CEO and said, Michael, what do you do so that you are always on the cutting edge? What is the secret? And Michael said, you know what? We encourage people to take risks, and we actually have a monetary reward for the best new mistakes. And he said, most cultures don't. Most associations say, what is that best new idea? What is that new thing I can do that is going to solve the problem that's going to help? And they just look for one idea. And he said, it's so hard to succeed in just one idea. But if you create a culture where you look at, you could try new things. You take risks, you go over what mistakes were made, some will work, some weren't. You reward that risk-taking, and you learn from it. He said, you will have breakthroughs, and you will see membership grow. And he said, you know what? Go to where the world is going and not to where it is today, which is classic Wayne Gretzky. So I wanted to do that as an introduction because I want to go over a variety of different things that are impacting associations today. And as I bring up these new ideas, I'm often asked by people, I hear, well, you know, I work in association, what kind of risk averse, or there'll be people who say, oh, we tried that, that didn't work. I'm not really sure about it. And the one thing I know is that while not every idea I will share with you will work, they do work for somebody. They have worked. They don't work every single time. But I also know that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. So let me move into some of the trends that I'm seeing out there that's impacting your ability to recruit, retain, and attract and cement member loyalty. And then I'll give you some solutions. So the first one is how we spend money. I noticed a few years ago that I had a number of memberships. I had some subscriptions to magazines, and I had a membership in my local botanic garden. And I believe in the botanic garden, and their mission is great. And every time I go there to this place, I'm highly satisfied with the experience. It also doesn't cost that much money. It's not that I can't afford membership. But as I drove up one June day, which is summer here in the United States, and I drove up to visit the garden, I realized my membership had expired. And I thought, you know, should I renew my membership, or should I just pay for parking? And it hit me. I'm like, wait a minute. I'm a membership person. I love it here. It's a great place. I believe in their mission, and it's not that expensive. So why would I just pay for parking? And as I thought about it, it was a clear answer. I just don't use it as much. You know, I've gotten busier, and I've had other distractions, and other things have come up, and there are more choices. And the reality is that, you know what, if you don't use a membership, even if it's affordable, the way we spend money today is we look at how much do we use it, and is it relevant to me today, personally to me. And it may have nothing to do with my satisfaction, with the cost of membership, with other things that may impact it. It's how relevant, or how much does it matter to me in my life today. And that's true with magazine subscriptions. You probably all know that. You probably, your subscription comes up and you're like, you know, but a lot of those magazines stack up on the coffee table, maybe I shouldn't renew it this year. And so it's a challenge that we're facing, because it's not that your membership dues are too high, or that you're not doing a good job, or your mission isn't good, it may be a personal usage. You know, are they using it? Another thing that's impacting our ability to succeed is that we have moved into what I call a sharing economy. And it used to be years ago that if you wanted information or education on a certain topic, you wanted access to experts or community of your peers, you had to join a professional society or association so that you could have that. And today not only are all these resources available from a lot of sources, but people are really sharing them with each other. We live in a very sharing economy. It's people are creating things and freely sharing it and they enjoy this. They get to have facts out of it. They feel like they become the expert. But again, that has created so many more resources out there that it becomes a challenge to, you know, hang out your head and say, hey, you know, we're the ones who are the experts. We have, you know, the top notch speakers on cutting edge topics and all the information you need, because some of that information is being shared by those experts outside of your association. So there is an association here in the U.S. who realized that if there is this sharing economy, if people want to share information and they want to embrace that and to get people engaged, they said, well, what can we do differently? So this is just a quick case study, but there's this nursing association. And they always put on webinars. They put on a webinar, you'd register, just like this one, and you would attend, you'd get your information, and then you'd leave and you'd go back to your job. And they realized that that really was inconsistent with where people were going in the future, what they wanted. And so instead, they created this, when they host webinars, they have a panel, they have a speaker and panel experts, they have the 60-minute webinar, but then they created this entire community on the topic. And they had threads, so discussions that they had created based on the presentation that was given in the webinar. They invited, at this case study show, 282 people to join the discussion after the webinar. And they found out that in addition to those one speaker and three experts, they now had 33% of the unique authors of people who contributed to those content, to those threads. It was the first time that they even posted in one of these online communities. And so they built this continuous forum where they took the webinar and the content and they said, let's continue it and build a community around it and bring in new authors and more content experts and more speakers to build more resources and share it with each other. And I think it's a great example of how an association could take the concept of a sharing economy and a product that they offer a service, which in this case was a webinar, and bring the two together and create a more robust experience for their members and add more value. Just some quick tips on it. They had one location to share tips and resources. They had a safe and secure network for asking questions so that people felt comfortable that they could ask questions and had the right environment and they had the experts there to answer it. They made sure it was member-only access to user-generated content and this lived on so that people could access it anytime, anywhere. It created so much value for the members. The outcome was that they experienced a 13% increase in renewals from 2012 to 2013. I interviewed the woman who had this webinar and I said, really, you can really tie that webinar to renewal increase. She said, you know what? We looked at all of our webinars and what we had done before and all the individuals who were allowing their membership to lapse and they tended to be people who had not become engaged. What we found is we created more engagement opportunities beyond in-person events through webinars, through content sharing and experts and access to their peers. On the bottom line, when we connected peers to each other and not just to our association, our association, we saw, we believe that's what contributed to the increase in renewals. So I'm going to take a quick second and see, Issa, is there any questions about what I just brought up that came in or should I keep going? Not yet, so please keep going. Okay, great. So the next thing I see that is really impacting organizations is people talk about it all the time. They talk about generations and I've had so many discussions with faith and chapter leaders, with local groups, national and international groups, and I've heard people say, well, they feel entitled and they don't join and I hear all these excuses and I actually think it's a little bit different. You know, what I see from this new generation that's entering the workforce is that there are five things that they want. They want to know that the association and the members of it will listen to me, teach me, mentor me, reward me, and acknowledge me. Now, it's kind of corny, but I always say, well, ME is the first two letters in membership. There's a huge opportunity here to engage these people. But you can't just do three of these or two of them. You have to let young professionals, new members of the workforce, know that not only are we going to teach you and mentor you, but we also want to listen to your ideas and we're going to reward you for participating and acknowledge the efforts you do. Now, I shared this idea with a group of some board members from a society and one of the gentlemen in the audience who is probably in his early 50s, he said, Carrie, these things mattered to me too. And what I told him was, well, they mattered to me, but when I joined associations about 20 years ago and I didn't get everything, I stayed anyways. I kind of put up with it. And what I found with this younger generation is that if they don't get this, they don't get this from your group, then they will leave. They will go somewhere else and they may create it themselves. So as you think about it, you look back at your everything that you offer, how you engage members, the marketing materials you have, the website, the content that you create, your committee structure, your volunteers, your products. Are you creating things and sending out messages that embrace all five of these? Do people know when they get them that they can become a part of your organization or attend a conference or volunteer and will all five of these things happen? Do you prove it? Do you show it? And if not, then you might need to go back and look at how you can make those changes if it's important to you to engage that generation. The next idea I think that's really impacting associations in a powerful way is that we live in a world of customized products. So most people have a smartphone. And most people, when they get the smartphone, they get to choose which apps they want to have on that smartphone. Can you imagine if you bought a smartphone and they said, these are the ones you get. You only get Angry Birds and, you know, Camera and, you know, Facebook and a few other things. And we would say, no, I don't think I'd like that very much. No, what we do is we get this platform and then we can choose what apps we want and if we don't want them after a while, we can get rid of them and we can add new ones. We get to customize it. But what I've found is that associations are not allowing their customers, their members, to customize membership. They say, here's your membership package. If you pay X amount of money, you will get these benefits. And there is no choice. There's no customization. Yet, most people don't want a lot of the benefits that are forgiven. They want a few things. So there may be a sense that there's less value for the cost. And I've run so many membership surveys, but we'll ask, does the value you receive, is it equal to less than or more than what you pay? And while there are high percentage that say it's equal to or the value I receive is more than what I pay, there's still sometimes 20, 30% to say, you know what, I'm paying too much. And what I've found is that we've fallen behind in creating more customized membership, more customized benefits programs. The next idea that's impacting associations is so amazing and important and been overlooked. Some people know it, but they haven't really placed a lot of thought into how they can incorporate it into how they recruit and retain members. So it's called the Zero Moment of Truth. And in 2011, Google Vice President Jim Lysinski described this new decision-making process that occurs a million times a day when people are exposed to marketing. And what happens is that they get some kind of marketing stimulus. They may get an email advertisement. They may see a banner ad or something on a social media site. They may get a direct mail campaign. And rather than responding to it, which used to happen, we used to send stuff out and people would respond if we did a really good job in our marketing copy or our offer, that's what used to happen. Now they see things and they want to know what other people think about them. And that is what's influencing their decision. So I think about it recently because I have this yellow lab that said so much that I can create a new dog almost every week with all the hair that I have from around my house. And as I get very frustrated with this and I keep buying vacuum cleaners, I find that I now have a basement cemetery of vacuum cleaners. So I get frustrated. I want to buy a vacuum cleaner, but three years ago when I first bought a vacuum cleaner, I would go on to consumer reports. I would try to find out what did the experts say? And I'd go to maybe the websites of different vacuum cleaners. Who sells the right one? But this time, this time around, I didn't do any of that. I didn't look at the experts. I didn't look at the manufacturers. I didn't compare the prices. I went to where the reviews were. I wanted to see what Amazon, what John Smith, who I don't even know, says about the vacuum cleaner. And that's how I made my decision. And I thought about that and thought, is that impacting associations? And does that impact how associations can sell membership, can sell education or products or services or even volunteer opportunities? And I believe it does. Even personally, this happened to me just three weeks ago. This book that I wrote, The Art of Membership, two individuals who I didn't even ask to do this, they went on to Amazon and wrote unbelievable reviews and long reviews, very in-depth about why this book is great and what you will get out of it. And someone I didn't know saw all those reviews. They were thinking about it and said, hmm, shall I buy this book for all of our chapter leaders? And after she read the review, she bought 300 copies of the book. And I thought, it really does impact everything. It can impact registration. It can impact membership. But going back to how you market your organization, how you recruit members, we've always used that testimonial kind of feels a little bit like it's been made up in someone's office. It doesn't feel real, the words you may use. I got the skills and tools I needed to do my job better. And that doesn't even sound real. So you have to think about how can we create what I call a feedback loop? How can we identify all of our target markets, what they're doing, our current users, what they are really saying about things? How they're using the benefits they're getting and following up with, well, why is that important? Why does that matter? And incorporating that, their comments into how we market our organizations, our products and our services. So what can you do? You have to understand that value is in the eye of the beholder. So we all know that one size fits all doesn't work yet. Most people say I don't really have the budget to create all these different marketing messages. And the truth is that you really do have to understand that what value is for one person may be completely different for another person. That not all members want the same thing. And even if they look identical on paper, you may want to interact with your organization in an entirely different way. I'm going to show you different types of membership, groups, segments that are different from your typical segments that you see. Now the first one that I think about are information seekers. And information seekers are people who may join just simply because they want to get information. They need an answer, they need a tool, they need solutions, there's something that they have. And they aren't there because they want to advance your mission. They aren't there because they want to get involved or they want to advance their career. They just are looking for information. And what's interesting is that you can find information seekers from a variety of different types of demographics. But you might know who those people are in your database. You may know those members who joined and have never gotten involved. They have never attended a meeting. They have never done anything yet. They join and they renew every year. And they have logged into your website. They have downloaded something. So those are the information seekers. What I'm going to share with you are, and I saw this question come up so I'm going to integrate it here, what I'm going to share with you is all these different categories of membership and then how you package it together. Just hold on as I go through each one. The second might be a lifelong learner. And a lifelong learner is somebody who is, someone probably like me, it's somebody who doesn't attend education because they need to earn certain credits. And they don't always attend educational conferences because they have an interest in a topic and they need a solution. They just love to learn. And again, your database probably tells you which ones of your members are these. They are the ones that might go to one meeting every single year or two or three meetings every year. They go to a lot of chapter meetings. They enjoy being around information and education and they learn just because they love to learn. Another group of members are the ones who are doing it just for professional development requirement. So in the United States, they may be wanting continuing legal education or CME, continuing medical education, or CPE, we have all these different words for it, but here we have, in order to have a licensure, to keep your license, you need to earn a certain amount of credits a year. And every association has members, individuals who will join because they need to obtain those credits and it's a convenient way to get it and the quality is there and they're fulfilling a requirement. And that's the primary reason to join. You also may have thought leaders, current and aspiring. So I have an image in here of two of our thought leaders from the American Society of Association Executives. And both of these individuals, you'll see it at every single event, ASAE event. The one on the right, the younger one, is someone who just won our Association Trends Award and a 40 under 40 award. Again, you see them, they are people who often volunteer for different leadership positions. They want to sit down committees. That is the value they get out of it. And if the organization that they belong to stops offering them these opportunities, if they don't allow them to be thought leaders and content leaders and provide their input, then their value in the organization will decrease. And for them, it's not necessarily about fulfilling an education requirement or searching that information. They are joining because they aspire, they want to be considered a thought leader in their field. You also have some, and it's a little bit different from thought leaders, are rising stars and networkers. They are looking at joining an organization because it's going to help them advance their career and continue to succeed in their career. And again, the demographics for this can be somebody who's very young or it could be somebody who has a lot more experience. But you have this type of audience segment as well. You also have social members. And social members are ones who, if you ask them why they belong and you have a whole list of reasons, one of the top reasons they just select or they know is because it's fun and enjoyable. And if you offer your social event to certain demographics only, you may be excluding all the individuals who want to be a part of your organization because it's fun. So here's an example. A friend of mine is a CEO of an association and another friend is actually a member of that group. Well, the friend who is the member, she received an email saying, come to this social event after work, happy hour, they'll be drinks and networking and socializing with other members. So she thought that'd be great. Now, this is somebody that a lot of people would want to meet. She's a lawyer, she's a rainmaker, she is well-connected, but she loves to socialize and she's in her mid-40s. Right before she was going to go to the event, she closed up her computer or she was just about to close it up, she looked back at the email and she realized that it was a YP or young professional event. And so she said, oh, all right, I guess I won't go. And so she packed up her stuff and she went home instead. And she told me that story it killed me because I'm like, the people who want to go to social events aren't always people who are in their 20s and maybe 30s. You can have people in their 40s or 50s or 60s who want to go and likewise, you can have people who are in their 20s or young professionals but not do it in a social event. They want to go to an education conference. And so, by thinking about membership categories that are based on interest and how people want to interact with your association rather than their title, their demographics, or the organizations that they work for, their work setting, or other things, then you're really creating a more customized membership package for them. And I'm going to continue on down and then give you an example. The other groups that I often see besides social are mission members. So these are ones who are not looking for the return on the investment. They aren't looking for if I spend this amount of dollars in membership, this is what I will get for it. They are simply people that believe in your mission and want to advance the field. I've done a lot of research and asked a certain different kinds of questions to determine if there are an average percentage, what percentage of many associations do they have of mission members that are in it solely for the mission. And it tends to be between 20 to 25% of association's members are mission members, meaning if they took out a lot of the benefits they would still belong. Now it's not the case for every group because there are clearly some groups that mostly what they do is mission or advocacy. But for a lot of groups that offer education, information, networking, leadership and other things, I typically find that it's only around 20 to 25% will fall into this category. Every group has mailbox members or uninvolved members. And that's okay. You don't actually have to do a lot for the uninvolved members. They may be perfectly happy and find value in paying the dues and getting access to the website and members only content and getting the publication that you send out. You also may have transactional members. Transactional ones who are just specifically saying, I need this information. I want this conference. I want something. What is the cost of member nonmember and they evaluate it. They will pay the member fee and join and then to get what they want and they're unlikely to renew because they may have gone and gotten what they wanted out of that. Those are the different types of membership categories that I've seen. And there's a group out there and I've seen a couple of groups that we've worked with that I've worked with that have said, okay, well, what can we do to allow more customized membership? And so what I'm going to do in the next slide, actually, this is just kind of saying if you don't want to have that revolving door of members coming in and out on demographics, but not benefits, then think about creating a membership structure that you pay what you want based on the benefits you want. So here's an example which is an association for design professionals. AIGA is here in the United States and they used to have categories of membership based on your credentials, based on if you are if you graduated from a degree program and they saw a dwindling of their membership and they knew that they had people that came in that wanted to interact with the organization in different ways. And so they created this structure and I know it may be harder to read all the different details and you can go to the website and pull it up. But hopefully you get the gist of this which is they have a membership category for $50 all the way up to $2,500 and the you can choose a very light membership something with this a few benefits or you can choose a very robust membership if you are looking for something that has a lot more benefits. By doing this by creating this new membership category they were able to expand their membership to be more inclusive and reach new audiences. That is why you would create this kind of structure and their members may select membership based on needs and interests rather than on demographics. Another model that I have seen is from a place called the Whitney Museum and what they do is you have a general membership that you pay to join the museum and this is just a screenshot but you can say do you want to be a social member? Do you want to be an insider member? Do you want to be a learning member? Do you want to be an advocacy member? They offer all these different things that doesn't matter your age or your demographics and they give you a description. I want to be a social member then you get two free cocktail receptions you get, invitations to special events they have all these different things for a social member. You also have the family membership with stroller days and they have the insider with behind the scenes tours and you add on or take off whatever types of memberships that you want to add to this. I took this model and I looked at a membership organization that was here in the States and I presented it to them. I said you've always offered out there that if you are this type of member people have to pay these dues and this is what they got for it. What if instead we created a base membership fee to belong and then we looked at the education membership and the social membership and the leadership membership and then we bundled different benefits based on those types and a lot of people to add as many types as they wanted and they love this model. It looked forward into the future into how people want to engage rather than saying this is what you should get. The organizations that I have seen that have moved to these models and there's only a few because this is very new but what they're finding is that they're having higher levels of engagement and greater satisfaction because people are getting able to customize and choose it. When you create your own membership you help ensure the value is equal to or exceeds the cost and members only pay for what they want or need, yet benefits are bundled based on interest rather than offering them just simply a la carte. Before I move on to the next, let me share with you the outcomes and then I'll open up for questions. What were the outcomes of these new models? The AIGA created a more participatory membership model and it doubled the number of chapters and increased the value at the local level by creating that new model of all those different benefits and you pay the price based on the kind of benefits. The Whitney Museum not only increased the membership but they got to know their members based on their interests and preferences so they're better able to target their messages based on how the kind of membership model they picked and they had higher attendance at events and they had higher levels of engagement. I think they're very interesting models. Is there any questions that I might have missed that are on the topic? Yes, there is one from Tanya. Do you have any examples of where you can offer customized membership packages without requiring more resources to service them? Yeah, that's a tough question. I don't know if you can create a new membership model without doing some kind of investment. As I think about it, I think that when organizations come to us and say we're interested in a new model, we don't just create models for them and then all that risk we open them up to all that risk that what if everybody went into the $50 model or what if everybody went into one type of model and they didn't add on different points of membership. To minimize that risk what we've done is we look at a membership survey to see what benefits people rank high, what they need, what their challenges are, what are the gaps and what they need and what they're not finding out there. And then the second is we will take their database, we'll take the data and we'll do some financial modeling where we'll try out different prices and make some assumptions. What X percent went into this group and X percent went into this group? What would the association need to do to break even and how much risk is there and how much money could they make if they were able to then attract 10%, 20% or 30% more members. That all takes resources, that does take time. So I think it's very difficult to break up a membership model and to offer it without investing any time or resources in it. What you could do is to create maybe a beta test or a small sample where you bring in a group of people and you ask them to customize it and you look at different prices and you see where they might come out and then try to extrapolate and think through, well, if we open this up to the broader membership would they behave like this smaller group? That might be another way to do it. But it's tough without investing resources. Another group that I mentioned at the very beginning is this healthcare IT group and they were one of the other groups that said, you know, where is the future going? What do we need to do? And they had a membership, I had said 11,000, but X had 17,000. Just in 2007 and today they have nearly 50,000 individual members and 570 corporate members. And they grew, HIMS grew because it created different categories of membership and offered different products and services that they couldn't obtain on their own. In this case they added some new benefits but I think that if you thought through different categories and just reorganized benefits potentially you could attract different audiences and you would have to look at really what your members want and need as well as what else is out there. So one of the things places to start well, okay, what do people want? What's the value there? And I kind of tell people that finding your value requires more than just doing a survey and saying, we offer these products how satisfied are you with those products? And it's similar to if you've invited somebody over for dinner it was 6.30 or 7.00 and they were hungry and you gave them lasagna and you said, how was the lasagna? And they said, it was good and you asked, are you satisfied? And they said yes. But maybe they weren't wanting the lasagna that night. Maybe they were craving pizza or a hamburger or steak or something. So asking if you are satisfied and interested with just what you're offering may not give you a true picture of what people actually value. You need to ask them, why did you join? Did you renew? And you may be doing that. But here's the other question. Why is that important? Why is it important that you get these things? That you join? What does it matter to you? What difference does it make at your organization? And then you also need to look at your benefits and just take a critical eye to them and list every single thing that you offer. And when I say list everything, don't just say we have educational programs but actually put the names of each conference each educational program, the publications that you offer, the volunteer groups. And then when you've listed all of them put down are they A, available to everyone, O, only available to members, Free to members and non-members pay or discounted to members. And when you just do this exercise you will get a better sense of what is the value that your organization currently offers. And then find out why. So when we do some surveys we will say not only, you know, why did you join but we put in some what we call psychographic questions and we'll say, we'll give them options. Are they joining because it's required? Are they joining to increase their marketability? Do they join because they find it fun and enjoyable? Do they join because they want to be recognized or do they join because they want to give back? And in the book The Art of Membership there's a huge list of questions that you may not be asking but it's getting a little bit deeper then. They're not joining just for the magazine but why do they want the magazine? They're not joining just for the education or just for leadership but why is it that they want it? That will help you build out those profiles and get a better sense of your membership. But one thing you need to keep in mind is that there are next best alternatives that exist in the marketplace. So an example of that I give is let's say you enjoy a good glass of wine and while a $100 bottle is very appealing it's very unlikely that when you go and order a glass of wine at a restaurant you're going to pay for the most expensive one because a low or medium price glass of wine is good enough. So if you take that analogy and you look at the solutions out there and the challenges they face they need education, they need information they need career assistance they need tools in their practice whatever it might be you may offer the very best but if somebody else offers something that is less money or easier to access or more convenient that's the next best alternative and it might be good enough and if it's good enough they will go there because I work with associations all the time with the top quality and we want to charge more because we know that ours is so much better and there are many people out there who say I'm joining because I need to fulfill this requirement but if I can get free education through this publisher, through this big event through other things those are next best alternatives and people may go put to them and you need to be aware of what those alternatives are you also have to think through ability to pay and willingness to pay so an example would be iTunes so willingness to pay with iTunes a song in iTunes here in the States might be everywhere is $1.29 to download a song and we can clearly well have the ability to pay $1.29 but your willingness to buy song after song it can be different for you than it may be for your husband or for your friend or for your roommate or whoever it might be or your colleague your willingness to spend money on things varies so people have different willingness to pay for things so we get a little bit into pricing here because also one of the things that's often overlooked in membership in retention is an engagement is granting different pricing strategies that go beyond what does it cost okay we'll just charge a little bit more or we'll charge what it costs until it will be breakeven and there is a philosophy that some people assign a certain value based on the perceived value if it's too low they may not perceive it to be as good now I know I just talked about next best alternatives that they may be things out there that might be lower in price but I also think there are times when you can charge more with people more value so here's an example a bread machine came out from a store here in the states called Umlin's No Mum but I know it's offered on Amazon as well in Australia and the retail suggested retail price is $380 remember that we always see that suggested retail price it didn't sell but when they came out with two bread machines one at $129 and one at $249 that comparison of two things oh I can get the bread machine but not spend as much what they found is about 75% of the people went for the lower price item people didn't buy it when there was just one item but they purchased it when there were two and I think about that with membership associations we offer them just one category of membership we offer education that's offered only with one price point and when you do that if they look at it they're not given enough choices so having that comparison of two things helps people make a decision also pick the format so the art of membership if they had the Kindle version only available for $24.95 and the print only for $34.95 there are what we found is that you have a high percentage of people who would say I'll pick the digital only we've seen an increase in sales for digital only but now if I changed it the Kindle only for $24.95 the print only for $34.95 or the Kindle and the print for $34.95 what we found is that we made a lot more money that people would move from that Kindle only version up to the Kindle and print version and spend more money even though it's the same thing the Harvard Business Review does this associations are starting to do this with their publications with their membership with their bundling packages they are adding so much more value at the higher class that people are actually moving into that category so this is a screenshot from the Harvard Business Review and they're very much like an association they have an organization they offer education they offer degrees they offer publications and content and what they do is they created two options but they drove people to the higher option so they know all the content is the same because they made the price differential so small $89 versus $99 plus you get the iPad version of this publication on there this even though it's all the same content they actually sell much more at $99 than $89 because they give people the option an association here in the states we had a conference coming up and the price to register for the conference they had the early bird price they had the regular fee but on top of that we also offered a premium seating so you can pay the regular fee and then we had a limited number limited availability for where you would get with that the premium seating you get reserve seats you get a little cocktail reception and you're going to meet some of the speakers some of the experts and this small association selling 30 I'm not sure if it was this course or the other course a limited number of seats and the people who paid the lower price were happy because they still could attend the conference and the people who got those limited seats, limited edition seats they were happy because they wanted more a different experience out of the conference other pricing tactics that you can do is you can offer VIP access for your meeting or fast pass or preferred pricing groups so here we have a Disney world they have these rides, these events that are so popular and you'd have to wait hours in line if you just stood in line or you can go and get a fast pass but what we're seeing now at conferences is if they have a very popular speaker or session or general session and people don't want to stress out am I going to get there in time is there going to be a seat for me in this conference call but I really want to see the session and I may not get there people are willing to spend a little extra to get that fast pass to those different sessions they'll pay a little extra to get VIP access to the content leaders and then you can even look at different groups, preferred groups like alumni, people who have attended the program in the past and this will encourage them to register to sign up I actually recommend ditching early bird pricing and instead of just having a one-time early bird pricing instead you can have let's say that your price for your conference is $650 for the early bird and $1,000 for the regular pricing you can increase the price every week with an email and tell them the price increases every week and incrementally move them up we did this with a group and we saw early registration soar because people started realizing the price was going up now some people cannot make the decision until later so that price incentive may or may not matter but there was a whole group of people that it created a sense of urgency to pay for it earlier rather than to wait too long with the early bird pricing we have six weeks they don't really have to respond until right into that last day I've also done that with the price increases by the number of seats that are sold as well both of those are some kind of urgency pricing bottom line is that you just want to give people something to compare so I'm just going to wrap up with a few other last thoughts one of the things that I see that really is helpful in getting members and getting prospects to join is to focus less on your organization and more on the problems that they have and then connect them to the solution my quick story with this picture is that I'm a marathon runner and I've run the Boston Marathon a couple of times but the first time right before I was going to run the Boston Marathon I got a terrible injury and I went to a physical therapist and rather than immediately just starting by selling by saying these are the things we should do for your knee with the injury she sat down with me and she said what's your problem what are your goals, what do you want to do and then let's figure out the solution and I told her I've got to run Boston it's in five weeks and I'm injured and so her plan for me was very different than if she had just said here are all the exercises and the stretches and what you should be doing for it so thinking about that thinking about solving problems and not just off-selling what you have consider this that people don't buy gym memberships to look better, get fit and lose weight they don't buy shampoo, they buy beautiful clean hair so what you want to do is you want to list what are the problems your members have what programs and products do you offer connect the dots between the start with the problems that they have, what you offer and what are the outcomes and when you can do those three things in your marketing, in your messaging it focuses on them you're making them the center of your marketing then all of a sudden they want to read what you're talking about and if you combine that with those pricing strategies that I shared and with the idea of a more customized pick what you want and what you need you will find that people will be more responsive to the marketing you have you also shouldn't sell everything sell just what matters so just do a few things really well identify what's unique and needed think about where you excel look for product extensions what that means is if you have a conference that's exceptional look for a way to take that conference and go beyond that look for content from that conference and engage people or recruit people by white papers or by content from that conference and just make sure that the quality is there now I know that a lot of people want some quick takeaways what can I do tomorrow to immediately increase membership what I did was called the VIP sure thing and with this program what we did is we looked at the current core member who had been a member for a long period of time in this case a long period was only like five to seven years for these different groups but we looked at someone who had stayed at the membership for more than three years and we looked at their characteristics and then we said who should be a member but isn't and we came up with a short list huge direct mail not a long list of a thousand people we had 200 people that we said these should be members then instead of offering them a free membership we actually enrolled them already as members into the organization we didn't just offer them a company membership we made them members we sent them a letter and we said you are now a member we really believe you should be a member your colleagues are members of this organization the membership will expire and you'll be asked to renew you can drop the membership or you can renew we had an 80% retention rate of those members who should be a member now it's a small group but it works when it is highly targeted and focused on prospects who should be a member and I have this target here because you can see with each ring you think of those are individuals who are as they get farther and farther away from the center they have fewer things in common with the current member bottom line is make the member the star of your message and people will connect with that and I know I really this was very long and I know I didn't get to a couple of questions so when I just open it up I have to see if there are one or two questions before we conclude yes, sure but before we do that I just want to let everyone know that I will be launching a satisfaction survey on the right hand side of your screen so please help us in gaining some feedback so we'll go on to the question from Paul how do you create such a membership in small groups of people for example 500 and still remain financially viable? that's a great question I mean to remain financially viable to look at it with a small group you absolutely have to do the financial modeling you have to say if I were to attract lower my price or increase my price or change whatever pricing you have you would have to look at is there enough people for me to bring in to be able to make it financially sound sometimes the answer is that there aren't enough people that your audience just simply isn't large enough for you to change the pricing and when that's the case but you need to add more value then you need to look at keeping the price the same that's what you have because you need to make it financially viable and you have to say well what can I add to it what are some additional benefits that I can create or bundle on to here or add on to it so it brings more value we get that question all the time and when I work with groups I tell them the audience needs to be large enough and the prospects need to be there and if it's not let's look at other graphs great now we do have one from Glenn what do you suggest for health basis organization that institutionally requires members to have specific medical needs to become a member this is a tough question and I've worked with a medical group here in the United States and they had in the bylaws this is a type of member that we can have as part of our organization and we couldn't move to any of these suggestions until the board made some changes so I was going to get the board to make some changes to the organization we started with what is their mission and to achieve their mission did they want to expand their audiences and they agreed they did the second step was for me to bring in case studies examples of other associations that have changed their model and then some data so we did a membership study so the combination of having the data some case studies we actually go back and change the bylaws outside of that I would have to personally sit down with you and look through the organization and say what can we do if we can't change the demographics how can we make add-ons or change something in the membership so that it doesn't conflict with the bylaws and what you have so I know the time is up I think it's 11 a.m. your time it's 6 p.m. right now we're back here in the States I do really appreciate all of your time today and I hope you all enjoyed the session great thanks Cherie and thanks all for joining today's webinar we hope you gained some valuable insights and found the technology easy and engaging we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar thank you