How can membership associations and member organisations get ROI and value from online communities?
This article was originally written by me and published on Guild’s blog. I have adapted it slightly.
Find the original article here
A common question for membership organisations is: "What is community, and why should I invest in it?"
Here are 12 ways member organisations can create value and ROI from community:
Member acquisition and member growth
Member retention and loyalty
Improved member insights
Member networking
Supporting and diversifying revenue/income streams
Adding value to your events program
Supporting special interest, regional groups or different member tiers
Supporting Continuing Professional Development and your training programs
Creating sponsor or partner value
Cutting through noise and information overload
GDPR compliance and data privacy assurance for your members
Define and develop your member benefit offering
What's the ROI (Return on Investment) of community for member organisations, associations, institutes, unions, guilds and other professional bodies?
Membership organisations are lucky. They naturally have communities. But in my experience, many associations, institutes and professional bodies do not always ‘do’ community well or place community at the heart of their membership proposition.
Even fewer are measuring the value and Return on Investment (ROI) that they get from communities/online communities.
If you are a member organisation, these are some of the ways you can generate value and ROI from community:
1. Member acquisition/member growth
Associations, unions, institutes and other member organisations rely on recurring income via paid subscriptions. For many, member acquisition and growth are required to create a secure financial footing.
New members are also important to a membership organisation’s continued relevancy and survival.
All membership organisations require a stream of new joiners – they bring energy, new perspectives and new skills. They also replace members who have come to the natural end of the membership lifecycle - perhaps retiring or changing careers.
Communities can help with acquisition and serve as a helpful window into what a paying member can expect from joining a membership organisation – a well tested ‘try before you buy’ tactic.
If your community is open to non-members, sharing links and previews of firewalled content can increase their interest in joining. 'Social proof' in the form of conversations is an incentive to invest in membership.
A great example of a membership organisation using community to highlight resources, guides, events and thought leadership to prospective members is the PRCA. This ‘membership shop window’ approach complements a number of other member-only specialist communities.
Membership associations who are struggling with member churn and who need to attract new members can find that public or discoverable groups, offering trial periods for membership, can support their member acquisition strategy.
2. Member retention and loyalty
Member retention is a goal for most membership organisations.
Securing recurring revenue and ensuring the most talented members continue to engage, connect and amplify content and messaging is the lifeblood of professional membership bodies, institutes, associations, unions etc.
Accessing a year-round, always-available, digital community space for connecting and networking with other members outside of events and meetups is a key driver of member loyalty/retention.
Loss aversion is a powerful motivator.
Many of us will want to avoid losing access to a valuable peer community if we don’t renew.
Lisa Collins, former Head of Membership Engagement at the IABM and advisor to membership organisations and associations, explains:
“For membership organisations, virtual communities are the 'glue' that binds members together outside of events and meet-ups.
The true power of these online communities is that members can connect and collaborate in their own time and reach out to other members when they need support, advice or a sounding board from peers.
Member organisations can fall into the trap of thinking that it’s all about the content they provide and not the context or the safe space they provide for members to connect and support each other.
Put community at the heart of your member retention strategy, and you’ll see an enormous impact on member perception of your value to them.”
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the National Education Union (NEU) shared similar views at the Guild Community Summit 2022.
Mike Joslin, NEU's Lead Marketing Officer stated that community has had a hugely positive impact on member sentiment, with 75% of members finding their REN: Remote Education Community “extremely helpful.”
3. Improved member insights
All businesses have an ever-increasing need to capture valuable, actionable insights about customers to shape decisions about their brands, products, campaigns, and services.
And it's no different for membership organisations.
Consider the massive amount of data that social media platforms collect - but don’t share.
Smart brands and businesses create online communities not only to communicate with their prospects and customers, but to capture rich insights about their challenges, pain points, and successes. Community conversations can also help clarify the topics that create the most discussion and engagement. They can also show how sentiment changes over time.
This insight data is also available to member organisations who create communities. This is 'zero-party data' and 'first-party data' that is going to be increasingly valuable when layered with other sources of member data.
Mike Joslin is Lead Marketing Officer at the National Education Union, one of the largest member organisations in the UK with over 460,000 members. At the Guild Community Summit, he showed how the NEU collates member insights from multiple data sources, including polls, surveys, Zoom, social media and its own private member communities.
This data is used to ensure that the NEU’s campaigns and messaging are micro-targeted engagement campaigns and messages to members who are most likely to be interested, and most likely to act.
The NEU is focused on ensuring everything it does is GDPR-compliant to fully respect the privacy and data security of its members.
4. Member networking
Most membership associations want to help their members network outside of the events, meetings, training and other gatherings that they organise.
One of the biggest benefits of membership as a member is being able to meet peers and network with others.
Virtual community platforms can provide your members with safe spaces to connect, network, chat, message, collaborate and do great things together all year round.
For example, The Marketing Society's Coffeehouse community on Guild is a member-only benefit where members can "meet fellow marketers from around the world, exchange ideas and expertise."
5. Supporting and diversifying revenue/income streams
Building the opportunity to join a community as an additional layer of member benefits could be a way to diversify income streams.
Community can also become a business model in itself. This is the model for many newer commercial and quasi-commercial member organisations.
Agency Hackers is an example of a membership organisation for the digital age.
They attract leaders of independent agencies in advertising, creative, e-commerce, digital to their high-quality, thoughtful peer community. Today it has nearly 900 independent agency leaders engaging in its active member community on Guild.
Community is a ‘sticky’ value-add to any subscription model.
Many membership associations communities push and highlight revenue-generating products such as training, courses or events. Fewer associations tier membership and support that tiering with private sub communities.
6. Adding value to your events program
Events are an important part of any membership organisation’s model, whether they are in-person, virtual or hybrid.
How many times have you hosted or attended events or awards when you wish you could continue the energising discussions prompted by brilliant speakers, roundtables, workshops or in the queue for coffee?
A digital community provides a natural space for your members to continue the conversations, collaboration and networking long after the event.
Your communities should also support the promotion, creation and curation of events throughout the year. Community discussions can highlight topics that are gaining traction, hidden expertise, potential speakers and much, much more.
A event App that facilitates member networking during an event isn’t neccessarily a ‘community’. In fact, usually these event apps tend to provide very short term solutions and they follow the ‘Event Communications Peak’ leaving all opportunities to extend networking and engagement when your member deletes them from their phone.
If you want increased member engagement before, during and after your flagship events, then a member community and sub communities could be the solution.
7. Supporting special interest, regional groups or different member tiers
Most mid-sized to large membership organisations will have subgroups, regional groups, member tiers, working groups, councils, chapters or special interest groups.
Creating a single, large community is a great approach for many, but creating smaller, more focused groups and communities for members with shared identities, interests and goals can be very powerful.
A community platform that is flexible enough for you to develop multiple groupings, channels or tags is important for many membership organisations.
Ensure that you have governance and oversight of these and don’t allow WhatsApp ‘whack a mole’ to happen in your organisation, where groups pop up without permission and with zero governance.
8. Supporting Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and your training programs
Many membership associations provide training, courses and all forms of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to support their member base and to generate revenue.
Communities can play an important part in promoting training and events.
But member organisations should also put community at the heart of their learning programs.
For example, longer courses and trainings can have their own cohort communities or even alumni communities. These are powerful ways to help delegates learn together, support one another and gain greater professional value outside of the classroom or learning environment.
Socially Mobile is a PR school set up by two former Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) presidents, Stephen and Sarah Waddington. The cohort-based learning programme and community supporting is designed to create a more diverse set of PR industry leaders.
Every cohort has its own learning and peer support community. After graduation, the students are invited to the Socially Mobile alumni community – a powerful, growing network of new, diverse PR and communications leaders.
Leanne Hughes, Communications Lead, NHS and Socially Mobile graduate explains the value to her and other graduates of a learning and alumni community:
“it’s a positive safe space to connect with the cohort and build up a bit of solidarity and support. It's good to have a platform away from normal social media platforms to share information in confidence with each other."
9. Creating sponsor or partner value
Many membership organisations attract sponsors in the form of technology companies, professional services and other partners who wish to target their member base as potential customers.
Communities offer multiple benefits for your sponsors or partners. You can invite them in to demonstrate authority on a topic. Presence in a community, in the form of perhaps a video livestream event or an Ask Me Anything (AMA) helps build awareness with a highly-qualified target market.
In some membership association communities, carefully selected sponsors or partners can showcase their expertise and credibility year-round. And a community is an ideal channel to cross-promote content, events, etc., while providing member value.
In fact, thoughtful, tailored sponsor partnerships can add value for both the community members and the sponsor or partner brand.
10. Cutting through noise and information overload
There are only so many events we can attend. Only so many reports, catch-up videos, and social media posts that we can learn from. There's no shortage of competition for audience attention and social media is a space that is especially 'noisy'.
A respected marketer described LinkedIn recently to me as a "bin fire. It’s full of ads, salespeople and people sharing personal things that probably shouldn't be connected to where they work".
They went on to say that their LinkedIn Company Page had limited reach and the only reason they personally use it is for recruitment.
LinkedIn today is a space where it is increasingly hard to appear in a users feed without resorting to algorithm-beating tactics that rarely deliver the right professional message to your members and prospective members.
Go ahead. Take a look at your own reach and engagement numbers on your membership organisations' social media accounts. If you’re reaching more than 5% of your total audience with your posts, then you are doing exceptionally well!
Important messages simply aren't reaching their intended audiences on LinkedIn and Twitter for most membership associations.
Pick any membership body, say The Association of Change Management Professionals.
Let's take a look at what engagement rates look like on one of their typical posts on their LinkedIn Company Page.
An example of how Membership Associations can struggle to reach audiences using algortihmic social media platforms like LinkedIn. This post has an engagement rate of 0.04%
With almost 32,000 followers, you'd expect a higher engagement rate than 15 people liking. commenting on and sharing a post - that's a 0.04% engagement rate.
The same post on their Facebook Page and on Twitter highlights that the social media posts and tweets simply aren't reaching their members, prospects and other stakeholders following them.
I don’t know whether this association needs to advertise to reach members and prospective members, but many organisations that I speak to have to spend on advertising on LinkedIn and other social platforms to reach the audiences that they want to reach.
Community on private platforms can help cut through social noise, mitigate these ad costs and ensure that important messages and content get seen.
Communities are ad-free, salesperson-free, algorithm-free.
Your members are not bombarded with competing information. They can take time to reflect, discuss, forage, explore, read, and understand what you’re sharing in your communities.
11. GDPR compliance and data privacy assurance for your members
Many member organisations are unaware of the potential legal and data privacy issues when using consumer messaging apps such as WhatsApp for their member groups/communities.
Choosing a community platform that is GDPR compliant and has a respectful approach to data will show your members that you care about their right to data privacy.
And if members trust you to do right by their data, then they are more likely to engage, connect, network and share - which in turn drives insights, perception of member value and loyalty.
12. Define and develop your benefits offering
Corporates use customer communities to help shape their R&D and product development. Membership organisations can use community intelligence to refine membership benefits that attract new members, and help with member retention.
Lisa Collins, former Head of Membership Engagement at the IABM and advisor to membership organisations and associations says: "I believe that the use of communities can help member organisations define and develop their own benefits offering to members.
Listening to your community and getting direct feedback from members on their pain points means you can develop your offering accordingly."
How can member organisations resource communities?
Some member organisations will extend the role of community manager to those already managing social media channels - usually colleagues working in comms, marketing or member engagement teams. Some use consultants and agencies.
Many work with member volunteers with specific roles, skills and interests to host and manage special interest groups, regional groups or sectoral groups. It is important to ensure that volunteers have guidelines, training and that someone in your membership association is responsible for the ongoing relationship with them.
Stephen Pobjoy at the CIPD explained at the Guild Community Summit in 2022 how they work with a combination of CIPD staff, member volunteers and partners such as the NHS and the Civil Service:
"All of the groups are run slightly differently. You can't have a 'sausage factory' approach. When we are rolling these groups out, we are very careful to think what their customer needs are and what's appropriate."
A community manager needs credibility and expertise. But they also need to have people skills, organisation, empathy and strategy.
Like social media management, you can’t expect a junior member of staff to make your community a success. Investing in dedicated community staff or training - my training and coaching services for example, can pay off.
Funding for a community frequently comes from the marketing, member engagement or communications/PR budget. In membership associations, dedicated community roles or teams are becoming increasingly common.
What is an online or virtual community and what does it mean for member organisations?
An online community (also known as a virtual community, internet community or digital community) is where people come together digitally to interact, share knowledge and build relationships.
Virtual communities offer members a safe place to discuss common challenges, collaborate, network, find answers and share stories.
A private virtual community - unlike social media with its algorithms - gives members a platform for an equal share of voice.
Online communities can be broadly classified into 5 C categories or pillars and 1 C category or pillar.
I’ve classified them as the 5 Ps of Community (Communities of Practice, Play, Product, Place, Purpose) and 1 C is a Community of Circumstance.
Most membership organisation communities naturally fall under 'Communities of Practice' - professional communities usually restricted by sector/industry/goal.
Communities can be members-only, e.g. The Marketing Society's Coffeehouse.
Building communities on community platforms like Guild helps member organisations to group members together, and engage and network with experts and peers. Belonging to a member community continually highlights the benefits of being a paid-up member.
Many membership organisations develop sub-communities around special interests, (e.g. inclusivity, sustainability), roles or career stages (e.g. 30 under 30) or country/region/chapters, (e.g. US - Northeast, UK - West Midlands) etc.
Communities can be created to drive member acquisition by sharing thought leadership, highlighting the calibre of members and the value of 'belonging' and networking with those members.
Talk to me if you are interested in creating communities for your membership organisation. I can also help if your communities are not delivering value to you or your members.
Further reading
I’m creating a community glossary and will be explaining some key concepts in community strategy, community building and community management.
Here are some connected articles that you may find helpful:
What is Community Everywhere / what are Community Ecosystems?
What is Community Market Fit?
What is Community Led Growth - is it the same as Community Based Marketing (CBM)?
What is Minimal Viable Community (MVC)?
What are rituals in community building and why are they so important?
What is Broken Windows Theory and does it apply to Community Management?
What is Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD)?
Book a Free Consultation
Are you a membership organisation or subscription business who needs help or support with your community strategy/community building? I’m ready and waiting to hear from you. Book an introductory call to speak to me about your challenges and questions you might have.
Photo by Paola Franco
