In the world of associations, some universes, or pools of membership prospects, are easier to quantify. A medical association, for example, has a clearly defined set of professionals that it hopes to recruit. It’s every association’s goal to achieve as close to 100% market share as possible – in other words, compelling every professional in your universe to join your organization. The ability to appeal to every professional is not only a mark of leadership and prestige, but it also translates into more revenue as that penetration rate increases. But how do you separate your low-hanging fruit from your membership challenges? With a limited budget, is it worth it to pursue certain prospects if you’re not confident in the returns?
Within every collection of non-members, you are bound to have former members, prospects who have had contact with your organization and other professionals who represent “the rest” of your universe. While the middle group represents a custom-made membership opportunity, opinions vary on the first and last groups. On one hand, former members had been a part of the “family,” but chose to leave for some (often unknown) reason, leaving the question of whether it’s worth it to try to change their mind. On the other hand, never members represent that untapped membership reservoir, but information about these prospects can be limited.
Student conversion – few topics are as central to membership professionals these days. For years, we have all been seeking more effective ways to get students to pay attention, join, engage and generally love our organizations. We work with dozens of associations who represent hundreds of thousands of student members, and all are challenged in the conversion area. The highest rates we see are in the 30-40% range. Recently we’ve begun digging deeper on some of these issues and what we are finding is a little scary. For example, at one organization, an audit of a year’s worth of outbound e-mail found that over 5,000 students received 20+ promotional e-mail messages for products and services that students are not in a position to buy – conferences, seminars, publications, etc. We also found that students were 3X more likely to unsubscribe from the association’s list within the first four messages. The upshot? These students are savvy enough to know immediately that they’re being “spammed” so they get out quickly. It’s no surprise. In our research with students, we find that their needs and expectations of their professional organizations are pretty clear – help me connect to other people, get a job and give me (cheap or free) access to information that will help me do it better. However, associations are hard pressed to deliver the goods. Continuous e-mail promotion of products and services that have no relevance is a sure fire way to tell them that the association is really NOT the place for them. Personally, I think that the erosion of our brands, particularly with this younger set, is one of the biggest threats we face as associations. There is no more potent brand-eroder than spam. Will we wean ourselves from the narcotic of e-mail, or simply continue to blast out irrelevant messages into the ether? It sure will be an interesting experiment to watch.
