The Future of the AMS Should Include More Member Engagement Features
We haven’t exactly hit the age of “Avatar”, “The Matrix” or “Mad Max,” but the capabilities of technology have profoundly advanced (think virtual reality). Some of the most futuristic advancements have occurred within network structuring and business administration, but let’s focus on one small area of those advancements: member engagement metrics.
One of the most important topics in modern non-profit administration and association management is member engagement.
Measuring member engagement, not just tracking it, is essential to building a loyal membership base, maintaining a brand, building event attendance and many other important aspects of a member-based organization. Elements to tracking membership might include keeping up with event attendance, the number of member portal log-ins, email clicks and participation in committee or discussion board posts. Measurement of that engagement goes a step further- using the data from tracking in order to populate a scoring system to measure those activities.
Member engagement has been identified as the metric that most affects all other aspects of a member-based organization.
Marketers are beginning to recognize that proper member engagement occurs as a constant, not as an event. Making member engagement a priority improves membership retention, membership renewals and repeat purchases.
Membership organizations are also starting to understand that member engagement is driven by intangible other elements that have already become a priority in the industry. These drivers include trust, convenience, quality, price and likeability. With this in mind, it is only natural to purchase software that can track and analyze the metric that involves all other relevant metrics.
Member engagement analytics are also vastly underused.
Some member organizations have trouble determining how many members they lost year over year and the reasons why. Those associations that employ quantitative analytics to their members will have the advantage, and in return will gain a holistic view of data and member engagement across many activities.
Still, others have no clue as to why their attendance drops for events. Some associations overlook the obvious insights, and others simply do not have the manpower to track the statistics. The right tools, properly armed with relevant features, could change all of this in the very near future. By implementing cutting edge tools and software to ultimately boost member engagement, the ultimate payoff exists in being able to actually measure it.