Grow Membership with an Online Community Solution
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Heather McNair, Vice President of Engagement Strategy at Higher Logic, the leading cloud-based community platform, and Kevin Ordonez, Owner and Founder at .orgCommunity, a digital communications and technology group serving associations, presented on Growing Membership with an Online Community Solution. The discussed how associations can use online communities to expand their member base and increase retention. They also covered case studies and examples of organizations that use communities to: - Drive engagement with an active and engaged online community - Create a rich knowledge base of member-generated content - Boost member participation and collaboration using pre-populated member data
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Grow Membership with an Online Community Solution
- 1. Grow Membership with an Online Community Solution Heather McNair, VP of Engagement Strategy Higher Logic Kevin Ordonez, Owner and Founder .OrgCommunity
- 3. Connect Through an online collaborative environment, gain new perspectives and engage with the most influential community of nonprofit executives. Learn Exceptional education and a host of relevant resources enlightens and engages the association management and nonprofit community, moving organizations forward. Lead Whether you’re a high-level headliner or someone seeking exposure, .orgCommunity provides many meaningful ways to share your ideas and best practices.
- 4. Education Series Brought to You By…
- 5. www.orgcommunity.com www.facebook.com/orgcommunity www.linkedin.com/company/-orgcommunity twitter.com/orgcommunity Got a Question? Join the Conversation Online…
- 6. About Higher Logic: What We Do • Member engagement • Grow your organization • Increase ROE “I want to tell AANAC how impressed I am with the LTC Network Digest on AANAConnect. I am learning something new every day. And, when I have questions of my own the answers are always helpful and prompt. I once posted a question and received a response in 7 minutes - you just can't get that kind of attention anywhere else.” Jan Davis, RN, CRNAC
- 7. Higher Logic solution Core Features • Discussion Groups • Resource Libraries • Profiles/Directories • Blogs • Wiki Glossary • Event Calendar • Automation rules • Mobile-friendly • Analytics Optional Modules • Content Manager • Microsites, Event Sites, Intranet • Mentor Match • Volunteer Manager • Speakers’ Bureau • Event Manager • Event App • Community App
- 8. Why embrace community? • Member expectation • Non-dues revenue • Data intelligence and SEO “Your private community is a good place to find and curate content. Through the process of building a knowledge repository you can teach members, thus earning their trust, and ultimately resulting in organization relevance and growth.” - Marcus Sheridan
- 9. Why do members join?
- 10. Why do members leave?
- 11. Communities work! • Increased likelihood to recommend • Increases renewal • Increases spend/lifetime value • Increases other engagement “The Social Café is one of the greatest tools a professional association can have and you must be proud of it.” Member, International Association of Movers
- 12. Need proof? • MGMA: Renewal rate 7 percentage points higher • ASAE: Members who are active within Collaborate are 30% more likely to recommend ASAE. • AANAC: Rated most valuable member benefit Engagement generates more engagement, which increases retention, which generates $.
- 13. Likely to Recommend… Photo? NPS No Photo 19.2 Photo Only 36.9 Photo and Bio 41.0 Login Total NPS 0 17.1 1-2 26.1 3-4 36.7 5+ 41.2
- 14. Likely to Spend… Amount Non-Collaborate Collaborate ≤ $600 45.5% 12.9% $600-$1600 18.5% 15.2% $1600-$3000 13.9% 15.2% > $3000 22.1% 56.7%
- 15. A brief look at best practices • Define community’s purpose and goals – and keep them in sight • Limit the number of communities • Auto-subscribe your users • Seed your discussions • Increase engagement through journey mapping • Utilize gamification
- 16. Begin with the end in mind • If you don’t keep your goals in mind, it’s easy to get sidetracked • Define audience, purpose and culture • Set your primary goal -- then secondary goals • Growth? Retention? Increasing spend? • What organization strategic initiatives do the goals align with? • What can the community help my organization do better, cheaper or faster?
- 17. “…you need to first define what the majority of your members need, and then you need to make it as easy as possible for those members to get what they need without distracting them.” Jill Straniero, CAE Digital Collaboration Manager American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) In Associations Now article
- 18. Record your goals • We are launching a community because______________. • Our community will be successful if ____________________. • Our community can help support these initiatives/departments/strategies:
- 19. Start simple • Focus on your primary goal • Don’t over-segment and create too many communities • Open Forum or primary groups – one community per 25k-ish members • Qualified users added automatically (and removed if they no longer qualify) • Auto-subscribed
- 20. Why an “Open Forum” approach? • Only 10-20% of users actively participate; you need to play the numbers game to get critical mass • Too many groups, people don’t know where to post. Also no economies of scale for you. • Make it easy for members to know what to do • Allows you to see how users actually engage, not how you THINK they will engage or how they SAY they will engage
- 21. Why auto-subscribe? • Done properly, you’ll see an opt-out rate of 5-10% • Opt-in communities might see 20% of users subscribed after 6 months • Daily digest is recommended default configuration • We already send too many emails! Community emails contain valuable peer-generated content – not viewed like marketing email • Per CAN-SPAM regulations, emails include a one- click unsubscribe
- 22. Case study: Professional Photographers of America • Launched without an auto-subscribed open forum • In the 8 months preceding the auto-subscription, their all-member forum had a total of 844 unique contributors and 8,301 posts (average of 1037 posts/month) • In the 8 months following their auto-subscription, they had 1,282 unique contributors and 11,520 posts (average of 1440 posts/month)
- 23. Case study: American College of Healthcare Administrators • Launched in April 2013 without auto-subscribing their members • From October 2013-January 2014, they had 43 unique contributors to their open forum and 136 total posts (average 34 posts/month). • We auto-subscribed their members on 2/23/14. • Between March 1st and April 30th, they had 67 unique contributors and 169 total posts (84.5 posts/month).
- 24. Additional Communities • Later phases, or segmenting memberships of 30k+ • Use data in the CRM/AMS to automatically populate groups based on: • Demographics (interest areas, job titles, etc.) • Committee participation • Event registration • Chapters • This also allows you to easily cut off access when someone’s membership expires.
- 25. 25
- 26. Seeding discussions • Plan to seed two questions per day for the first 2-3 weeks • Get something in users’ inboxes they can respond to • Model the behavior and type of questions you expect • Create the habit of expecting a digest each day • Start creating value
- 27. Journey mapping • Engaged members = loyal members • Define how they should engage to get the value they are looking for • Make it as easy as possible
- 28. Journey mapping: new member campaign
- 29. Does not have a bio Is a member Added to the system more than 9 days ago and less than 18 days ago X
- 32. • Rule: Welcome New Members • Logic: Send an email to every member who joined in the last 7 days asking them to community, update their profile, connect colleague, and post to a thread. • Started: October 12, 2015 Professional Photographers of America
- 33. • Between October 12 and November 11 (30 days): • 474 New Members Received the email • 345 Logged In (73%!!!) • 92 Added a Profile Picture (19%) • 60 Added a Bio (13%) • 36 Connected with a Friend (8%) • 55 Posted at least 1 Message (12%) • As a group they’ve made 148 posts (3% of all posts in that 30 days) PPA’s Results
- 34. • Rule: We Miss You A • Logic: Send an email to every person who has written more than 4 discussion post(s) group reply), and has not posted a new reply to a discussion in 90 day(s), • Started: August 14, 2015 American Association for Respiratory Care
- 35. • Between August 14 and November 27 (105 days): • 1284 People Received the Email • 337 Posted a Message (26%) • 11 Posted That Same Day (1%) • 73 Posted Within A Week (6%) • 191 Posted Within A Month (15%) • 33 Posted More Than 5 Messages Since (3%) • As a group they’ve made 914 posts since (25% of all posts in that 105 days) AARC’s Results
- 36. Member responses… • ahhh... shucks...thank you. The fact is that I am very impressed with your forum. So much so that I have incorporated it in one of my White Papers... • “The CEO Network is the best ASAE tool for me as the CEO. I read them every day and comment when I can. Thank you for your vote of confidence!” • “Thanks for the offer of support.” • "I didn’t know that feature was available…” • "I just saw this message. I will start marking those responses. Thank you for the tip!” • "Members who engage are members who renew. Good outreach!” • “Again, thanks so much for reaching out to me. I was about to let my EdTA membership lapse and now I think I'll renew.”
- 37. Fueling engagement with gamification • Give points for engagement activities: • Posting • Blogging • Commenting • Volunteering • Mentoring • Ribbons, badges, leaderboards • “You’re almost there” & congrats emails • Awards
- 38. Recognize & Reward Members • Assign badges based on community participation, certifications, event attendance, years as a member and more. • Feature top contributors on site homepage
- 40. Questions?
- 41. Heather McNair Vice President of Engagement Strategy Higher Logic heather@higherlogic.com 202.350.3502 Kevin Ordonez Owner and Founder .OrgCommunity kevin@orgsource.com
Editor's Notes
- Welcome!
- Good morning and thank you for attending today’s webinar. My name is Kevin Ordonez and I am a founder and owner of .orgCommunity along with Sherry Budziak .orgCommunity launched on Dec 15th and it is the ultimate collaboration environment for association and nonprofit professionals to connect with peers and solution providers. We have already lined up a full calendar of events for 2016 that includes webinars, live educational sessions and networking events. To learn more about of events, and become a member please visit www.orgCommunity.com Before I turn it over to (Heather), I want to thank our partners: HigherLogic, SandStorm Design, Davis Design Partners and RealMagnet. (Heather), take it away!
- Thanks, Kevin and thanks to everyone for joining us this afternoon. Just a brief background for those of you who aren’t familiar with us, Higher Logic is a leading provider of cloud based engagement software. What exactly does that mean? In a nutshell, our platform provides a venue for your members to connect with each other, share ideas, ask and answer questions, volunteer and work together. Today we’ll talk about how a Higher Logic community site can provide your members with more opportunities to engage with each other and your organization, offer a tangible benefit that can help grow your membership base, and increase your return on engagement – a key component in increasing ROI.
- At the heart of our software are communities: collaboration spaces made up of discussion groups and resource libraries, all of which are archived, indexed and fully searchable. People can participate in the discussion groups via the site, email or mobile device. Each user also has a profile, pre-populated with data from your AMS, a directory for users to locate each other, blogs (often used for articles or to showcase association thought leaders), an event calendar, and a wiki glossary (similar to Wikipedia) where users can add and edit acronyms and industry terms to create a knowledge base. All sites, out of the box, are mobile friendly. If you’re a data geek, you’ll love the robust reporting module which lets you track how users are engaging with your site. We also have a game-changing feature called automation rules which will spend some time talking about later.
- Before joining the Higher Logic team, I was a client at two different associations (MGMA and AANAC), so I’ve seen first hand the benefit a robust community can offer and organization and its members. Seven years ago, when I launched my first community site at the MGMA, the idea was pretty new to the association space. Andy Steggles, the now President of Higher Logic and then CTO of the Risk and Insurance Management Society referred to it as “Bleeding edge” when he came in to meet with my board of directors to convince them we’d done the right thing. Today, members expect them. Further, if you don’t provide an online space, users will find it elsewhere – through LinkedIn groups or a competitor (whether another association or for-profit entity). The danger in that is that we are creatures of habit -- once people settle in on another platform, it’s more difficult to get them to migrate elsewhere. We’ll talk in a minute about how community sites can increase dues revenue, but keep in mind there is also ample opportunity for non-dues revenue – through advertising, sponsorships and subscriptions to exclusive communities or libraries filled with white papers, research documents and more. Once your members start creating content, you’ll also be sitting on a goldmine of data intelligence. By watching the questions your users ask, you’ll get a better understanding of their pain points and can develop additional benefits accordingly. Many of our clients have also started opening up some of their community content to the public, so it can be indexed by search engines and bring new users to their sites. Search engines LOVE user generated content, so this can be a much more effective traffic generator than a static website.
- This is an excerpt from the annual membership study from Marketing General Inc. Consistently, the top reasons for joining an association are networking with others and access to info. Specialized info – few orgs have enough SMEs on staff to develop this content all the time. Communities let users provide it to each other.
- Creating value. Discount on events – how many do people attend each year? Journal or magazine – once a month Advocacy – can’t really call that a benefit because people in your field benefit from your work whether they’re a paying member or not. Community is the one benefit they can get value from every single day.
- And the biggest reason to embrace communities is that they work! In benchmarking research over the last couple of years, we’ve seen evidence that people who are engaged in an online community are more likely to recommend your organization to their colleagues, more likely to renew, the average amount they spend with you goes up – from event attendance to product purchases, and it also increases other engagement like volunteerism, writing and speaking.
- My old CFO used to say, we’re a non profit, not a for loss. Associations must run like businesses if they want to succeed. At MGMA, people who subscribed to more than one discussion group had a renewal rate about 7 percentage points higher than those who were not involved At ASAE, NPS was 30% higher for members who belonged to the community. There is also a correlation with attending events, volunteering, etc. and higher scores, but the community is something your members can interact with every day. At AANAC, the year after the community was launched, it was rated the second most valuable benefit, behind the certification program. Two years’ after the launch, it was rated the top most valuable benefit.
- Nod to Stephen Covey Recruiting new members or customers Retaining existing members or customers Increasing spend Gaining feedback or business intelligence Staff intranet – improving productivity Fulfilling a mission, providing a service to your members or the public
- More than doubled their engagement, not only in terms of posts but also the number of members contributing. Just did a site review and they are still maintaining 70 posts per month.
- You’ll notice a theme here – people are busy and impatient, and often won’t take the time to do what, is in our minds, the simplest things Metcalfe’s law: In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network. If you were the only one in this room to own a phone, how valuable would it be? With an integrated community, you have the option to populate groups based on activities, demographics, regions or other valuable attributes found on their AMS record. We’ve found this dramatically improves participation in a community. Clients who’ve opted to not do this typically see 20% of their members subscribed to a community after 6 months; clients who automatically add people see about 90% of their members still participating after the same 6-month period.
- CASE STUDY: AANAC Discussions in Action Infographic – shows how AANAC took online education and continue the conversation online in ANNAC Connect. They were able to measure many things, and this is the graphic story.
- This isn’t about tricking your users – it’s about creating value. For an organization that auto-subscribes 20,000 members: With 30 seed questions, you can expect 200 messages posted in the first month. Without any seed questions, you can expect 30 to 60 messages posted in the first month.
- First year – lowest retention, but it’s also when members are the most excited and there is the most potential to get them involved. Once they become disengaged, hard to get them re-engaged. Going back to those earlier slides – members who had a bio, picture and logged in repeatedly were more satisfied. Once upon a time, campaigns like this had to be done manually and required a huge amount of overhead. Automation rules make it easy. Set them up and let them run.
- Very targeted. Going out to a small specific segment in response to an action (or non-action). Not like marketing emails.
- Make the tone of the email appropriate to the message. Most will be casual, personal. (Tie back to culture of your community.) If they look like they came from you, out of Outlook, they will get a much better response than a designed email.
- ASAE – early results
- We can connect with your AMS/CRM, many of these things can be prepopulated based on data you’re already tracking there. No double entry.
- Is achievable. “3 out of 11”