McKinley Marketing, Inc.

The Member Experience

By Sheri Jacobs, CAE, and Sara Miller, CAE
Modified from ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership's publication, Membership Essentials

In October 2004, Fast Company magazine featured its first ever “Customers First Awards.”(4) Recognizing companies like Progressive, Mini USA, and Trader Joe’s, the magazine recorded five takeaways from the award finalists:

These lessons can easily apply to the association or non-profit world. When The Experience Economy(5) surfaced in the late 1990s, organizations around the world changed how they treated customers. Some businesses have a tendency to see each interaction with a member as an isolated event instead of a touch point in their overall experience. Admittedly, it is much easier to think that members don’t remember what you said to them last week, but customers do remember how you treated them last week, positively or negatively. They will compare you to other businesses, which may or may not be your competition, and rate your performance against their own expectations.

In First, Break All The Rules,(6) four customer expectations are described:

The first two points (accuracy and availability) are your base. They are the minimal expectations of your customers or members. They expect you to have the correct information and they expect you to be available. Meeting these two needs does not put you ahead of the competition but just gets you in the game. You really start to impress your customers when you satisfy the other two expectations—partnership and advice. Customers should believe you are with them in their challenges.

Although staff cannot always relate, they should always empathize with the plight of your constituency. Whatever the problem, the member should know that you will work with them to find the solution. Furthermore, if members can come to you for information and education, you are filling an important void. This connection increases your relevance to members and decreases the chance that they’ll forget you at renewal time.

Thinking about expectations and carefully planning the experience leads to the overarching theme of customer loyalty. While we have always heard mention of loyalty in connection with membership and customer support, we have recently seen a greater emphasis and new metrics for determining one’s connectivity to your organization. For many, experience is the mechanism for growing one’s loyalty. A good experience helps connect people to the organization. The consistent interactions, the personalized service/correspondence, and continued on-time delivery of goods are all major milestones within the experience, and success in these areas helps build loyalty. There are four major steps an organization should follow to evaluate and improve the customer experience and grow member loyalty.

Step One: Your Mission Statement. What does it mean to provide exceptional service to your members? If your staffers do not share similar answers to that question, the first step is to draft a mission statement. Your department should have a single, concise definition of what you are supposed to do. It should be the guiding principle behind your daily work and the foundation of any new program. Without a shared mission, you cannot reach your potential because everyone will be operating from different perspectives. To some, phone messages should be returned within 24 hours, while others may say 72 hours is acceptable. Without uniformity of service expectations, the members’ experiences are different based on who answers the phone—and the variances can greatly affect their impression of the organization. Thus, having a departmental mission statement is a critical first step in providing member service.

The mission statement should be the foundation of every decision. Does the new or existing program help you accomplish your mission? If not, it should be put back on the drawing board. If yes, you should continue to pursue the program confident that it is in line with association and department goals. Connecting the program to your mission statement will help answer the questions, “Is this something we should do?” and “Is this worth doing?”

Step Two: The Member Experience. If possible, membership professionals should become members of their associations or at least put their names on the mailing list and seed their addresses on direct mail lists.  Instead of focusing on when you send the welcome kit and the renewal notice, you focus on understanding what it is like for the member. How do the mailings read? How does the direct mail connect with the website? If a person calls, what is the availability of the membership department or program staff to answer questions? These are the elements that affect the service you provide and, ultimately, the member’s experience. Few people will continue to be an advocate for the organization after a negative experience.

To get a handle on the member’s experience, map what it currently is and then create a separate version of what it should be. The fictitious organization charted below. Member Experience Compared may be vastly different from your association. The objective is to look at what it’s really like for members and how you help them feel connected to your group.

6/1: Send acquisition package

6/13: Person contributes and becomes a member

7/3: Welcome packet is mailed

7/25: Member receives invite to annual meeting

8/1 - 9/15: Member receives promotional material from meeting sponsors

8/25: Member receives email about annual meeting

9/30 - 10/4: Annual meeting; new member does not attend

10/13 - 10/31: Member receives follow-up notices from event sponsors

11/23: Member receives magazine with stories about annual meeting and wishes they'd gone

1/18: Member receives new-member welcome call

2/1: Member receives notice that membership expires in 4 months

2/28: Member receives email about membership status

4/17: Member calls organization to get costs of this year's annual meeting; no call back

5/5: Member receives second renewal warning

5/20: Member signs up for annual meeting

5/29: Member receives final renewal notice; does not renew

Ideal Experience

6/1: Send acquisition package

6/13: Person contributes and becomes a member

6/29: Welcome packet is mailed

7/25: Member receives invite to annual meeting

8/1: Member receives personal call welcoming them to the organization and explaining the annual meeting

8/1 - 9/15: Member receives promotional material from meeting sponsors

8/25: Member receives email about annual meeting

9/28 - 10/2: Annual meeting; member attends with other people from their company (your organization followed up with member to let them know of discounted rates since colleagues were attending)

10/11 - 10/29: Member receives follow-up notices from event sponsors; follows up with some of the sponsors regarding future partnerships

11/23: Member receives magazine with stories about annual meeting

1/18: Member receives six-month follow-up call

2/1: Member receives notice that membership expires in 4 months

2/28: Member receives email about membership status

4/17: Member calls organization to get costs of this year's annual meeting; call returned same day

5/5: Member receives second renewal warning; sends in renewal

5/20: Member signs up for annual meeting

Based on the variety of budgets associated with membership recruitment and retention campaigns, the above ideals may be more or less than you’re able to do. There is no definitive rule here. Instead, the focus is on your unique organization, your unique members, and the unique benefits and experiences you can offer.

Once you have the real world picture and the ideal picture, the next step is to figure out how to elevate the current experience to meet your vision. Depending on the size of your membership, you will have to think creatively about how to change the experience. When funds are limited, focus on major milestones that will have the deepest reach. If you can institute a new telemarketing campaign whereby new members are called after 90 days, this may be the best way to introduce your organization to members and find out more about their specific needs. You will be surprised at the small touches that mean a lot to your members. You should always review what your competition is doing (i.e., join your competition and compare their experience to yours) but also look at for-profits for inspiration.

The experience will help you understand what it’s currently like to be a member and it will help you visualize what you want that experience to be. It’s important to focus on outbound communications, response time, and consistency of message. You are examining, at least, the full 12-month membership cycle. Depending on budget, you will incorporate new ideas and begin shaping the current experience to better fit your own expectations. With a smaller budget, you may have to pick the two to four major milestones that will have the greatest impact. With a more robust budget, you can address the entire experience, including considering outsourcing, revamping publications, and generating new community initiatives (listservs, networking opportunities, and more).

Step Three: Customer Loyalty. After you’ve created a memorable member service experience, you have to focus on the end result—loyalty. If your experience has met or exceeded all expectations, you have created a constituency that will be more loyal to your organization. You meet their basic needs, but you also offer tangible benefits beyond just being there when they call. You have entered the loyalty zone.

There are different ways to define loyalty. Who are your most loyal members? How do they act? What do they tell others about your association? As a first step, Jill Griffin(7) offers a two-part definition for customer loyalty: “Customer retention describes the length of relationship with a customer. . . . A firm’s share of customer denotes the percentage of a customer’s budget spent with the firm.”

Step 4: Putting It All Together. By now, you should have a mission statement, an experience map of both the current situation and the ideal, and a picture of the loyal user-member who sticks with you and gives you everything he’s got. You have created a foundation for all future decision making as well as an evaluation system for reviewing your current offerings.

While you have undoubtedly worked with some other departments to create the above components, you must share your end product with the rest of the association. You could schedule a conference call or town hall meeting to discuss the new vision and to get the buy-in of other department heads. (You can’t be the only one focusing on loyalty because the pieces are spread throughout the organization.) With the support of your Executive Director, work through the ideas with the rest of the staff and generate their support of your plan. Implementing, evaluating, and revising your plans is more enjoyable than looking at how your organization currently works and identify the areas where you’re falling short.

While no two membership departments are exactly the same, there are commonalities that reach across all organizations.  The strength of the department is in its people.  The staff must have a clear understanding of your expectations and the department’s goals.  Furthermore, they should receive the proper training to ensure position success.  The department should also know the member experience and understand the connectivity between positive interactions and retention.  Finally, the department’s commitment to increasing member loyalty should never be compromised.  A fully functioning membership department is easy to identify – staff are committed, members are engaged, and revenue has increased.

Sheri Jacobs, CAE, is managing director of McKinley Marketing, Inc., Chicago. Her association experience includes nearly five years as the chief marketing officer and director of membership for the Association Forum of Chicagoland as well as director-level positions in membership and marketing at the American Bar Association and the American Academy of Implant Dentistry. She was 2006-2007 chair of ASAE & The Center’s Membership Section Council. Email: sjacobs@mckinleymarketing.com Sara Miller,CAE, is the senior director of member loyalty and conferences/events with The Humane Society of the United States, Gaithersburg, Maryland. She has spent the last six years at The HSUS engaging people in the mission of Celebrating Animals, Confronting Cruelty. Email: smiller@humanesociety.org.

4. October 2004, Fast Company magazine “Customers First Awards.” Pg 81
5. The Experience Economy
6. First, Break All the Rules, Buckingham and Coffman1 (p. 129-131)
7. Jill Griffin (Customer Loyalty, 2002, pg. 5)
8. Griffin. (p. 31-32)
Buckingham, Marcus and Coffman, Curt.  First, Break All the Rules. (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Sanders, Tim.  The Likeability Factor.  (Crown Publishers, 2005).
Griffin, Jill.  Customer Loyalty.  (Jossey-Bass, 2002)
Pine, II, B. Joseph and Gilmore, James H.  The Experience Economy. (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) 

Back to articles