What exactly makes up a nonprofit’s brand experience? Well for membership driven organizations, the brand experience just may be the membership experience in itself. Starting from the moment audience members learn about you—and hopefully sign up to become a member of your community—they are experiencing your brand. And expectations rightfully may be high for the value that your organization will bring to them when they decide to become a member. Whether your organization has a paid membership model and membership network website, or simply gates content or other resources behind a login, you are making a promise to members that when they sign up, they will be offered value commensurate with their investment of time or money.
Offering meaningful membership programs of course starts at the content and experiences that you’re offering members, but it doesn’t end there. Offering meaningful member support, providing timely and transparent communications, and listening to and implementing member feedback will all help ensure that the promises you’re making are seen and realized. And choosing the right tools and technology to leverage is also key.
In this Constructively Curated newsletter, we’re going to explore some resources and tools to help member-driven nonprofits evaluate and design their member experience from start to finish utilizing the full power of strategy, communications, and technology.
Determine What Type of Network You’re Looking to Foster
Not all membership organizations are built the same, so not all membership organizations are looking to foster the exact same type of member network. There are three major types of networks—learning, action, and movement networks. Understanding what your organization is attempting to foster is not only strategically important for creating alignment between your nonprofit’s mission, vision, and financial model, but it is also a natural first step to building out a strong member experience that gives members what they are looking for.
Member Journey Mapping
Each one of your members will walk through the journey designed by you to join your network, be oriented to membership, and continue to take full advantage of your offerings as a seasoned member. Defining this full journey takes time and intentionality. We need to determine at each step what we want members to feel and experience, what our touchpoints are, and if we are meeting expectations. This Fullstory resource walks through ways to comprehensively map out your unique member journey to benefit both your organization and your members.
Welcoming Members with Thoughtful Communications
If you’ve ever signed up for a membership service just to receive no welcome or confirmation email, you know that it fills you with confusion. Sending welcome communications not only is an opportunity to begin the process of orienting members to everything they need to know about your network, but it is also a chance to get members excited. You can start delivering value right from your welcome. There are a wealth of different ways you can welcome members—like welcome letters or packets, spotlights of new members on your online community—and more.
Making a Strong First Impression
First impressions matter, and oftentimes, the first four weeks of membership set the tone for a member’s entire experience. This is the time when we need to lead new members and help them learn how they can integrate their membership into their daily lives. Members should feel welcomed but not overwhelmed, excited but not pressured, and rewarded for engagement rather than ignored. In this podcast episode, Membership Geeks introduces a five phase approach during the first four weeks to making a great impression.
Collecting Member Feedback
Bridging the gap between your organization’s understanding of your member journey and your member’s actual lived experiences is key to improving what you offer. And it requires us to do something simple but extremely helpful; collect membership feedback. Not only does member feedback give us information we can use to offer more value to our members, but it also signals to our members that we’re interested in hearing what they have to say. There are a few different ways we can consider collecting feedback, and some do’s and don’ts to remember for success.
Leveraging An Engagement Platform for Your Membership Website
Building a membership website is far from simple or easy. Members often have a wide variety of needs that require complex features and functionality, and choosing the right technology is key to ensuring a positive member experience. This is where rather than starting from scratch you can leverage an engagement platform like Open Social. Open Social is a membership website tailored tool on which your organization can build a customizable member website— both ensuring a great experience for users and easy website management for your team.
The Evolved Membership Nonprofit: A Webinar to Explore
To create an amazing membership experience for your members, your organization’s larger membership model must be strong financially and strategically. There are a wealth of considerations to create and manage your organization’s business model successfully. In Nonprofit Financial’s Evolved Membership Nonprofit webinar, a panel of membership nonprofit experts convened to speak to the history of membership organizations, to show an example of an organization succeeding in the space right now, and to answer questions from nonprofit professionals.
More Constructively Curated
- Sharing Effective Climate Stories: 7 Resources for Nonprofits
- 7 Resources for Ethical Storytelling in Design
- Stand Out on Giving Tuesday: Tips for Meaningful Engagement with Your Nonprofit
- Launch Your Nonprofit’s New Brand to Build Buy-in and Drive Engagement
- Member Survey Best Practices for Your Nonprofit Brand
- 6 Ways to Build a Strong Brand Through Your Team
