Silverbear Membership Blog

As consumers all of us form purchasing decisions dependent on a number of criteria

Do we need this item? Can we afford what we want? Are we comfortable about buying it from this outlet or person? Several of the standards are empiric i.e. Do we possess the cash available, but the majority of the criteria are, usually, emotional:

Do we “like” what we are buying? Do we “feel” comfortable about purchasing it Do we “feel” valued by the person offering it to us, and so on We may buy an item one day because we “feel” good about it, but not buy the identical thing on an alternative day because our feelings are different and we don’t feel so good about it. In the majority of cases, our “feeling good about it” position has nothing at all to do with the artefact or service itself but more to do with our overall emotional condition.

This emotional side of things plays a vital part in becoming and remaining a member of a membership association. In 1943 Abraham Maslow...

In our previous blog posts on this subject I have already covered Internal Communication Methods and Membership Web Portal . The third and final part of this blog will cover Reporting & Analysis and Integration.

Reporting & Analysis Increasing the efficiency in the level and type of service you offer to your members can really only be accomplished by measuring and analysing the feedback you get from your members. This can be a very complex and time intensive activity which is often pushed aside as there always seems to be more urgent matters to take care of! Being able to identify your membership clusters, such as geographic breakdown, job titles, profiles, dashboards and KPIs is fundamental. The segmentation of your membership base and the ability to analyse detailed reports will make sure membership managers are able to analyse their members such as the who, what, where and why, whilst still ensuring each membership group receives relevant and targeted communication.

As membership organisations...

In the first part of the blog we covered Internal Communication Tools. The second part of this blog post is Membership Web Portal.

A membership management solution that offers you a fully web based portal will allow your members access to their personal information at any time and from any location. Allowing your members to easily log in using their own unique username and password and edit/amend/update their personal information.

Amendments that are made by the member will automatically feed through and update the internal membership system of the record of the member, ensuring the information you have on that member is always accurate. A membership portal which is offered by a membership solution provider will enable each member to access relevant tools and content for each member type, such as blogs/forums/wikis etc encouraging member-to-member interaction and cross interaction between different groups.

Selecting a comprehensive membership software solution will ensure relevant information...

Most membership organisation’s vision is to host and provide information which their members can easily and simply access, being able to provide a platform where membership organisations and members can share knowledge, information and network through the integration of their membership system with the membership database and their website. More and more organisations want to keep members informed and are starting to create specialist-interest online communities which offer services such as forums, blogs, wikis, expert content and file libraries.

The key to a successful online community is really dependent on your internal systems and how you can utilise them efficiently, through the implementation of an online membership management solution you can seamlessly integrate with your website and develop an online network model reflective of your requirements.

So what should your online community offer?

Fresh, dynamic, collaborative, creative and engaging content An intuitive and straight...

We have seen from the last post that social media is becoming one of the most popular areas of the Internet. People are using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to communicate with each other and promote ideas and information. So how can membership organisations use social networking sites to communicate with their members? There’s more to sites like Facebook than just creating a business page and updating your status.

Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. It has more than 400 million active users, more than 5 billion pieces of content (such as web links, news stories, blog posts, photo albums etc) and Facebook pages (pages that are commonly created by businesses) have created more than 5.3 billion fans.

So the power of Facebook is immense. People are used to using it as a platform for communication, and membership organisations are starting to understand the value that lies within in.

The key to Facebook is its ability to communicate different messages and information...

Do you know who your members are? Do you know what your members are looking for? Do you know why they are looking for it?

Managing your members efficiently and effectively will help you answer these questions, however, in these economic times members are demanding a clearer “Membership ROI” and asking their membership organisations to demonstrate this.

So the question that really needs to be answered is; “how much value does your organisation provide to your members?”.

This is not any easy question to answer but it is essential you do answer it, and answer it well. As a membership organisation you need to connect and stay connected with your members, however, defining what you should be offering to your members is easier said than done, below are a few areas we have highlighted;

Highly targeted communication channels via; email phone website social media

Ensuring the information you have on your member is accurate and up to date so targeted and...