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Professional associations are powered by the community of members they build and serve. When your success depends on factors like member engagement, participation in activities, and collecting dues, it’s important to find effective ways to grow your membership base while retaining the members you already have.
In our guide to What Is an LMS: Definition and Uses, we emphasized how learning technology like a learning management system (LMS) can help associations in many ways. That includes increasing member engagement, offering more value through continuing education, and attracting new members who are interested in the courses you offer.
What are some other member retention and member recruitment strategies you can use? Stick around as we review some tips, best practices, and 25 proven ideas that can help.
What Are the Biggest Challenges in Member Attraction and Retention?
Before we get into the ideas to attract and retain association membership, it’s important to understand why member attraction and retention can feel challenging. Some of the biggest challenges include:
- Low member engagement: Professionals join associations because they want to get value out of their membership. However, if they don’t feel engaged with your community and what you’re doing, they likely won’t see enough value to want to renew.
- Lack of resources and time: Many smaller associations just getting started struggle with this one. It can feel challenging to deliver things like continuing education, extensive events, or activities when you’re short-staffed or limited on time. Fortunately, solutions like event technology or LMSs that help manage those tasks can make it easier.
- Inconsistent recruitment or retention efforts: Membership recruitment and retention shouldn’t just be something you think about if your numbers are dropping. Associations that want to increase membership in an association need to consistently invest in outreach, engagement strategies, and valuable member experiences.
- Not updating member benefits enough: Having static benefits with little change over the years can make the experience feel stale for long-term members. So, it’s important to keep evolving and continue offering new benefits, activities, continuing education options, etc., that keep ongoing members interested.
How Can Events Help You Attract and Retain More Members?
Events and workshops are a great way to attract and retain more members because they give you a chance to deliver real-world value, build a sense of community, and align with your association’s message and values.
Plus, it gives your team a chance to interact with current or potential members during activities and conversations. That way, you have more opportunities to recruit new members and retain current members before renewal dates come up.
How Does Continuing Education Drive Member Loyalty?
Many professionals join industry associations to help advance their careers. Continuing education helps deliver on that with clear opportunities for professional development.
For those new to an industry, it might be courses that help them build essential skills so they can perform better at work, while more experienced professionals may want to learn how to take advantage of current industry trends and new technologies.
When you have the right technology, like an LMS, it’ll allow you to build a content library of courses and learning materials so members can continue to benefit from it long-term, no matter where they are in their educational journey.
It’s a great way to encourage renewals when you have new and exciting updates to your learning content coming out consistently. Plus, it gives you another opportunity to generate non-dues revenue by monetizing your courses.
What Are 25 Proven Ideas to Grow and Retain Your Membership?
Now that you understand the common challenges and how things like events and continuing education can help, here is our list of 25 proven ideas for membership growth and retention:
- Offer on-demand education through a centralized LMS
- Host live virtual events for members who can’t attend in person
- Bundle event registration and education access into member pricing
- Use hybrid conferences to reach remote and global professionals
- Create member-only livestreamed sessions with industry leaders
- Track engagement data to personalize learning paths
- Award digital certificates and continuing education (CE) credits automatically
- Simplify renewals by tying them to education milestones
- Repurpose event recordings into year-round learning libraries
- Offer early access to event registration for members
- Use session analytics to improve future programming
- Create onboarding courses for new members
- Host virtual networking sessions alongside live events
- Create a centralized place for member interaction and communication
- Run micro-events throughout the year instead of just one big annual event
- Highlight speaker expertise with post-event learning modules
- Make professional development measurable and reportable
- Offer tiered memberships based on education access
- Give your audience a voice with live responses and polls during sessions
- Integrate event technology to reduce disruptions or errors
- Support busy professionals with mobile-friendly learning
- Consistently update members on new activities and member benefits
- Use engagement data to identify at-risk members early
- Use automation to help with common tasks like registration and logistics planning
- Position your association as a career-long learning partner
How Our Learning, Event, and Livestreaming Technology at Cadmium Can Help
At Cadmium, our goal is to provide associations with the learning, event, and video technology they need to create impactful experiences for members. We offer several options that can help.
Our Elevate and EthosCE LMSs are designed to help you deliver valuable learning experiences, no matter where your audience is in their career or educational journey. Elevate is designed for associations and nonprofits, and EthosCE is designed for continuing healthcare education.
Do you need a tool to plan and manage events successfully? Our Eventscribe event management system is an all-in-one solution that can help you set up a task-based system, automate, engage attendees, review event data, and more, all in a centralized place.
We also offer a smooth livestreaming solution with Warpwire, designed to help you create impactful live experiences for your members.
Request a demo of our product suite today to learn more about how our technology at Cadmium can benefit your association.
