Member engagement sits at the core of everything an association does. No matter the staff-member, no matter the member benefit or event or email sent, each is a piece of the larger tapestry that is member engagement. While this is a generally accepted fact for any forward-thinking and plugged-in association leader, knowing what to do with this knowledge – or even what membership engagement really means – can be a nebulous task. What do members want to do? More importantly, why are they taking the actions they are, why aren’t they taking advantage of affinity programs or new benefits we rolled out this year, and what can we do to call them to act?

The real issue lies in that while most associations serve a very specific niche, industry, profession, or need, the membership base isn’t a monolith. We’ve watched over the last four-plus years as the makeup of the industry has shifted dramatically, the needs of members have changed, and even how they get reached is different than it ever was. Gen Z don’t answer the phone, boomers are retiring and exiting the professions, and millennials and Gen-X are too busy to take advantage of the traditional opportunities of association membership. On top of all the other things out there that people want in their life, and all the other sources of information and learning and networking – engagement, quite literally – that are increasingly available, associations need to be smarter about what they do, and how they reach out.

Engagement is a living thing

As mentioned, the needs of a membership change over time, and so the offerings an association provides should shift, as well. It’s important to track not just what people do with you – what events they attend, what courses they take, what emails they respond to – but also what they don’t care about. A popular class from five or ten years ago can fall out of favor. A well-attended event that’s long been seen as a key piece of the annual conference, could actually be costing you money.

Tracking behavior is key, but when applying an engagement score and weighting those behaviors, making sure you audit it over time is just as important as those weights. If a large group of your membership – those in mid-career with families – don’t have time for the big conference every year, what else can they do, and what else is important? How will that change next year, or in five years? There are young people just entering “student membership” range now – that so-called Generation Alpha – who have grown up differently and want to experience life and their careers differently than even Gen Z. Watching the shifts in engagement between these age groups, between demographics any any number of other subsets of your membership, is paramount and can teach so much to the staff, if they’re looking. It even creates new segments of outreach – not of traditional demographics, but of behaviors and needs themselves. That is the real path of a living engagement.

Be proactive

When an association is tracking engagement correctly – whether with something cutting edge like our own Acumen platform or with a homegrown tool in Excel – use it to be proactive. So someone joined last year, great! And better yet, they’re engaged, they’re clicking on emails, they’re taking a course, they might even be considering going for that certification. But it isn’t just on rails at that point. Be proactive, see what else someone like that member might want to do next. Experiences get stale if something new isn’t offered. Whether it’s the membership experience, a movie franchise, or your annual vacation, doing the same thing over and over gets boring, repetitive, and ultimately makes people less interested. Understanding that pathway that a member should be on helps in every department. Marketing knows what messaging will ring loudest, membership can accurately project retention (and even leverage a well-built engagement score on high-engagement non members), the events team will know who will want to come to this year’s conference, and who might need a nudge.

Use engagement scoring as a tool

Dovetailing off that, use the scoring rubric at the heart of a well-rounded engagement score as a tool to track new actions. When a new association product or benefit is launched, track the micro-impacts it has to the engagement of whatever member subset or demographic that you’re targeting. Use A-B testing to see how different groups respond to messaging around it. Test long-held organizational beliefs and prove to your leadership that’s sometimes the old way of doing things is the wrong way.

Engagement scoring – when executed with a proactive, data informed and results-focused mind and practice – can unlock a wealth of value for an association. Peering into the path of membership, from first touch to organizational evangelist, can help you and your colleagues understand what really matters to members, and make sure that each year is a new journey for members ,and the right one for them. Many tools out there provide some level of engagement scoring, and using these can be a good snapshot of what people are up to, but members– and engagement itself- is a moving target, always shifting. Doing an engagement scoring exercise that’s holistic and looks beyond just the big things, beyond just the data in the AMS even, can be a valuable effort for any association.

We’ve reached a point where quantifying what was once thought to be uncountable and purely anecdotal is easy with modern technology. Associations have to be able to know what their members are up to, and what they might want to do next. With all the other distractions and chances for engagement that your members have, whether professionally or otherwise, being heard through the noise takes novel ideas, new tools, and a bit of risk taking. That’s not always easy in the association world, but the organizations that do take a chance and think outside the box will find positive results. That means more members, happier members, and a clearer future.