How do you keep your members up to date? Do members of your association still regularly receive information via newsletters and mailing lists? Do you summarise the most important topics and results of your committees in additional emails?
That means that all of your members are regularly being flooded by information. In the best case, this is a very comprehensive, wide-ranging, general messaging – but at the same time it also means that your members have to filter out the information that is personally relevant to them from this flood of messages that they receive themselves.
This general messaging causes frustration among your members:
- Loss of interest: too much non-targeted information reduces members’ interest over time.
- Declining relevance: a high volume of non-personalised messaging often leads to a decrease in the overall relevance of the association’s topics to its members.
- Vicious circle: important news is often overseen in the flood of information and has to be re-sent. This increases the flood of information and the messages accumulate and at the same time lose relevance and importance for your member. It is hardly possible to get out of this declining relevance spiral with a newsletter as an information distribution tool.
- Association services are being undervalued: Members are only marginally aware of the services your association is providing and underestimate them.
- Decreasing participation: Non-informed members do not actively participate in the day-to-day life of the association because they lack exposure to current topics.
- Member retention decreases: unfortunately, poorly informed members hardly succeed in building an emotional bond that makes them feel truly connected and committed to your association.
How do you manage to keep your members individually informed and engaged?
This is where your membership platform comes into play. Bundle information and make it easy to access by using a clear structure on your member platform.
Your members and association matters are grouped into groups and thematic sections so that you can ensure that each of your members only receive personally relevant information. This way you can ensure that members are regularly informed about their individually relevant matters just as reliably as they are informed about the general, overall association matters.
How a membership platform helps individually address all members and keeps them well informed:
- An accurate relevance and targeted distribution of information increases the interest of the individual member and encourages involvement.
- When published on the membership platform, every piece of information reliably reaches the target groups it is intended to inform simultaneously.
- All members of your association see and experience the activity and dynamics of your organisation at first glance.
- Even lesser active members are regularly informed about all milestones and important association topics via weekly personalised digest emails.
- Your members individually choose which channels they prefer to consume content on your member platform: Via desktop, mobile, app or email summaries.
- Interaction and cooperation are encouraged: Documents can be attached to posts and made easily findable by means of tagging. Many features promote interactive collaboration (as far as it is desired).
- Through the targeted information and involving your members in individually relevant topics, you will automatically create a stronger bond between your members and the association.
- Events and meetings: All appointments are gathered in the calendar and shown according to relevance and area of responsibility.
So, how does this then look in the day-to-day work of your association?
We have asked Dr Katharina Eylers (Head of the Division Industry 4.0 and Technical Regulation) from Bitkom to give us an insight to the results they were able to achieve:
“I feel like I am an information distribution centre. I receive a lot of various information throughout the day and distribute it to the right committees and audiences. How the members perceive my role is varying and rather interesting. A member once said: “I always get the newest information from Mrs. Eylers”, although he had never been in contact with me personally. He feels that he knows me well, which makes me happy because I have had a positive impact on him.”
This more personalised approach increases the relevance of the information because your members can trust that the news they have received also represents real added value for them personally.
A completely different, tailored level of information and increased motivation means that members will hit the ground running and increase their commitment to the association’s work.
Members engage specifically with the topics relevant to them and have a full overview of their agenda and committees.
The vicious circle of a confusing flood of less relevant messages has been broken, and the structure ensures that members are not receiving the same information more than once.
Your members appreciate emails and messages again, knowing that the information has been filtered and channelled for them in advance.
They have confidence in being kept informed individually. And this leads to them being more actively involved in your association work and to actively participate in working groups and committee work, which in the end leads to them having a stronger bond with your association.