Getting Personal: Why Your Association Needs To Do It For Members

Membership sector online personalization is a huge topic. In 2014, it was the key online challenge facing the membership organizations and associations. I’m defining online (member) personalization as the delivery of targeted and personalized online content based on what we know about a website visitor or member. We need to talk more about what online personalization is and why your membership organizations should be doing it.

Membership sector online personalization is a huge topic. In 2014, it was the key online challenge facing the membership organizations and associations. I’m defining online (member) personalization as the delivery of targeted and personalized online content based on what we know about a website visitor or member. We need to talk more about what online personalization is and why your membership organizations should be doing it.

WHY PERSONALIZE YOUR ONLINE CONTENT?

Engagement, engagement, engagement!

Structured and robust online planning/strategy development needs to focus on increasing online engagement and forging much stronger relationships with your members. Your online personalized content should help in your journey to convert passive members to engaged advocates, online and offline, who are more likely to vote in officer elections, attend local events and more.

You need to think about what you would want if you were a member of your organization. How would you want to be addressed when it comes to voting in online elections for the next chair or president?

a) Dear Colleague – Association X is asking members to vote… (BORING!)

b) Welcome Alex – We would like you to vote for our next visionary leader! (WHO ME?)

Note: Using ‘first person’ narrative will always help to engage!

Your members want to feel like part of a direct, relevant and value driven online relationship and conversation on a shared and common them like a professional, trade or special interest area.

HOW CAN YOU GET PERSONAL?

This is where the buzzword ‘BIG DATA’ comes in and how you store your members’ details/data becomes key. If your BIG DATA is accurate and is stored in a suitable condition/format that can be securely transferred or transposed onto the Web you will be in a great place to enable online personalization. However if you are using legacy back-office software this may be a wake-up call that you need to update, upgrade, replace or rationalize membership systems.

A RESOURCE: MEMBERWISE NETWORK

You can benchmark current sector trends via our Harnessing the Web 2014 research summary report available on the MemberWise website. The Network also provides free help and advice via presentations, advice sheets and videos. You can also express an interest in attending our next Harnessing the Web 2014 national conference.

Online personalization will almost certainly become a must-have rather than a nice-to-have over the coming years; develop your plan and the tools you need to support online personalize now in order to sustain for the future.