Membership management software can make it easy to offer engaging and accessible content that keeps your members involved online. After a member has joined your association, welcome them into your online community with opportunities to learn, contribute, and collaborate using SilkStart’s built-in applications. Ensuring your members are able to interact with your association’s web presence, and will return regularly, is as easy as including these popular features:

Groups (Forums)

Let your members collaborate in a group by posting discussion topics, pictures, documents, links, and more. Each group can have different member type and privacy restrictions, and can be segmented by topic of interest, role in the association, or other criteria of choice. Did you know that you can also use groups to hold an online election? Get started and create your first group!

Articles

Articles allow you to create a news feed that can be shown in a widget across your site. Share anything from association announcements to industry-wide news, and feature important posts at the top of your feed. Adding tags to your posts makes it easy for members to filter by content that is of interest to them.

Blogs

Create a chronological stream of posts that highlight achievements, topics of interest, or any other exciting news about your association! Maintaining a steady output of content will encourage members to return to your site on a regular basis. Already have a blog? Migrate your posts to SilkStart by copying over and backdating a desired amount of recent posts. Get blogging!

Facebook Photo Galleries

Connect your association’s Facebook page to display photo albums on your SilkStart site. Each time you upload an image to Facebook, your SilkStart gallery is automatically updated. It doesn’t get any easier – Contact us to activate!

Use these easily configurable applications to attract new members and incentivize your current members to strengthen their relationship with your organization. Once you’ve begun creating content, make it easily accessible to members by adding links in your navigation bar, sharing items on social media platforms, or sending a group email. It’s never been so easy to use your membership management software to create value for your members and share it online.

Here are 6 steps to help transform your association into a customer obsessed one:

1. Make members a central figure in your organization culture

You really need to bake this into your organization. Give customers a voice by asking questions like ‘how does the customer want that to work?’ or ‘how would that impact the customer?’ to ensure their perspective is considered in all decisions that affect them.

In a recent survey, almost half of survey respondents (49 percent) said their renewal rate has remained unchanged since last year.

2. Generate feedback loops

Do satisfaction surveys and ask the net promoter score question, but also be sure and talk to your customers. Ask them what they think, and then act on their feedback. Solicit feedback from employees who interact with your customer regularly. Lastly, make it easy for customers to get in touch with you, or submit feedback.

3. Define and track customer metrics

Define your KPI’s first, and then track your progress. You can track engagement metrics like the net promoter score, plus other forms of engagement like attendance at industry events or participation in online discussion groups. In addition, consider KPI’s like attrition or churn rate, and customer lifetime value to track organization health.

4. Define the customer experience from the customer’s perspective

To understand the customer experience, look from the outside inward, not from the inside out. When deciding how new initiatives should work, articulate it from the customer’s perspective.

5. Walk a mile in their shoes

This requires you to align your business strategy with the customer journey. To map their journey you need to walk in their shoes. I was impressed the other day when, in a demo, a prospective customer asked us to demo the member experience. Everyone asks about the admin tools, but rarely do they ask us to step them through the customer experience. Amazing!

6. Get Everyone Involved

The goal here is clear – make sure everyone in your organization, not just people who interact with customers, are committed to listening to, understanding, and acting on the needs of the customer. To do this, make customer obsession a central principle in your organization’s core values, and only hire people who are customer-obsessed by screening for this in interviews.

A pivotal thing that I believe differentiates us in the Association Management Software space is that everyone else focuses on the obvious customer – the association admin who uses the software. Clearly an AMS needs to help them. We’re different because we also focus on the association member. By working backwards from them, we are building a platform that truly helps associations acquire, engage and retain members.

So how do we start from the member and work backwards today? Well, one way is by creating a mobile first approach for members. This is much more than just making sure an association has a mobile friendly marketing website – which itself is critical in order to operate an association today. It’s about ensuring a member’s experience when they come to an association website for the first time – sign up, view events, buy an event ticket, view a job post, update their profile, contact another member, etc. are all optimized for a mobile experience.

The work of continuing to improve for your customer never stops, and ensuring we create a great experience for both associations and their members is what we strive for. We’re customer obsessed and we hope you are too.