Member-Only Content For Retaining Memberships
Exclusive content catered to members is crucial to keep them curious and involved in your events and offerings. A meaningful membership experience is fully worth cultivating given the value members add to nonprofits and cultural institutions.
A member-organization relationship is not purely transactional. How and why a member engages with an organization is a key added layer in this relationship.
Members are the lifeline of an organization because they are the precursor to a steady revenue stream and morale. Given the importance of members to the growth of your institution, you need to prioritize membership incentives, engagement, and content to cultivate a robust membership base.
Why Are Memberships so Important to Non-profit organizations?
Some common benefits of a robust membership base include a connected community, long-term retention, more active engagement, and increased donations.
According to a Stanford study, memberships are a great tool to strengthen loyalty among supporters and to increase earned income for sustainable recurring growth. Another study pooled information from institutions such as museums, zoos, and other cultural organizations. After tallying up the revenue generated from admission tickets, retail, food, and gifts, it found that members brought in the highest percentage of revenues. A member has 4.5 times greater long-term value than a visitor.
Every non-profit and cultural institution needs a base of supporters whose values are aligned to the mission of your organization. Secondly, organizations need the resources to run smoothly and have autonomy over their mission and societal goals. Having a core base of loyal members will give you the recurring revenue and support you need to run successful events, hit your annual goals, and expand for the future.
What Are Some Examples of Member-only Content for Non-profit?
What works for one non-profit organization may not work for another. The key to creating content that members will find useful and worth their time/money is engagement. Keeping that in mind, below are a few member-exclusive incentives you should be offering to your members.
- Member-events portal access: Members can create their own profile in the website, which will track their hobbies and interests. Organizations will then connect members with corresponding events, programs, and products.
- Tutorials and learning platforms: This is a key component of member engagement. Learning content relevant to members, keeps them involved and gives them the gratification of learning new things. It also inculcates friendly competition between members.
- In-person & virtual networking space: This includes virtual/real-time facilitators and break-out rooms for discussion topics. For example, game nights, happy hours, learning events, local collaborations, etc.
Information gathering through surveys, polls, and suggestion notes from members can be a good strategy to understand the preferences of your members. Certain content can be demoed to gauge interest, before spending significant resources on such content.
How Member-only Content Helps Member Relationships With a Non-profit
It’s your responsibility as an organization to originate compelling member-only ideas and strategies. Below are various examples of how member-only content impacts members:
- Build new connections to inspire more action or giving.
- One of the biggest reasons why people become members is to increase their social circle and connect with like-minded individuals.
- Having a group of people you can work with only expands the capacity of activities members can accomplish.
- Reinforce loyalty.
- Engaged and active members become loyal members. When you invest in content, educational resources, and exclusive member-only incentives, you reinforce member loyalty.
- Happy members also propagate the goals of the organization and recruit new members into the foil.
- Urgency, scarcity, and exclusivity of certain products or activities.
- Non-members might feel the pinch to join in as a member, especially if existing members validate the cost of being one. This validation is only possible when member-only content is providing value.
- Personalized content for special occasions.
- The targeted experience increases your members’ sense of belonging. Based on member preferences, your website can have an additional section providing members with additional links, coupon codes, bonus offers, and access to drip content.
- Offers/discounts/privilege.
- Your organization should be committed to catering to members’ needs. Members will enjoy perks such as discounted tickets, early booking privileges, buy one get one offers, and other booking privileges.
Successfully implementing even one of the above aspects could significantly improve member relationships, engagement, and retention rates. The more you prioritize your member’s experience, the greater returns you’ll see in the long run.
How to Get Started With Member’s Only Content
Starting can be the hardest step, but it does not need to be complicated. Simple mediums of creating members-only content are listed below.
- Email Newsletters: An email newsletter/status update or member-only website portal is enough to get the ball rolling. A lot more freedom and ingenuity can be exercised in a company’s portal, depending on the needs of the company.
- Social media groups: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the usual hotspots where members can be integrated with the latest updates.
Feel free to use other mediums/get creative when integrating members-only content. If your organization works closely with another institution, joining forces to cater to members can also be a great strategy.
How Acme can Help
How do you build engagement, grow memberships, incentivize retention, and improve the member experience? A cutting-edge ticketing and member management solution, like ACME.
ACME makes all facets of managing membership easier through its encompassing member management system. We optimize data storing, information processing, tool integration, and usage analytics while making the end-user membership experience seamless.
Click here to learn more about how ACME can transform your membership strategy today.