Membership organisations exist to serve their members’ needs, to provide support and to foster a sense of community and connection across what can often be a diverse group of members. Post-pandemic, we’ve seen a rapid uptick in acceptance of, and use of technology to provide a sense of connection and community.
In this article, we’ll look at how Audiri helps with some of the key challenges membership organisations face in maintaining regular, meaningful two-way communication which is targeted to members’ interests and communicates the value delivery of the organisation.
1. Member engagement & information overload:
Maintaining consistent and effective communication with members is crucial, as it ensures members can see the value offered by their membership. With today’s busy schedules and overflowing inboxes, it can be challenging to capture and sustain members’ attention – especially if they perceive communications are irrelevant, impersonal or too frequent.
Additionally, membership organisations often have a wealth of information to share – event updates, policy changes, educational resources, CPD events, industry news to name a few. However, bombarding members with excessive or irrelevant information often has the reverse effect – information overload results in members tuning out, overlooking or even ignoring important updates.
Audiri offers some key features that help member organisations strike that important balance. By offering a single touchpoint for your members, you can consolidate newsletters, social and professional development activities, and updates to deliver targeted, personalised and value-driven membership engagement activities across your member-base.
By segmenting users into customised groups, updates reach their specific intended audience: membership-wide, critical notices are published universally at the touch of a button, while sub-groups can publish and receive their own personalised notifications, events, group messaging and activities. Even better, administrative controls can be created, so sub-groups are able to self-manage their notifications from within the console, which reduces overarching administrative overload.
2. Channel simplification:
With a diverse membership base, its common to see a wide spread of member communication preferences. Most membership organisations solve this by creating multiple channels including email, 2 or 3 social media channels, chat rooms and newsletters.
The problem with this approach, is that it creates more work, and often results in lower levels of member engagement within each channel. Member organisations spread themselves really thin trying to keep up with so many touchpoints with their members, and the hustle of this activity often means you’re spending more time populating channels and less time actually serving members’ needs.
The opportunity to simplify and streamline ALL communication to a single touchpoint is a gamechanger – it focuses members’ attention, and streamlines the workload for Membership admin and marketing teams.
The messaging to your members changes as well – instead of directing them towards multiple channels and hoping that they start to pay attention to some of them, the power of having a single app installed on their phones, which becomes the “home” of your organisation and your member offering is powerful, and simplifies the member onboarding process.
3. Limited resourcing to apply to technological solutions:
Member organisations exist to fulfil their membership mission, and this relies upon investing the majority of resources towards advocacy, services, events and value adds for your member base. This often means that funding technical solutions and adopting new technologies and digital platforms can fall to the wayside.
As a result, Membership organisations fall back on the tried and true “free” platforms like WhatsApp groups, email communications, and closed groups on Facebook to get their message out. The disparate nature of these solutions, and the distraction of other messages competing for members attention can really reduce the ability to reach members with key updates, events, and activities offered by your organisation. This can have a huge impact on member engagement and their perception of your value proposition.
Audiri offers a custom-branded app solution for a simple annual subscription fee that solves this resourcing crunch and can integrate with your organisations current technology stack, and eliminate the need for API and technical integrations. Member organisations can create their own membership app, customised for their brand, inside the app store, leaving the complexities of app development, maintenance, server and data management to the Audiri technical team. Out of the box, the app offers powerful membership engagement tools including in-built newsletters, notifications for individuals and groups, events that include RSVP capabilities, group messaging and meeting schedulers all seamlessly providing technological infrastructure to consolidate your member engagement activities.
Take control of your communication and engagement strategy!
Membership organisations have signification challenges in communication and engaging with their members – taking a strategic approach to this, including thoughtful planning and leveraging technology tools like Audiri – can be a gamechanger for your organisation. By consistently evaluating and improving your strategic approach to communication, it’s possible to reduce much of the day-to-day effort and activity out of production of content, and assign it towards member engagement, strengthening of relationships and driving your membership missions forward.
Interested in learning more about how Audiri can be a gamechanger for your organisation?
