This one concept can propel your most successful membership drive yet

Changing your perspective can change your results

Melinda Starkweather
October 18, 2021

“This is so frustrating I’m ready to quit,” a member told me on the phone. The member had been trying to renew her membership, but the renewal process was confusing. She wanted to set up an auto-renewal, but then, despite entering her financial information, the system showed that she hadn’t yet paid.

As I worked with the member, she continued complaining – and she was right to.

If we’re asking people for their time and money, we need to make sure that their time and patience aren’t wasted on bugs or processes that haven’t been stress-tested. How can you as association professionals make member sign-up and renewal easier?

Here’s a riddle: What do you call a member who becomes frustrated with the renewal process?

The fundamentals of user experience (UX) design can provide associations with a roadmap for changing how your members experience the join process. I fully acknowledge that UX and UI fields are interrelated and much more involved than the brief items I’m mentioning here, but there are some basic concepts that can transform your organization’s strategic thinking about how you close the sale on memberships.

Consider the following:

Identify personas. Who are your members? Who are your prospective members? How will each interact on your site? What are their goals and how can you meet their expectations? How facile is each persona with technology? Will they need videos to demonstrate how to use basic tools or will they catch on quickly with brief explanations?

Empathize with the person using your site. If you’re an admin, you probably know the site best from the admin end, rather than the user side. You need to step out of your shoes and into someone else’s. If you go to a new site, what do you look for? What markers are helpful?

Part of empathy is considering issues of accessibility and usability. Have you accounted for users with auditory or visual needs outside of the norm? How easy is it to find the buttons to join? If there is a process, is it clear? Is there a lag time the user should expect? What should they see if they’re successful?

What are the interactions you want different kinds of users to engage in? You need to make each path very clear if you have different member types or memberships.

Task Flows are important to review. Task flows determine how users accomplish goals using the options of the site architecture. Within the task flows are the User Flows. How will the user accomplish the activities as you've set them up? What are the possible user paths within the task flows? Are there issues that may pull the user out of the optimized flow?

Most AMSs have customizations around the member join process, from variable language for different member types to diverse payment options. As you consider your association’s personas and empathize with how they experience their activities (user flow), you can more thoughtfully set up task flows to improve their engagement. Engagement through the join process translates into successful membership drives.

The answer to the riddle: a non-member

Prevent non-members. Starkweather just completed its One Minute YM© “Membership Matters” series. In this series we outlined different tactics to optimize the member experience, and from there, optimize your engagement with them. Check out this sheet of actionable tips to further engage your members. You can also watch the series here on YouTube and sign-up for our weekly One Minute YM Email series, so you don’t miss out.

Melinda Starkweather is co-founder of Starkweather Association Services and developed the Cirrus Change Readiness platform. She is a coach and speaker on change management. She loves dogs.