One thing about member retention is that it is constantly on the mind of associations, no matter the season. Earlier this year, we emphasized the benefit of using surveys to improve membership retention. Surveys can prove vital when implementing a strategy to retain members, but what do you do once you have all this feedback? How do you effectively use the responses from your members in order to keep their interest in your organization? Here are some helpful ways of using survey feedback to increase membership retention:

Ideas for Content

One of the toughest and most enterprising things for member-based organizations to do is to stay on top of the modern, current and developing trends in their respective industry. With the world moving at a faster pace each year, it becomes even more important to be able to sift through everything that is in vogue and adopt what is valuable and desirable to your membership base.

Feedback from your member surveys is a fantastic way to find out what your members are missing. Optimally, your survey questions should not only be designed to find out what content your members want to see from you, but also provide some practical, directional examples. More than likely, your members will give you some bare minimum answers for your questions. In order to have more clarity, it will behoove you to give more context for your members by including some detailed options such as useful technologies, marketing trends, etc.

Once you have the survey feedback, it’s just a matter of determining the level of interest throughout your membership and bringing the content to your members.

Provisional Committees

It goes without saying that the more a member participates in your organization, the more likely they are to stay a member of your organization. Member participation increases member retention. However, just like figuring out what content your members are interested in seeing, it can be quite challenging to figure out how to entice your members to devote their free time to your organization. You have to be convincing and make a rather compelling case for why your members should actively participate in your organization.

With the feedback from your surveys, you should be able to determine what your members’ main goals and priorities are for joining your association. You should use your survey feedback as a starting point to assess all your committees and discern which ones are useful and which ones are not. Furthermore, based on the survey feedback you can pinpoint which committees would be perfect to welcome member participation.

Provisional committees are the most suitable for member participation. They keep members engaged without disrupting the structure of your organization. Think of special events committees, specific research committees, etc. Rely on your survey feedback to figure out which committee your members would most likely want to be a part of, and do not be reticent in creating one if need be, no matter how novel or unconventional the committee may be. The beauty about provisional committees is that if they do not perform well, they can always be adjusted for the next time.

Survey feedback is extremely advantageous to get into the minds of your members and that information is essential to boosting membership retention. Nonetheless, you can only acquire that kind of feedback if you actually send out a survey. Our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss, has an easy-to-use survey tool that can hand you that specific feedback on a silver platter. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo and don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.