The best recruitment marketing ever invented won't be fully effective if your association's membership options aren't appealing.

Consider the types of memberships you offer. Membership in associations cannot be a one-size-fits-all proposition. Different types of members will have different needs and may have different designs on what they expect to gain from membership. They may also have different budgets.

Offering different types of memberships isn't necessarily a new idea for associations, but in recent years more associations have started identifying advantages to opening up new and different opportunities for prospective members to join.

This idea can be broken out into similar but separate concepts: member categories and member tiers. Categories are generally dictated by the association, and members are fit into respective groups. Tiers, on the other hand, offer the members options to choose their own levels of membership.

Categorized memberships

Membership organizations generally either target individual members or groups, such as agencies or companies. A best practice for any association is to make sure someone who wants to join has an applicable option, regardless of what the primary or typical member may be.

In MGI's 2015 benchmarking report, 17 percent of responding associations listed "membership too diverse; difficulty meeting needs of different segments" as a top-three challenge to growing membership.

Many associations have traditionally maintained membership categories to accommodate different types of members.

The American College of Emergency Physicians, for example, is an individual membership organization built largely of doctors. Not all doctors are in the same stage of their careers, however, so ACEP offers a few categories.

In addition to regular membership, there are reduced-rate options for transitioning physicians who have completed residency within the past three years. There is also an option for Candidate Membership — medical students and interns.

TAPPI, an association focused on the paper industry, also helps transition early-career professionals into membership with student memberships as well as a discounted young professional option for members just starting their careers in the industry.

Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) is comprised largely of group members organizations like DMOs and CVBs that market destinations to tourists and meeting planners. However, DMAI still provides reasonable options for prospective individual members who may not be employed by such an organization, as well as a Partner and Sponsorship option for companies that may not be destination marketing groups themselves, but are suppliers and vendors who want access to those groups.

Like many associations, DMAI also provides inexpensive student and educator memberships that afford individuals the opportunity to access resources and network as they begin or teach careers in destination marketing.

"We really just want the students to be a part of the picture and let them know what a destination marketing organization is and what it does," Director of Member Relations Mitchel Gehrisch said. "The Educator membership allows us to get our information to them so they are able to educate their students."

Dues for DMAI's primary membership category the DMOs themselves are determined by the member organization's operating budget. Member groups with the smallest budgets currently pay $300 annually for membership, while members with the largest budgets pay more than $7,000.

"Half of our membership has a budget of a million dollars or less," Gehrisch said. "That system really enables any size DMO [to join] because we didn't want to leave anybody out."

Categorized membership structures such as this allow the association to adjust dues and benefits based on criteria such as company size, revenue or career level.

Tiered memberships

A more progressive trend for associations is a tiered membership approach. MGI's 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report found only 12 percent of associations claimed to have a "tiered structure of increasing benefits."

Differing slightly from member categories, tiered memberships provide different options perhaps even among categories that put more flexibility in the hands of members themselves.

The DMAI Partner and Sponsorship option is an example. It provides different levels of access to members at increasing costs, of course that best suit a company's needs, goals and budget.

Several years ago, the Professional Beauty Association (PBA) decided its price points weren't working for members, so the organization overhauled its dues structure into a tiered model that gave more flexibility to prospective members. For its business members, the PBA scrapped its old structure of dues based on gross sales and introduced a ladder of five options based on how many employees the business wanted to allow access to PBA benefits.

"That's been great," Elizabeth Fantetti, PBA director of membership and association programs said. "We've added probably another 4,000 constituents to our database just as benefit recipients."

The PBA also changed the options for individual members, including addition of a free membership option that allowed PBA access to people who had been hesitant to join in the past for financial reasons.

"The free membership has been wildly popular," Fantetti added.

The paid individual membership was reduced from $115 to $50, but no longer includes tickets to the association's major event. However, with a half-price event ticket benefit for members, the difference for joining and buying tickets compared to purchasing full-price tickets as a nonmember is only $5, leading many to lean toward the membership route.

"As for pure membership success, we've definitely moved in the right direction," Fantetti summarized.

In another approach, ACEP provides additional subcategories for regular members what it calls "sections." More than 30 different sections allow physicians to pick as many niche groups (e.g. Cruise Ship Medicine or Medical Humanities or Forensic Medicine) as they like for additional fees. This approach, more akin to a la carte tiers, allows member physicians to be part of the larger organization while adding optional focus on their specialized areas if they desire.

Having too many membership options can become cumbersome for the association and potentially confusing for the prospective member, but too few membership categories can exclude potential members. Assess where your members and potential members come from, and make sure you have appropriate categories and/or tiers to accommodate.

Sponsored memberships

MGI's benchmarking report also found 78 percent of individual associations offer student memberships, whereas only 13 percent of trade associations do.

Sixty-one percent of "combination" associations offer student memberships. These can be a valuable recruiting tool for future members, as the same report found on average 38 percent of student members joined individual associations as full-time members.

One approach to the student membership that has gained favor lately is the sponsored membership.

An interesting case study on the potential value of sponsored memberships comes from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), which started a sponsored member program in 2007. Since then, student membership has skyrocketed from 3,000 to more than 22,000.

The intriguing, and perhaps most telling, part of the story is that the student membership only cost $15. It can be inferred that even this small amount was a significant deterrent to thousands of potential young members. Finding a sponsor to cover the costs of young or student members can provide associations an audience full of potential future members.

In the AIChE model, the memberships are funded by corporate sponsors. Similarly, paper industry association TAPPI taps into corporate sponsors and vendor members to help fund student memberships. Sponsors cover the $35 cost to support a student member for a year.

"Our student membership has grown exponentially since the sponsorship program started," noted Mary Beth Cornell, CAE, Membership & Global Development Director of TAPPI. "A lot of them, if they go into the industry, they convert into full-time members."

While the benefits to the association are obvious, the corporate and vendor sponsors also benefit from the relationship.

"Our relationship with TAPPI has expanded beyond our publishing partnership by providing 75 student memberships to the future leaders in the pulp and paper industry," Andy Keith, Vice President, Partnership, MultiView, said. "Students and young professionals are the next generation of experts in their fields and are an invaluable asset to their industry."

This article is an adapted excerpt from the MultiView ebook "Modern Practices for Member Recruitment and Retention." See below for more information.



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