Increasing Engagement

Above all, for any association to engage their members, they first have to know who their members are. That means leaders must learn a number of things about their members, such as their strengths, weaknesses, problems they face and what they need help with in order to connect with them.

To engage staff and members in the best way possible, you have to treat them as individuals to understand their needs; otherwise, the masses are probably going to hear about it. To keep up with the shifting mindset that such a loss of public perception has afforded, the way people interact with an organization must allow for more customization. In order to leverage their full engagement potential, management structures should be designed to incorporate the strengths and aid the weaknesses and working styles of their staff and members.

Engaging your audience through emotional connections drives a desire to frequently interact, which also helps form habit — that key component to maximizing revenue generation with the individual and with their network of aligned friends and colleagues. Without the emotional connection forged through common purpose and values, individuals are rarely motivated to engage in this way.

Engaging members requires strong resources (e.g., exclusive studies, noted experts, relevant news content) capable of explaining what’s going on in the members’ fields of interest. The more valuable their membership is to them, the more frequently they will engage and form a habit.

With interests changing faster than ever today, it is harder to predict where your audience will want to engage even in the near future. For this reason, it is more critical than ever to find ways to interact with your audience frequently to gather real-time insights into the trending and likely future interests of the group. These improved insights allow associations to better plan blog content, conference sessions/speakers, planned publications and educational courses.

People are generally terrible at forecasting the future for themselves or others. This is why predictive intelligence technology is so important when looking ahead. By looking more at the behaviors of a member or user, an organization can use tools to predict their future interests more accurately than by looking at the rear-view mirror feedback that typically comes from survey results.