Member Jungle for Maximising Engagement - A Primer for Organisations
You have an event coming up and you want this to be your best yet! How do you increase interaction with your members to get more people involved and talking about the event? Our Director of Membership, Leigh Clover, walks you through a campaign and how you can use Member Jungle’s membership software to get closer to your members.
Engagement is crucial for any membership organisation’s survival. Each club and association is different, but it’s our common interests and our camaraderie that brings it all together. How to keep that connection and communication going and flowing?
For an organisation to thrive, it must engage with their active members, stimulate its less active membership to action, and trigger interest among potential new members. Events can be a great way to do this!
In a world of limited time and resources, organisations that engage successfully are generally themselves successful since they can use that engagement to drive membership, participation, and renewals.
I spent many years working with leading brands. Like any brand, you’ll need to build a relationship with your members and expand that relationship to touch prospective members.
Your Member Jungle Dashboard is a Membership Relationship Management Platform
Big brands think of how to create meaningful relationships with customers. To do this, they use a customer relationship platform or a CRM to maintain information about their customers, classify them into categories, and manage certain aspects of the communication process. We made sure Member Jungle provided features comparable to many CRM platforms with additional features made specifically for membership organisations, such as text and email campaigns for your membership.
SMS or text and email campaigns can be categorised according to their previous online activity or membership level. Segmenting your email and SMS list is a great way to target your communications with specific, relevant information that will keep your audience interested and engaged. To make this process easy, Member Jungle created a set of default categories including:
-
Membership database
-
Purchasers from your store
-
Event attendees and registrants
-
Business/member directory listees
Get the Engagement Machine Turning
Just as the Member Jungle platform incorporates the best features of a CRM to communicate with your membership, Member Jungle is a cloud-based software solution that helps you manage content to push relevant, timely, or interesting information to your audience.
By using the blog, discussion forum, document library, events, news, and photo gallery pages and back-linking to these from your club social media accounts, your website becomes an engagement machine.
Putting it Together with the Tiger Bay Yacht Club
To demonstrate how all this engagement might work in practical terms, we’re going to run you through a fully implemented campaign for Tiger Bay Yacht Club.
-
Since the highlight of the club’s annual season is a race that celebrates the founding of TigerBay (the Tiger Bay Founders’ Race) the first step is to add the event to your club’s Events page. If you plan to sell tickets, you add the tickets to your online store.
-
Once your event is posted, it makes sense to write and post a short blog post describing the race. Perhaps giving a short history of the race, last year’s participants, how the yacht club’s sponsorship has had a positive effect on the Tiger Bay economy, or any topic that will develop the race promotion. You’ll definitely want to link your blog post to your Event page.
-
If you want to take the promotion further, use Member Jungle’s slideshow feature to promote the race on your Homepage with images from last year, the event details, and a link to your blog post.
-
Now that you’ve created pages on your site for people to read, it’s time to let the Tiger Bay Yacht Club membership know that the race is coming up and how they can get tickets. This is where you can use the email and SMS campaign features built into Member Jungle.
-
To solicit volunteers for help with set-up, clean-up, or to help monitor the race course; you can create a targeted email and SMS campaign to focus exclusively on this membership group.
-
You’ve posted information on your web site and notified your membership and previous race attendees. Now it’s time to tell the world at large about the race with social media posts that backlink to your blog post and your event announcement. You can use your club Blog page to tease out new posts periodically to maintain interest and count down to the event.
-
Returning to the email and SMS campaign module in Member Jungle, provide updates on the race preparation, areas where the Tiger Bay Yacht Club needs more assistance and reminders for planning and preparation meetings.
-
As the race happens, your News page is an excellent way to post daily updates as they happen and link these your social media pages. By posting to your News page and linking back to these posts, you ensure that your event is captured on your page and drives web traffic directly to the Tiger Bay Yacht Club rather than disappearing into the vortex of Facebook or Twitter after the event is over.
-
With all the pictures your club takes at the Tiger Bay Founders’ Race, collect these and post them to your Photo Gallery page and incorporate the best into a blog post recapping the event.
-
Since you now have a list of race attendees, send a follow-up with links to your Photo Gallery page with a call to action to join the yacht club and participate in more fun events. Repost to your social media sites as well to drive more traffic to your club portal.
-
Finally send an email and SMS to the Tiger Bay Yacht Club members thanking them for their participation and recognising the tireless efforts of your volunteers.
-
Why Your Sports Shooting Clubs Need A Membership Management System
4th October 2024
Now, I’ll be honest, despite growing up around guns and gun people, I’m not much of a shooter or a hunter. Despite this, I love finding out about strange and unusual
... more -
5 Ways To Build A Sense Of Belonging In Your Club Or Association
30th September 2024
Humans have evolved over a very long time to be social creatures. From our distant ape ancestors banding together to survive the dangers of the wilds to generation after generation
... more -
How Peak & Parent Bodies Can Manage Their State or Regional Groups Better With Member Jungle
16th September 2024
Being a parent is hard. I assume I'm not a parent yet. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure one day I'll meet Mr. Right, and we'll do what countless generations
... more