In marketing, lead scoring is useful to determine the potential value of a client. At its core, lead scoring helps marketers find out which clients are truly interested in making a purchase and which ones are just considering their options. Many of these metrics can be used – with very little adaptation or modification – in the niche of membership management, too.

What kind of data is involved?

Membership engagement is difficult to measure. With so many different metrics and factors involved, many organizational leaders are rarely looking at the whole picture. To increase your effectiveness when trying to benchmark and measure your association’s membership engagement, consider the following data sets:

• Member demographics: Are you targeting specific groups, such as parents, CEOs or entrepreneurs? If so, you can start by collecting and analyzing any data that is related to their demographic.
• Online behavior: With so many members embracing the internet, it’s critical to look at their online behavior. How they engage with your website and even how they act on social media can be useful information when forecasting a member’s projected participation.
• Community participation: Take a look at how they interact with their surrounding community, too – especially if you are a local organization.

Other types of data are also involved, including online and offline shopping habits, seasonal trends, regional data and more. With so much information at play, it’s easy to get bogged down in unnecessary or irrelevant details while missing the most important data.

How can you determine engagement?

In order to determine engagement based on the information you’ve collected thus far, it’s critical that you analyze and interpret all this data. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but it’s often done by grading membership engagement to help determine their overall return on investment, or ROI.

Think of it like a grade school report card. While it’s up to each individual association to establish their own grading range, many use a simple, point-based scoring system. The Florida Association of Insurance Agents, for example, recently adopted a point-based platform that consists of three separate tiers:

• Tier 1: The first tier is for members who scored eight points or higher and are considered the most engaged.
• Tier 2: Members who score between four and eight points fall into this tier.
• Tier 3: The last tier is for those who score less than four points. In other words, they are the least engaged.

As you can see, those who land in Tier 1 offer their association the highest ROI. While members in Tier 3 produce a lower ROI in general, they’re still important to your organization’s bottom line.

Busting Membership Engagement Myths

There are also many myths surrounding membership engagement, including the false assumptions that associations and membership sites are an easy way to make a passive income, that you need to spend all your time attracting new members or that it takes substantial investments to start measuring engagement.