Give New Members the Personal Touch during Chapter Onboarding

The first few months after they join your association, a new member is evaluating whether they made the right choice. This is a crucial time period for member retention. Has membership met their expectations? Are they seeing a return yet on their dues investment? Did their chapter onboarding experience help them understand how to get the most out of their membership?

Chances are new members are having wildly different onboarding experiences depending on the chapter they joined. But members can get some semblance of a consistent chapter onboarding experience if both National and chapters focus on their strengths. National can contribute expertise and resources, while chapters focus on the human touch.

New Member Onboarding: It’s Not Just Show & Tell

The first few months makes all the difference for a new member. My gym understands this membership principle. They give two months’ free membership to new members who attend a four-session training program—essentially a new member onboarding program. In these sessions, a trainer learns about the new member’s goals and interests, introduces them to different aspects of the gym, conducts a baseline fitness assessment, and suggests a two-month training program.

When a new member understands and becomes comfortable with what the gym has to offer, they’re more likely to develop a workout habit. They start to see results, become motivated to keep going, and are more likely to renew their membership.

The same principle applies to association and chapter membership. If you learn about a new member’s needs, introduce them to the chapter and association, and guide them onto the most relevant membership path, you will create a member for life.

Collaborate with Chapters on a New Member Onboarding Plan

Kaiser Insights and Dynamic Benchmarking learned in an association survey that first-year member renewal rates increase from 62 percent to 68 percent after the implementation of a new member onboarding (engagement) plan. This modest increase is just one of the benefits of an onboarding plan.

Associations also benefited from:

Feedback about what members value
Feedback about why they joined
Feedback about their professional challenges
More detailed information about each member
Increase in identified volunteers
Cleaner database

Resist the temptation to impose an onboarding plan onto chapters or affiliates. Don’t assume you know what’s best for them. You have membership expertise, but they know the day-in/day-out challenges of running a chapter. Instead, collaborate with components on your new member onboarding plan so it’s both practical and sustainable.

Ask Staff & Volunteers to Join an Advisory Group

Invite staff and volunteer leaders from a diverse selection of components to join your staff in an advisory or working group. Together you can develop and promote an onboarding plan that takes advantage of each side’s strengths: the National association’s resources and the chapter’s human “touch.”

Develop Team Building with Member Journey Mapping

To facilitate team building, do a member journey mapping exercise together—either virtually or in person. This exercise puts all of you in a new member’s shoes and allows you to share knowledge about the new member experience, as well as identify gaps, places of confusion, and areas ripe for improvement.

Elements of a New Member Onboarding Plan

A new member onboarding program isn’t only about show-and-tell. It’s about listening too. To meet a new member’s expectations, you must learn enough about them so you can show them how to best navigate the chapter and association experience.

Provide Resources & Technical Support

Both National and chapters must know what the other is doing and when. Remove any barriers to implementation by providing chapters the resources they need to uphold the plan on their end, for example, a step-by-step onboarding action plan, email templates, and web page copy. Consider providing technical support too, such as an email marketing or data-sharing platform.

Welcome New Members Right Away

Nowadays, people expect instant gratification from their online experiences. Something must happen after a new member clicks “Submit” on their membership application. Whether the application goes to National or the chapter, someone must welcome the new member as soon as possible and give them suggestions on what to do next. These suggestions can be based on the basic demographic information you collect on the membership application, such as member type, career stage, job/specialty, or location.

Set Up an Automated Email Campaign

Since most components are managed by volunteers or a small staff, and lack the technical resources of National, you can hardly expect them to react instantly to new members. Instead, National could set up an automated email campaign for new members. If you share an AMS or email marketing platform with your chapters, they can see which emails have been sent and where new members are in the onboarding workflow.

Even if you don’t share such technology with chapters, you can develop a manageable onboarding plan with them and create resources that will help them welcome and onboard new members, for example, several variations of welcome emails targeted at different types of members.

Get to Know New Members

Transform your new member outreach from an association-centric approach to a member-centric approach. Instead of barraging them with information, learn more about new members so you can better shape the onboarding campaign as well as future marketing campaigns.

Ask new members questions like:

Why did you join? What would you like to get out of your membership?
What are your three biggest challenges/frustrations at work or for your business?
What type of people would you like to meet?
What do you need to learn to move forward in your career or improve your business?

If chapters have the staff and/or volunteers to do it, a personal phone call or email goes a long way. Even though you can go deeper on the phone, many people don’t pick up their phone these days or they prefer to communicate by text or email. Find out which method each new member prefers.

Introduce Micro-volunteering Opportunities

New member outreach is an excellent microvolunteering opportunity. Instead of committing to a long-term or time-intensive responsibility, members can volunteer to make a call or correspond via email with a new member. They find out about the new member’s goals, interests, and needs, and help them take next steps. A few months later, they check in with the new member to see how they’re doing.

Launch an Onboarding Email Campaign

An onboarding email campaign could run alongside these personal touches. These emails could automatically come from the chapter, if their email platform allows automated campaigns, or they could come from National. The National/chapter onboarding working group develops the framework for an email campaign that polls new members about their needs and interests, and makes suggestions for next steps, for example, an invitation to an upcoming National webinar or chapter event.

New member onboarding has traditionally been an information-sharing exercise because that’s something National can easily do at scale. Instead, provide the membership expertise and resources that chapters need to deliver a more effective onboarding experience. Our next post describes different methods for getting a new member involved in the association and chapter.

Elements of a Chapter New Member Onboarding Program

National’s welcome email campaign should take a slow and steady approach so new members don’t experience information overload. Little by little, introduce them to the association, but only to what’s relevant for them. Select the content based on what you’ve learned from their membership application and any chapter outreach.

For example, send new vendor members an email suggesting best practices for developing relationships with fellow members, or introducing them to a few marketing opportunities. Young professionals might want to hear about early-career educational events or microvolunteering opportunities. C-suite professionals would like information about exclusive roundtables with their peers. Emails sent to a professional specialty segment could tell them about an upcoming webinar or job-specific online discussion forum.

All new members would benefit from hearing how to pursue common goals, such as connecting with other members, keeping up on industry news, contributing expertise or time, helping out on a project, or learning a new skill.

Suggest Options for New Team Member Orientation

The danger with in-person orientation sessions is yawn-inducing information overload. Instead, try a more enjoyable story-telling approach. Because stories stick in our memory, new members will be more likely to act upon what they’ve learned. Making their first few months enjoyable is a great way to increase member engagement later down the road.

Volunteers could talk about how they got involved in the association/chapter and the different ways they’ve taken advantage of membership. Allow plenty of time for formal and informal Q&A, and follow up the next day with an email linking to relevant information.

Monthly New Member Mingles

The Kansas City chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) hosts monthly New Member Mingles, an opportunity for new members to network in a small group setting. Each attendee receives coupons to use in their first year of membership for discounts on educational programming, events, and membership renewal.

Encourage Online Conferencing

Encourage chapters to foster their online community with online orientations too since new members can’t always get to meetings—or host them yourself. You could do a live webinar and then make the recording available, or do the same on a web conferencing platform like Zoom.

Host Onboarding Webinars

The International Coach Federation (ICF) hosts onboarding webinars to guide new members through ICF resources and benefits. An Associations Now article reported, “ICF uses the webinars as an opportunity to explain the ICF credential to new members. That promotion has paid off: ICF has seen a 39 percent increase in first-year members applying for the credential.”

Arrange a Welcome First Event

Remind your chapters how it feels to walk into a room where you don’t know a soul and everyone is chatting it up with friends. Encourage them to make a special effort to welcome new members at their first few events. Put something on their badge that identifies them as a new member. That alone should prompt existing members to greet them warmly, but you could also add a name badge icebreaker.

New Member Ambassadors

Ask an existing member to volunteer as event ambassadors who welcome new members and introduce them to a few others in the room. National can provide a training video or best practices tip sheet for new member ambassadors.

Encourage Structured Networking

Build in time for structured networking. New members need networking time to connect, but during open networking, association consultant Amanda Kaiser said, “Friends gravitate to friends leaving new members feeling like they are the only one in the room who doesn’t know anyone. Create guided discussions with a purpose. Roundtables, mastermind groups and discussion circles all fit the bill. These formats give [new or] potential members a chance to see that current members are just like them.”

At conferences and other large events, give new members a space of their own, like The Hive at ASAE’s Annual Meeting, where they can grab a coffee or water, relax, get questions answered, and meet other members. Ask members to “staff” the space for 30 to 60 minutes each—another microvolunteering opportunity.

Think Member Experience

Ask new members to pick up a gift before they leave the event. We heard about one association that gives new members a logo-ed coffee cup filled with treats to bring back to work. Assign a current member to call new members the week after the event to check in, hear about their experience, and suggest next steps.

Let Member Customize Their Association Experience

Members are used to setting preferences with online services and brands. During onboarding, ask new members to update their member profile with interests and other data you can use to personalize their membership experience. For example, let them opt in to receiving information about specific types of micro-volunteering opportunities, or allow them set the frequency and types of communications they want to receive. This can be done easily with membership management software.

During the first year of membership, your association and chapters will share lots of information with new members—and they will end up forgetting much of it. But you have time to slowly learn about them and introduce them to different relevant benefits of membership. By leveraging National’s resources and the chapter’s human touch, you can meet and exceed a new member’s expectations.