How many activities did your membership organisation cancel during this spring’s lockdown? How much income fell away? How much are social distancing and working at home policies impacting your organisation- and are you prepared for this to continue or worse still a return to lockdown?
This virus made clear what was already apparent: from now on it’s digital first, physical second. But is your digital strategy ready? Here’s 5 questions any membership organisation or association can ask themselves.
☑ Are your customer journeys digital?
When everyone stays in and phone lines get overloaded, can your members interact with you fully online? Applying for membership, reservations and cancellations, or following a course? For every interaction you have with your members or other audiences, ask yourself “Can we make it digital?”
While you do so, avoid pursuing 1:1 digital copies, but look carefully at what users need, and design services that are easy, instant, available 24/7 and scalable. If you need to choose, prioritise those journeys with the biggest ROI – whether that’s bringing in more income or reducing costs.
Many membership organisations saw their income from training courses fall away throughout lockdown and beyond.. Most moved quickly to Zoom, but if you are going online anyway, why not offer courses in a truly digital, always available form? An inspiring example is Generation Global, a learning program on dialogue skills by the Tony Blair Institute that was originally developed for teachers and students in classrooms. They decided at the start of the pandemic to develop a self-directed online learning tool – and had it live in just 12 weeks.
Lucy Hayter, Head of Generation Global, explains why and how they developed their self guided learning tool developed during lockdown, .
☑ How flexible is your digital platform?
Covid-19 has reinforced the importance of adaptability and resilience. Digital platforms should be designed with this in mind – enabling organisations to quickly pivot their operations when the need arises. Just think of those retailers who could swiftly move to click and collect models when the demand for home delivery outgrew their capacity. This was made possible because they could easily change the checkout flows on their website.
Next time you renew your website and CMS, you may want to consider going for component based design and development. A website set up with modules in mind allows you to quickly adapt your processes when you need to. The choice of CMS matters here, but even more the approach the developers take.
Professional membership organisation works with Deeson to gradually migrate from Drupal 7 to a component based setup of Drupal 8, giving them greater flexibility.
☑ How diverse is your business model?
When all income but your digital services falls away, can you survive? For many organisations, digital has traditionally been a vehicle for promoting physical services. With this spring’s lockdown, access to physical assets and experiences was lost, and with it much of the website traffic that supported cross selling.
Think for example about museums, where most online shop visitors came via exhibition pages. We have therefore seen organisations looking at how they can generate new, wholly digital income streams. The V&A and Royal Academy of Arts host extremely popular workshops and courses, for example – could these kinds of activities go online?
Professional membership organisations should think about what unique assets they have – what their unfair advantage is – and what digital services they can develop around them. Consider: what knowledge or network do you have and where you can leverage this? You might be able to offer certain member benefits to non-members for a fee.
☑ Do you include all of your audiences?
Lockdown unfortunately made it clear that some people are still not connected digitally, and many groups are underrepresented in terms of content and services. Added to that the BlackLivesMatter movement has highlighted the lack of consideration for people of BAME backgrounds when many decisions are made.
With becoming digital first also comes the responsibility to consider all audiences. For example by doing qualitative user research amongst non-users to find out what they need, and by designing and developing according to accessibility guidelines. At Deeson, we take this policy as standard.
CIOB champions accessibility in rebuilding its website. Pages work on all sorts of devices, have enough contrast for visually impaired users and can be read text-only using a screen reader.
☑ Are you learning from data?
Crunching the numbers might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s important to know how people are interacting with you. Personally, I find it intriguing to know if people research events more during their lunch break, and what subjects and content formats get the most traction. Also, research can save you some expensive mistakes: we recently tested a new membership signup form for a client, and found that we had indeed improved the design, but needed to shorten the texts to really improve user experience and conversion.
Understanding what your online visitors are using or missing on your site, what they love or hate, where they struggle or succeed, is essential to realising any of the tips above! It’s definitely time to set up that measurement framework if you don’t yet have one!
Deeson is a leading digital agency delivering transformative web platforms and digital change for clients including ITV, BDO, Imperial War Museums, University of Oxford, University of Derby, Bond, Chartered Institute of Building, Food Standards Agency, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and the National Crime Agency.
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