How do you know if your members are engaged?

In our previous blog, we explained how data can help you monitor and understand your member retention rates. We also noted that engagement was a key factor in driving retention. So, we’ll now take a closer look at engagement – what it is and how you can measure it.

Engagement is about a lot more than just retention. To truly understand engagement, you should look at all the ways a member can interact with your organisation and recognise how they’re accessing the benefits you offer. These benefits will hugely differ across organisations but could cover group participation, educational content, professional and legal support, event attendance and much more. It’ll also include softer elements, such as digital engagement through email, web or other online platforms – whether this is free or paid-for content.

It’s fairly common that many organisations are very good at measuring the success of their activities – how many people attend events, how many website visitors there are and how many people download a brochure. But understanding engagement needs to go beyond this to understand these interactions from the individual member perspective.

At the next level, some organisations will start to measure specific initiatives at an individual level. This means understanding the recency, frequency and depth that somebody is engaging with a touchpoint. For example, this may mean looking at email engagement and segmenting members based on their recency (when did they last read an email), frequency (how many emails have they read in the last three months) and depth (have they just opened an email or have they gone further and clicked on links – see the below chart).

Such a model can be set up relatively easily for some touchpoints, but for others it means finding the right data points and deciding how to measure them. The depth of engagement can be a particularly tricky aspect and we recommend spending some time researching and trialling what this may mean in certain aspects of your organisation. For example, with educational content, it could be the length of the content or the additional time needed to fully complete tasks. Is it free or is there a financial commitment?

Getting there may not be easy but having this perspective on your activities can reveal some fascinating insights. You may have great attendance at your events but is it always the same people who attend (i.e., vast swathes of your members are not engaged in this way) or is it always different people and very few go on to attend future events?

At Wood for Trees we advocate going even further than this and building an engagement model to measure, monitor and understand the ways your members interact with your organisation across the broad spectrum of possibilities noted above. This, of course, adds further complications because you’ll then not just have to look at different levels of one activity, but weight the ‘engagement factor’ of lots of separate activities.

I remember years ago a charity client asked me to help them put a monetary value on a campaigning activity for their cause, so they could compare this against a financial donation. We never did decide, and I think this is an almost impossible question, but I do think you can give relative weights to activities that facilitate some kind of comparison. There will be no absolute right answer here but through research and discussion you should be able to obtain a view of what’s important to your organisation and create a raw engagement score to measure your members against. Having this information will give you a whole new understanding of your members.

Initially, we suggest taking your raw score and aggregating up to a very high-level engagement segmentation or a more detailed matrix cross referencing on any other types of segmentation you may have (see below charts).

There’s no simple answer to any of this but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to measure different levels of member engagement.

If you’d like further help with this or more ideas, please feel free to get in touch at [email protected] or request a free copy of our whitepaper on how we have tackled this in the charity sector here.