Onboarding Needs a Plan

In membership we all hear “if there are no members, there is no association”, and it’s true. But winning someone over is only part of the job. What you do with them once they’ve joined is just as important.

People argue that sales teams are more important than member engagement, but I think it is often the other way round. (Disclaimer: I of course see the value in sales teams. Sales people, don’t come for me!)

Once someone has joined, a different kind of work starts. Sending them a welcome email and a login isn’t onboarding (sorry). Onboarding takes place over a period of time, is personalised, and needs an actual plan.

The plan should tell members what’s available to them and, more importantly, how to use it. Telling someone you have a resource library doesn’t mean they’ll use it. Showing them how to log in, search it, and find what they need probably will.

If you’ve ever joined a gym, you’ll know how this goes. You have your induction, including the tour, getting your key fob, maybe a free session with a trainer, and being shown how to book on to classes. This is onboarding, and it should be essentially the same for membership associations, private members’ clubs, and any sort of loyalty programme. It just varies in depth, detail, and format.

Onboarding works both ways, too. While members are finding out what you offer, you find out why they joined and what they actually want from you, and in my experience that second bit is the one that gets missed. Ask the right questions early and everyone knows where they stand, and you learn what value looks like to each member, because it isn’t the same for everyone. You can then point people to the events, resources, and contacts that are relevant to them, instead of sending everyone everything. And once you know what someone expects, you can go beyond it, with an introduction they didn’t ask for or an opportunity they didn’t know existed. A member who gets more than they expected in their first few months has a good reason to renew, and to tell other people about you.

None of this helps if it stays with whoever did the onboarding. What you learn about a new member, why they joined, what they want, and what they expect, needs to be recorded and shared with the colleagues who can act on it. The events team can introduce them to others in their sector, and the policy team can involve them in the issues they care about.

Getting onboarding right, especially if you have a decent self-service option, means many members will help themselves. That saves your team’s time and resources, and it saves members time too. Your team can then focus on the members who need a person. Some members will always want to pick up the phone, and that’s fine. Onboarding helps you work out who they are.

It also depends on who’s joined. With an individual membership, the person who decided to join is the person using the membership. So onboarding is about finding out why they joined and showing them how to get the most from their membership, based on their career and interests. Much of that can be automated.

Companies are trickier. The person who signs is often senior, rarely uses the membership, and is the one who decides whether to renew. Meanwhile, the people who’d get the most out of it may have no idea they have access. Agree on what success looks like for their organisation, then make sure their staff know about the membership and use it in ways that fit their roles. Get to know more than one person there, because if your only contact leaves, your renewal is suddenly in doubt.

Whoever has joined, it all starts with the handover from sales. In an ideal world, sales passes on everything they’ve learned and the new member never has to repeat themselves.

In the real world, sales has moved on to the next target (as they should, that’s their job), the engagement team may know little more than what they can find out online and the member ends up repeating much of what they said during the sales and sign-up process.

A good handover gives the engagement team what they need on day one: why the member joined, what they want to get out of their membership, who else is involved, and what they were promised. Especially what they were promised.

You’ve spent months winning that member. Spending a few weeks making sure they stay is the least they deserve, and it’s a lot less work than trying to win them back.