For membership organisations, the COVID-19 pandemic has placed member retention under the spotlight more than ever. Membership organisations need to work harder and faster to demonstrate their relevance and value, to retain members and entice back those who have left, in order to safeguard revenues and drive business growth.

Membership organisations have an opportunity to revamp and modernise their continuing professional development (CPD) offerings and develop, sell and promote new forms of online training to support their members’ development and most importantly to deliver increased value for their members.

People join membership organisations to learn and develop in their chosen industry and profession. It’s vital therefore, to provide members with top quality learning resources and tools that combine to deliver a personalised learning experience, one that is tailored to the unique role, position and development requirements of the individual member.

How as a membership organisation, can you maximise member benefits and value to ensure member engagement, retention and growth?

1. Embrace digital

Expectations are high when it comes to learning. There is a wealth of quality online learning materials out there. The sector specific content that you provide must match this in terms of the user experience it provides. Embracing digital is a must.

Some early indicators to consider include:

  • Do you require the use of printed forms or spreadsheets for CPD data capture?
  • Do you force the use of desktop browsers to access content i.e. do you not support mobile?

If the answers to the above questions are ‘yes’, then the chances are that your offerings need modernising to embrace digital. This is more important than ever as the younger generation of member joins your organisation.

2. Recognise that every membership organisation is different

No two membership organisations are the same. Each will have different drivers, face different membership needs, use different terminology, use different planning approaches, align with different skills and competency frameworks, have different certification requirements, different levels of membership and more.

For this reason, it’s highly unlikely that completely ‘off the shelf’ solutions will meet your needs sufficiently closely. Equally, developing a solution yourself is hugely costly and fraught with risk. A combined approach involving a ‘best in breed’ platform plus configuration, customisation and integration is key.

3. Align your learning resources with sector specific skills frameworks

Start by providing a library of quality, accessible and relevant content to your members. Many membership organisations already have a large library of valuable materials which can be provided for their members.

However, to avoid the dangers of information overload, you must be able to personalise your learning offering and align it to sector specific skills and competency frameworks together with varying membership levels and other relevant standards and qualifications.

4. Assess your member’s individual needs

Provide the tools to assess your members against skills frameworks to identify gaps and promote the right content to help them easily achieve certifications and standards and complete their CPD.

Take this one step further by enabling comparisons over time to enable your members to demonstrate progression.

5. Consider the ‘freemium’ model

Consider providing certain content and resources free of charge. Encourage users by delivering a quality user experience and then provide additional resources as part of your standard membership packages. Then consider selling premium content by using eCommerce to open up additional revenue streams.

More to come in Part 2

In Part 2, we will talk more about how membership organisations can maximise member benefits and value to ensure member retention and growth.

Agylia is a UK learning technologies company providing a fully integrated learning management system (LMS) and CPD platform, and mobile learning Apps to membership and not-for-profit organisations.

Alex Mackman
Alex MackmanTechnical Director, Agylia