How can technology boost your club's members engagement and retention?

When you have the right technology in place, you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and streamline your membership management operations.

Today we are showing you how you can help your board of directors see the value of investing in club management software like Clubistry.

As the owner or manager of your club’s website or membership base, you know that membership marketing is very important to the ongoing success of your organization. You probably also recognize the importance of having the right technology in place to streamline your membership marketing efforts if your staff is very small or even worse if you are the only one managing everything.

But you can't move forward with the purchase of new club and membership management software without first convincing your board that it’s time to invest.

In this article we'll help the case for getting your board to agree on purchasing or committing to a new club and membership management system.

Goal and Challenges of Membership Clubs

Your board doesn’t always see your efforts and day-to-day challenges. So, remind them of your membership goals, and help them to understand some of the obstacles you face in reaching those goals.

• It’s a struggle to process applications for new members. Applicants downloading and filling forms manually is a hassle filled with opportunities for typos or writing mistakes. Then when those forms are received by your staff sometimes they are not readable and the opportunity for transcript errors arise. Then the board needs a system to organize and vote for membership applications, this is normally done manually and someone needs to be taking notes of what board member is agreeing to or if an application is denied. All these manual processes take time, effort and introduce the opportunity for errors.
• Communicating via email messages with applicants is time consuming, taking many hours per week to build, test, and send application emails when those are received, processed, accepted or denied.
• Member retention efforts are limited by existing technology. Most clubs are unable to execute on innovative member engagement ideas, such as creating new pages and forms/polls to capture feedback or ideas from members, modernize their website to make it more appealing to existing and new members, have a coherence theme and colors through the website to reflect the club’s identity and brand guidelines.
• Many of our day-to-day member management efforts are highly manual and time-consuming. We spend significant time on manual processes that we could be spending on developing programs that deliver member value, which in turn would lead to increased membership growth and retention.

Your focus should be in explaining how a club mananagement system can help.

Once your board understands some of the challenges you and your team face, let them know how technology can help. Here are some ways that Clubistry can help your club recruit, engage, and retain members:

• Manage member lists. Clubistry gives you a central location to track member data, including contact information and membership types. It even lets your members manage their own information through your club’s website – giving them a modern online experience and saving your staff time. They just have to Log in, go to their profile and edit their personal information without the club’s staff having to spend time on this task.
• Create a modern, accessible, mobile-friendly website to attract new members. Clubistry includes a website builder with prebuilt mobile-friendly sections that you can use to build unlimited pages. All your pages, application and custom forms will work and look great on mobile devices.
• Make it easier for members to join and renew. With Clubistry you can easily:
• Set up membership dues and due dates for your members so they can renew online. Forget about sending forms in the mail every year.
• Offer members the possibility to pay online with a credit card. This is one of the biggest quality of life improvements for both club managers and members alike: members can pay for renewals anytime, anywhere without having to mail checks or cash.
• Send member surveys to gain valuable member feedback. Clubistry offers the ability to create custom forms with as many fields as you need. With this you can create surveys, making it easy to build and send targeted surveys and get feedback, so you can continue to improve your recruitment and engagement efforts.
• Unleash the power of Content Management tools. Clubistry includes different types of content you can use on your pages to make them feel more organized and professional: Promo blocks, News, Events, FAQs, Document Library and Images just to name a few will make your website shine with ease making it more appealing for non-members to apply to join your club.

As a membership-based organization, your association must have the right technology to support your goals, address challenges, and ultimately provide a member experience that attracts members and keeps them around for years to come.  

Learn more about how Clubistry can help your organization recruit, engage, and retain members so that you can get your board on board with an investment in the technology you need to succeed. And if you are ready to give Clubistry a try you can always get started for free with a very generous free plan.