6 Membership Drive Ideas and 3 Steps You Shouldn’t Miss While Planning Your Campaign

Before you plan a campaign for membership growth, you must know exactly who you’re trying to attract.

In other words, who are your ideal members?

You can determine this by using your current data.

Analyze your current core members for clues about who your association is primarily serving. This gives you an idea of exactly who your target audience is, and who is already bringing the most money into your organization.

There are plenty of ways to segment audiences within your organization’s members. Some key demographics to target may include:

• Age group
• Gender
• Income Level
• Education
• Occupation

Of course, depending on the nature of your particular organization, there may be other aspects of your association membership to analyze as well. Take a moment to note what they are and be sure to factor them into your data analysis.

The good news is that our powerful analytical tools can create easy-to-understand visualizations to help you target your key demographic fast.

Once you know exactly who you want to base your drive ideas around, you can create tangible goals to guide your campaign.

We recommend that you always create SMART goals for your membership drives.

SMART goals get their name from an acronym.

The term SMART stands for goals that are:

1.   Specific
2.   Measurable
3.   Attainable
4.   Relevant
5.   Time-Bound

Writing goals with these aspects in mind will not only help you set clear expectations for your recruitment drive but also measure how successful it has been.

Setting your SMART goal will give you and your team criteria by which you can craft and refine your membership drive ideas, simplifying the next step exponentially.

It’s important to remember that when it comes to membership drive ideas, there is no one-size-fits-all plan.

The best ideas will always be the ones that best suit the demographic of the people you’re trying to attract.

For example

• If the data shows that your existing members value gathering information, consider creating a free download to incentivize prospective members to connect.
• If the data shows that your existing members prize personal connections, host a live event (either online or in-person) that will allow prospective members to have face time.

And don’t forget to think outside the box!

Every year, design studio Fell and Fair Productions hosts live, immersive fantasy-themed events such as their Hobbit Day Party held in Greenville, South Carolina.

Whimsical events like these not only attract like-minded people from around the region, but the buzz around the online content they create at the event also helps them expand their network nationally and even internationally throughout the year.