How to Build a Strong Membership Partnership with Your Chapters

In the association world, we live with Uncomfortable Truths. Elizabeth Engel, CAE, chief strategist of Spark Consulting, pointed out a few during our webinar: Membership Mastery: Building a Strong National-Chapter Partnership, including one we don’t like to talk about: your association and chapters are competitors.

You both go after the same people and companies for event registration and sponsorship revenue. You’re competitors for a share of your members’ attention, budget, and time.

Ideally, you have a strong partnership with your chapters. But even the best partnerships end up on shaky ground because of another Uncomfortable Truth: your association asks chapter leaders to do things they’re not good at.

Volunteer leaders are not association management or membership professionals. Most don’t have sales expertise and even if they do, there’s no guarantee they know how to sell and continue to resell an intangible experience like membership. Yet, we expect volunteers to intuitively know how to recruit, engage, and retain members.

Let’s challenge our assumptions about chapters

Putting these Uncomfortable Truths to the side for a moment, we now need to address a few Unexamined Assumptions.

Assumption: chapters are an effective channel for member recruitment. Hmm, not sure our webinar attendees agree. In the chat box, an attendee said a new member told her she’s been attending chapter events for 25 years and was never asked to join. Are you sure all your chapters excel at member recruitment?

Another assumption: chapters drive member engagement. Really? All of them? Another chat box commenter said she’s frequently heard about members who are engaged at the local level but are barely aware of the national entity. They come for local networking and look no further.

We saw evidence of this disconnect in our survey for the 2022 Chapter Performance & Benchmarking Report: only half of the associations saw a connection between chapter engagement and member retention. Unless you have software, like Chapter Performance, that collects chapter member engagement data, how can you assume a connection?

So how do you get components to be a better membership partner? What should you ask of them? What support should you offer to help them with membership responsibilities? In this post, we share Elizabeth’s answers to these questions.

Measuring member engagement at the component level

If you don’t set membership expectations for components, that same non-member will keep coming back to chapter events year after year without ever joining. Set member recruitment, engagement, and retention goals together with chapters. Share monthly membership metrics—total members, new members, retention, new member retention—so chapter leaders really know how they’re doing and how they compare to others. If possible, use software to automate these reports.

Elizabeth raised a caveat about recruitment. Boards are often fixated on membership growth. But is growth always good? Think about what happens after a successful membership drive if the chapter doesn’t have a new member onboarding and engagement plan. What’s the point of growth if member churn remains high?

Because engagement and retention go hand in hand, measure member engagement so you know how involved members are at the national and chapter levels. Member interactions mediated by technology, such as registrations and email opens, are easy to measure since they leave a digital trail.

But the key is measuring not only the interactions that matter to HQ and your chapters, but the ones that matter to members. Work with component leaders to analyze data and identify metrics that reflect the engagement that members find valuable—the kind of engagement that leads to retention.

Encourage a member-centric engagement strategy

Member-centric engagement brings value to the member, making them loyal and likely to renew. In a white paper on member-centric engagement written by Elizabeth with Anna Caraveli, they encourage associations to view the world from their members’ perspectives, learn about their challenges and goals, and connect them to solutions.

Make sure component leaders understand they have the same responsibility to boost member-centric engagement as you do by offering solutions, such as:

• Opportunities for networking, connection, and community at chapter events
• Education at chapter events
• Grassroots advocacy at the state and local level
• Communications focused on local/regional issues, news, and people members know
• Volunteering and leadership opportunities that help members acquire and deepen skills and expand their networks

Hold components accountable for delivering and measuring these engagement activities.

Be a good partner for components so they’ll be a good partner for you

Chapter participants in our benchmark study told us what the national association should do to help attract members to chapter leadership positions.

• Remove administrative burdens to the greatest degree possible.
• Automate processes through shared technology, like membership databases and dues invoicing/processing systems.

Elizabeth and the webinar attendees shared ideas for supporting components.