How Successful Organizations Onboard New Members for Maximum Engagement

What do we talk about when we talk about onboarding?

For associations, onboarding means helping your members use your services and products successfully. The better your members are at using the benefits you provide, the better you’re doing your job. That success starts from onboarding.

We’ve found that a lot of member organizations focus on the items they send and give away. We hear about email welcomes v. welcome kits (according to Marketing General’s 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmark Report, 74% of individual associations used an email welcome and 50% sent a welcome kit).

We hear discussions about the effectiveness of members-only website sections or new-member introductory email series. We hear debates over whether branded mugs or providing pastries at new-member orientations made members engage more.

What if we all thought about onboarding differently?

Instead of a transactional moment where you hand out swag or brochures in exchange for your new member’s dues and personal information, think about onboarding as a complete experience setting the tone for your entire relationship with that member.

Member organization professionals reported to Marketing General’s benchmark report that “lack of engagement” was the number one reason members failed to renew in 2015, accounting for 38% of churn. With that in mind, we should always be talking about engagement when we talk about onboarding.

To shift the your onboarding mindset toward encouraging engagement and creating excitement, you’ll need to think creatively but also practically.

Elements of an Effective Onboarding Program

Putting together an onboarding program designed to make your members want to interact with each other and you means finding a few key pieces.

1. Give them that warm, fuzzy feeling

Your new member should feel valued immediately. Really, they should feel valued throughout every touch point in your marketing funnel, but once they’ve crossed the velvet rope and become association members, roll out the proverbial red carpet.

A lot of member organizations feel the member retention process begins immediately after onboarding. It really begins the moment a member decides to pay for membership. At that moment, they’ve agreed to give you their information, dues and the chance to show them why they should engage.

Make them feel immediately like they’ve made the right choice and that you will competently deliver on all of the benefits you marketed. A few ways to wrap your new member up in an aura of value include:

• A seamless onboarding process. Try to avoid pitfalls like making new members enter their personal info multiple times or having to manually find info themselves. You can use screen-sharing software to watch a new member go through the process a few times. Seeing where they hesitate or stumble can help you identify problem areas.
• Tell them all about the goods. This isn’t the time to be coy! Tell your new member everything they might need to know about your organization, from how to access member-only areas, register for events, communicate with local sub-chapters or anything else. Make them feel like they’ve entered an entire world of potentially valuable options.
• Choose quality over quantity when it comes to swag. Okay, so we said not to focus on swag, but let’s be honest…everyone loves swag! The idea here is to make your swag part of the whole process of showing value, so err on the side of high-quality, useful items. You would rather have your member associate a beautifully designed T-shirt or quality folio with your organization than a bunch of cheap pens or sticky pads.

2. Take care of the basics

Of course, while your new member feels dazzled and appreciated throughout the onboarding process, you need to be accomplishing the basic requirements of onboarding.

Make sure you’re capturing all of the information you need to best serve your new member while they’re going through onboarding. The trick is making it feel like this process is invisible (or at least not annoying).

Consider using this chance to gather some baseline qualitative data such as:

• What does the new member expect to receive from your organization?
• What pieces of your marketing effort did they see before joining?
• Have they previously attended an event?

This data will come in handy for measuring things like retention and churn, but as we all know from being mired in endless forms ourselves, there’s a limit to how many questions anyone wants to answer in an onboarding survey. You’ll have to prioritize what information is most important to you and keep the survey brief.

A really easy way to make sure your onboarding process accomplishes what it needs to? Go through it yourself! Take a moment to periodically go through your own onboarding process to look for opportunities to improve.

3. Connect new members with your rockstars

Humans are social creatures. We tend to follow strong examples in group settings and seek out what’s “normal” in a new group when we join.

Consider creating a cohort of highly engaged members — these can be board members or just really active and social members — and connect new members with one of these “social ambassadors” right away.

A few ways you could do this:

• Automatically include new members in a social group for their region
• Set up a quick call with a longtime member where your new member can ask anything about the organization
• Hold social “welcome parties” for new members where they’re encouraged to log on at a certain time to “meet” a group of engaged existing members (kind of like a digital counterpart to a new-member orientation)
• Give new members the chance to register for subgroups like young professionals’ groups or women’s leadership groups during onboarding

4. Follow up on the promise of your onboarding

Once you’ve walked your new member down your red-carpet onboarding process, make sure you keep showing them how much you’re invested in their member experience. Use the data you gathered about why they joined in the first place and what their prime benefits are to keep them engaged.

If you have a member management database, you can easily communicate with members through mail and email integrations. Try adding members to custom mailing and email lists depending on their onboarding survey answers to make sure you’re sending them things they actually want to read or attend.

Keep providing those chances to connect to more members. Adding a social element to your organization can be a huge boost for retention.

Whether that’s a Facebook group, a regular Twitter chat, a Google group or a customized private social network within your member management database, members like talking to each other between face-to-face events. Getting involved in these conversations as a community manager can give you a lot of insight into what your members want and the things they’re concerned about, too.

Practical Onboarding Considerations for Member Organizations

We know: all of this sounds great in theory, but you have limitations. You have budgets, boards, existing processes, existing software, no time to outline a new onboarding process, not enough data or all of the above.

A well-designed onboarding process that accomplishes all of the things we talked about above doesn’t have to be a logistical nightmare. We’ve seen highly successful onboarding programs made up of a few emails and a couple of webinars. We’ve seen successful programs where every new member received a personalized gift basket and a coffee date with a local committee member — and everything in between.

The point is: know your membership and design a process that encourages people to participate in the best parts of your organization.

Software can play a huge role in how easy or hard an onboarding process might be. If your current member management database software has no integrations for email, no reporting capabilities or no way to help your members connect socially, think about adding compatible programs or finding an all-in-one solution.

Print-based onboarding may still make sense for some organizations, but most of the time, online onboarding is way more convenient for your members and more cost-effective for you. Going digital opens up a lot of options as far as custom websites, working with web-based applications or building an onboarding workflow inside member database software programs.

For instance, in MemberMan’s onboarding area, you can create a customized and automated onboarding workflow that can send emails, postcards or letters on a schedule. You can also automatically create tasks for the person in charge of your onboarding as soon as a new member signs up.

The three elements of the magical member formula are engagement + retention + growth. Getting to high levels of all three is all about doing the right things for your members and making sure they know how important they are — from the first second they become part of your membership family.