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 Billhighway, 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.

Rethink the chapter leadership role

Nowadays, traditional chapter leadership roles require more time than many members are willing to give to their chapter. You have to wonder if relying on volunteers, not association management professionals, to deliver and measure membership value is a sustainable practice. But you have to make it work.

Chapter leadership roles are often too burdensome to attract the best members for the “job.” How can you make the job easier for them so chapter leadership continues to attract the interest of talented members?

Consider revamping job descriptions and delegating some leadership tasks to other volunteers. Microvolunteering opportunities allow more members to contribute in a low-commitment way.

Share technology

Our webinar “chatters” told us about the technology they share with components:

Billhighway for chapter banking, payment processing, and invoicing—reducing the chapter management and reporting burden
Association management system or membership database
Website platform (content management system)
Online advocacy platform
Online elections platform
Chapter listserv or online community platform
Zoom licenses
Cloud platform for document retention

Inevitably, some chapter leaders resist accepting support from HQ. Send them video testimonials from chapter leader peers who use the shared technology. Whenever you roll out any new initiative or technology, do a quiet launch first with a group of eager champions. They’ll help you convince others to adopt the new process or platform.

Provide toolkits

Survey participants also wanted HQ to provide chapter start-up kits, which many in the webinar chat do.

A membership toolkit is essential for a successful partnership. In this toolkit, explain how the membership process works at HQ and components, and include:

Training video on the toolkit resources and how to use them
Features vs benefits cheat sheet
Sample recruitment plan
Chapter elevator pitch
Sample member welcome and renewal cycle communications
Membership messaging and scripts

A webinar chatter said her association created a “plug and play” social media sharing kit for chapters. It includes graphics, a script for social media sharing, and ready-made posts with testimonials.

Offer training programs and resources

Our webinar chatters provide professional development resources to chapter leaders. Deliver chapter leader training in a variety of ways so they can fulfill their responsibilities and support your shared membership goals.

Online resource library
Live and on-demand online training
In-person training and networking events
Chapter leader online community

In step-by-step videos, teach chapter leaders how to set up engagement drip campaigns for new and veteran members. Share email copy for tailored campaigns to different member segments. Suggest appropriate call-to-actions for each segment—small things a member can do right away that will deepen their engagement.

Make data analytics easier

Member engagement scoring seems daunting to chapter leaders, but it doesn’t have to be. To get their cooperation, make it as easy as possible for chapter leaders to understand and adopt. Provide resources, such as:

Template for measuring engagement
Sample engagement activities and point values (weighting)
HQ’s engagement scoring method as a model—many association management systems do this for you

Tracking engagement at the chapter level is a lot easier if HQ sees who’s registering for events, which you can with technology like Billhighway.

Set chapter leaders up with coaching

Offer coaching office hours to individual chapter leaders. Work with association consultants, like Elizabeth Engel of Spark Consulting and our webinar partner, Peggy Hoffman of Mariner Management, who provide this service.

Encourage peer-to-peer learning

Invite chapter leaders to share their success stories at your chapter leadership conference or training events. Ask leaders to take five minutes to share what they did, how it worked, and what they’d do differently next time. Give chapter leaders opportunities to educate each other. Encourage sharing year-round in a chapter leader community.

Your chapter leaders must know and understand the strategic direction of your association and the essential role they play in supporting your association’s goals. Give them the support and training they need to be and feel like a true membership partner.

Watch the webinar and review the chat transcript and related chapter resources on our website. The best way to build a strong membership partnership with your chapter leaders is to make their job easier so they have time to focus on membership. Billhighway simplifies and automates banking and financial management for volunteer chapter leaders and helps them track and leverage chapter performance and member engagement data.