Membership Programs: Challenges and Joys

By Mary Jaksch

Membership programs are rewarding, both personally and financially. However, don’t underestimate the amount of ongoing work that a membership program demands. It’s definitely not a “fix and forget” thing.

Quite apart from continually creating new content, there is a lot of administrative work. You’ll need to solve access problems, troubleshoot your site, update content, answer questions, be active on the forum, liaise with volunteers and staff members, and so on.

As your membership programs grow, you’ll be able to create a team that deals with a lot of these issues. But the workload seems to stay the same. Because you need to be in dialogue with your team, and solve some issues yourself as you’re the one who knows the complete system the best.

Build a team

As your membership grows, so does the workload. In order to manage the workload, you will need to form a team. You won’t need others right at the start, but you need to keep an eye out for strong leaders amongst your members who could be come team leaders. The way to spot leaders is to observe how they react in the forum. Are they friendly? Are they self-starters? Do they come to you with suggestions? Do they offer their help?

Once you’ve identified them, reward them by bringing them into the lime-light so that they get high visibility in your group. For example, you can make them a Moderator in the forum, or give them a voluntary position. In time, as your income grows, you will want to pay your key team.

In even if your membership program rocks, people will leave. We have a very high retention in the A-List Blogger Club, but it doesn’t happen by accident. You need to put in place retention strategies.

Retention Strategies

It’s much less effort to retain members, than to get new ones. It’s very important to put in place retention strategies.

• Create a good vibe: When new people walk through your doors, you need to make them feel welcome. When your membership site is still small, you’ll still be able to do that individually, but soon you need to put some things in place in order to make people feel welcome.Tip: When you welcome new members, remind them why they joined and list all the benefits. This lifts their level of motivation and excitement.

• Welcome Team: As a newcomer, it can be quite difficult and disheartening to find your place in a group that’s already bonded. If you ever changed school as a teenager you’ll know all about that! What you as do as your program starts grows, is to create a ‘Welcome Team’. The team emails new members and makes sure that they feel welcome and well oriented.

• FAQ for new members: When new members join, it can be a bit disorienting if you have a lot of material. A way around that is to create a FAQ in order to get new members up to speed fast.

• “Welcome” Bonus: It feels good to be welcomed with a present. This is something you can use in your membership program. Create a giveaway that new members get. That instantly creates goodwill.

• Make your site user-friendly: It’s important to display your learning content in a way that’s easily accessible, and so that new members can see at a glance what is on offer.

• Create overlapping content: A great way to structure content for retention is to create overlapping content. For example, you might want to do a three part series of information that rolls out over three months. Then you create a next series of three months that starts on the third months of the first series. In this way there is always something to look forward to in the next month.

Your role

When you first start a membership program, you are the central figure, and it revolves around what you do and what you say. But as a program evolves, this changes, especially if you create an environment that encourages interaction between members. In a well-run membership program, your importance as the center of the group should diminish and the group itself should step into that central place.

In part, the energy of a group is due to the size. For example, if you have a membership of fifty or under, the forum will be very quiet, and you’ll have to put a lot of energy into the group. Once you get to a size of about one hundred members, the group will create its own momentum and the forum will be active, even though activity may still be low. Once you get to over 200 members, a membership program starts to rock and will create its own momentum.

All in all, membership programs are a fantastic! You get a lot of satisfaction, you are able to help others, and you get a regular income stream. Try it!