New Guide for Increasing Member Engagement

CQ Roll Call released a new guide for nonprofit membership organizations and associations titled, Increasing Engagement: How to Keep Members Active When Your Issues Aren’t Hot.  Asserting that “keeping members engaged is the single largest challenge that associations face,” the ten-page guide is an informative resource on campaign branding, creating an infrastructure for engagement, identifying issues, leveraging peer-to-peer outreach, reengaging your advocacy team, and other strategies for increasing member engagement.

Increasing Engagement reviews the results of a recent CQ Roll Call survey about the challenges and opportunities nonprofit associations face. Thirty-six percent of nonprofit associations indicated that engaging members is the greatest challenge their organizations face, a higher percentage than any other issue, including securing sufficient “budget/financial resources” for their work. Forty-four percent of the respondents said they thought their members and supporters could be more active, and 75% said that it is difficult or very difficult to involve members and supporters in their advocacy campaigns.

The guide warns that calls to action and regular newsletters “only go so far” and that nonprofits must deploy multiple additional strategies to keep members actively engaged, particularly when the organizations’ issues are not perceive to be “hot.” Increasing Engagement provides an array of recommendations to engage members more effectively, including tips related to:

  • Getting “local” to tell your story
  • Using gamification to improve member retention and satisfaction
  • Encouraging leadership participation
  • Celebrating wins, affirming and appreciating members’ involvement
  • Creating “cultural change”

Increasing Engagement can be found at: http://connectivity.cqrollcall.com/survey-results-engagement-is-a-major-problem/