One of the biggest factors and key indicators of an association’s health is member satisfaction. Member satisfaction is vital to an association’s health for a few reasons. Happy members are more likely to renew their memberships, provide positive word of mouth to potential members and provide higher engagement and participation in their association.
All these benefits inevitably lead to membership retainment and growth for the association. It becomes clear, member satisfaction is a critical metric of not only the association’s growth but also its ability to meet its goals.
Therefore, this blog will delve into how to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a comprehensive analysis of your association’s member satisfaction.
Surveys
One of the best ways to gain a quantitative metric of your association’s satisfaction is to provide regular surveys and feedback opportunities to your members. Providing surveys and feedback opportunities allows you to gain clear metrics on your members’ overall satisfaction. Using concise surveys that have a variety of questions allow you to gauge their happiness on many fronts. Providing post-event surveys opportunities is another great way to gauge member satisfaction and provide valuable areas of improvement.
Another avenue of surveys to consider is to implement annual member surveys. Annual member surveys allow you to gain a large insight into member needs that can be implemented throughout the year. Most importantly, annual member surveys enable you to see areas of improvement that when corrected for, increase membership satisfaction.
Usage Metrics
Another vital quantitative metric for member satisfaction is usage metrics. Usage metrics consist of tracking website analytics, monitoring web traffic, page views and engagement. High engagement indicates satisfied members. In addition, email open rates provide insightful feedback into how well your communications are being received by your members. Additionally, it speaks to how well your content is being received by how willing members are to open association communications.
Retention Rates
One of the clearest signs of an association’s member satisfaction is the association’s overall retention rate. This can be achieved by calculating the percentage of members who renew their membership. A link to the calculation can be found below. The goal here is to see high retention rates. Anything over 75% indicates strong health to the future of your association.
Simple Association Membership Calculations: Renewal Rate (strauss.ca)
Social Media Analysis
Regular monitoring of social media platforms to gauge positive sentiments is a great way to evaluate member satisfaction. This practice may include regular contact with Facebook groups, tracking mentions of your associations and analyzing the sentiment of such mentions. Creating member groups where members can engage and share experiences also allows you to gain an understanding of member satisfaction within your association.
Through the combination of surveys, usage metrics, member retention rates and social media analytics, you gain a valuable insight into member satisfaction. This combination of tools tells you what is important to your members and how well they feel the association is achieving those goals.
Since member satisfaction is inextricably linked to member retention and growth, having the tools necessary to gauge both factors will ensure your association not only retains a large portion of your membership, but continues to gain new ones.
Check out some additional Strauss articles relating to how to retain and grow your association’s membership:
https://www.strauss.ca/finding-the-right-person-to-grow-your-association-membership/
https://www.strauss.ca/how-to-use-events-to-grow-your-associations-membership/