Exit Surveys: Let Us Know How We're Doing ... And Turn Off the Lights When You Leave

I hope that most of us in associations conduct exit surveys, and we recently considered how we should increase our participation rates on the ASAE listserv.

Good objectives for exit survey include:

 Collecting valid research results
 Distinguishing between avoidable & unavoidable attrition
 Ending this stage of the member relationship on a good note, and
 Clean the database for subsequent efforts to reinstate those who will want to come "back to the fold" in the future.

Our advice in this area includes:

1) Do a multi-part contact sequence. Starting with the lowest cost-per-contact option and migrate into costlier ones with the deliverable names who are not responding. A typical sequence might be: #1 online survey, #2 mail or fax survey, and (possibly) #3 telephone.

With any online survey, we recommend using an invitation & two reminders to non-respondents over a several-week period. This constitutes a reasonable and consistent effort from which they can opt out anytime or respond, and you should suppress them from the reminders. You'll always annoy the vocal 1%, but more persistence conveys to the former member that you're serious about wanting their feedback.

2) Make sure the message comes from an high ranking executive or volunteer name as the sender and signer. The reason many of our members leave us may be tied to something big & strategic within the association or in practice in general. Rightly or wrongly, a former member may regard correspondence coming from you or the membership department in general as transactional rather than an earnest attempt to learn and take action to address the issues a former member identifies that's within their control or influence.

3) Don't worry about anonymity but rather, offer confidentiality instead. You have to know who they are for proper campaign management but you won't report any personally identifiable findings. For your own internal operations, it's often worth the time to go back through your AMS and track the history of that one lapsed member who told you an interesting story about their experience ... if you don't know who they are you can't learn nearly as much about what your association did over their membership cycle to make them feel that way or form that impression.

4) Once you're using mail, offer a response premium for the first time but make it effective. The academic literature has demonstrated for years that front-end premia always outpull back-end; in our increasingly instant gratification, Amazon two-click world, it's probably even more pronounced. Offering respondents their choice of a $25 gift certificate toward your membership/services or an AmEx gift card could appeal to some (back-end premium); it would be far more timely and appealing to provide the incentive to ALL respondents included with your survey.

It helps to guilt a response (you gave me something, okay I guess I'll tell you what I think), and it can be easy to implement through a buckslip coupon insert in your #10 survey mailing, or a perfed tab on your outbound postcard that they can redeem online.

5) Monitor deliverability through each method and include this outcome in your final metrics. For example, if you have 500 lapsed members in April, it's helpful to know that 20% are unreachable due to job changes (bounces, NCOAs, phone confirmation of moves), 45% dropped due to inadequate value, 25% due to employer no longer reimbursing for dues, 20% because other associations meet their needs better, 15% for other cost-related issues, 10% due to retirement, etc. and that 20% might seriously consider rejoining in the future. You can infer the first figure based on actual campaign performance, the remaining figures by extrapolating from your findings based on any response rate.

I think there can be far greater impact if you can link exit survey insight to your ongoing membership operation on a personal basis, by 'flagging and tagging' individuals who report specific reasons for dropping. In the long run, most former members still in the field might not actually care about their confidentiality, and some exit survey findings could lead to additional followup such as more detailed discussions with the willing.

Former members in general appreciate knowing that you're working on the issues that led them to drop their membership and the additional conversations could allow you to probe further, test possible solutions. You certainly wouldn't want to spend all your time doing labor-intensive things for a low-potential reinstatement prospect, but if you can focus specialized attention on the individuals with the most interesting and/or prevalent comments, or those with pertinent demographics or practice characteristics, you can incorporate this into a much stronger member retention process. –Kevin

To Be Interesting, Be Interested First: How Asking Questions Sets Up Effective Copywriting

In a recent ASAE listserv, a staffer asked the basic question "What words do you use for 'networking' or 'education' in your copy?" I was glad to see it because so often we use a kind of shorthand with the outside world—members and non-customers—without really thinking them through. This often reflects the fact that if we're not careful, we can easily prepare our communications in a monklike isolation from the real voice of our customer. 

There are a number of terms that we all happily plop into our copy, but we often don't realize how people in our target audience actually process these terms … or the overall message we're trying to get across. When I write copy, I always ask for permission to contact a few members and schedule phone interviews with them. For most of us in associations, it should be an easier, regular, less formal process.

Some of the actual questions I'll ask a member or customer include:
* "Do you encourage other peers to consider membership? If you have, what kinds of reactions do you get from them?:
* "Pretend that I'm a peer who doesn't hold an ___ membership. How would you describe the organization to them/me?"
* "Thank you for the description. There were a few things I didn't hear ... tell me about ______ (often networking, education, advocacy, and information)." or alternatively...
* "You mentioned networking. That's a great buzzword that seems to mean different things to different people in different fields. Tell me more about what YOU regard as networking." (Ditto for education)
* "How valuable is (networking, education) to you? Why? If you don't mind, give me an illustration of some recent (networking, etc) that you've done."
* (If necessary) "Of course, we're speaking today to help us communicate more effectively. We're talked what you think and do. How similar are you to your peers? How might they think differently about ________?"

In a few short questions this allows me to have a long conversation that helps me "get inside the market's head." The member or customer won't mind--after all, nobody has ever had a bad conversation about themselves! It can help any of us figure out how to convey the benefits we offer, far beyond just using a single word that may mean different things to different readers, and to make it more compelling and understandable with the right words or examples.

I know the answers I get through this process DO vary by field, but often 'networking' entails idea exchange, commiseration when times are tough, 'brain-picking' on very sensitive issues they won't bring up in listservs or roundtables, checking in with old friends to see how they are doing, making new friends, basic business development, gauging reactions to what a speaker/guru just said, validating their current course of action, or living vicariously through others who do things differently from that person, or who have changed their practices. Depending on the season/year/person, the focus may be on survival, success, or just human interaction with like-minded people who share similar goals and operate in the same market/environment.

In any event, I'd encourage anyone writing copy for prospects to go through the exercise of speaking directly to their audience now and again, to find out how your audience thinks about these terms: I know many of us have staff specialists who see these functions in terms of their technical training and experience who serve as our SMEs, but they provide only half the story and that half may be very different from how your audience actually thinks. Often they can have tunnel vision regarding the issue and may emphasize literal truth over the words that are more likely to truly speak to the prospect's needs, to get their attention and be memorable. (I personally think advocacy is more limited than other benefits, as the copy often reads as if it's written by lawyers!) It's not easy, but going 'straight to the horse's mouth' and using what you learn will help you pick ... and defend ... the right words, examples, or concepts that will help prospects understand what you really mean by 'networking' ... or 'education,' or 'advocacy.'
 -Kevin

Facebook Turns Two for Me Today

Over time Scott & I both have a somewhat spotty record in terms of posting to our blog, in part because it's so much easier to share things in other environments such as ASAE's listserv and acronym. It's certainly where all our friends and competitors in the association world hang out, so I know I haven't ever written much personal here. I do envy friends such as Shelly Alcorn being able to bring much more personality to their posts than certainly I ever do. 

But for a change of pace, I thought I'd commemorate a small milestone in my own online development. As I was cleaning my email I saw my very first user greeting from Facebook. I guess that maybe made me the 100 millionth user in a community that now has more than 500 million. I know from our research that there are two predominant views of social media: as a business tool and a personal tool. I am never quite certain where I fall as I have been able to use LinkedIn un-self consciously to track 750ish of my business friends, former colleagues and clients and to post the occasional message promoting the next event I'm speaking at.

But Facebook has morphed into something so much more personal that it's hard to think of it in the same league as a "business tool." Sure, I flag myself as a fan of my friends' companies, but as I look through my list of friends I find people I haven't spoken to in person since junior high and I find myself commenting on notes from people I probably sit next to and do not speak to directly at happy hour at Hard Times Chili, just because they also know my favorite waitress. The analyst in me thinks of the classic social networking diagram that shows the web of contacts we form in any workplace--using the number of contacts we make to establish who's in the loop, who's not, who's a connector, who's influential, and who operates in relative isolation.

Sometimes it really is better to not overthink things. I would have no idea how to craft a message that "works" just as well for my cousins who are ministers in Oregon, high school friends from Idaho who kindly shoot and share images from my hometown, including the house I few up in (above, just behind the farm implement store in tiny New Plymouth Idaho), and the association execs and consultants who are my primary contacts in life today in Washington DC. I guess I'll just write what's on my mind and to enjoy a tool that shrinks the scary outside world into a place where a few hundred of the people who have touched my life over the years "live." I can hear all about their lives, their bad jokes, their children's proms and graduations, and even sometimes still play the smart-aleck teenager I used to be even after the wrinkles and bald spots serve as a constant reminder that I am no longer a puppy. As someone without a family and who primarily works alone today, I appreciate even more the luxury of being able to "speak" to people I never see in person. Even our school reunion in two weeks, the first one I've ever attended, is hard to picture without having something like this to link us together when and how we want to be linked.

Thanks, Facebook!   -Kevin (NPHS Class of '82)

Why It Never Makes Sense to Lower Dues

An association was recently considering lowering their dues in response to member complaints and to demonstrate empathy for members in our current economy. It was interesting, quasi-radical thinking of the kind I generally support, but not something that should actually be implemented. Dues are not like taxes: both represent revenue streams funding what are to some extent "social goods" but the resemblance ends there.

If an association's research identifies pockets of discontent defined by type of individual or organization, it's better to address these groups by developing new/refined services that deliver greater value, communicate more effectively, offering and honoring satisfaction guarantees, or when necessary extending hardship dues forgiveness to a class of members or on a case-by-basis.

The top reasons you shouldn't lower dues include:
1) As an association, we're in a great position because we "compete on non-price." Memberships are not commodities, so our customers don't immediately check out the competition and engage in switching behavior when prices change. If your dues levels haven't changed but you believe willingness to pay has, there are two logical courses of action open:
a) Conduct broad-based research or mine past research to determine if occasional complaints represent a more commonly held perception of inadequate value relative to price paid.
b) Find ways to deliver greater value.
Your association membership consists of a large body of customers (some who complain) who pay the prevailing price for a bundle of benefits that your membership comprises: to me, mass behavior speaks much louder than minority protest. Better to increase value to match the current price, than to lower price to match the lower value perception held by a portion of your membership.

2) Demand for membership is very price-inelastic, so lowering dues means fewer resources, which can undermine delivering an increasing level of value. This means that the proportionate change in volume is low, relative to the proportion change in price. On the way up, this is good news for us: increase dues by 8%, and the corresponding decrease in membership is unlikely to be more than 1%-2%. On the way down, it's more ominous: a 5% dues decrease might attract 1% growth. In these two cases, gross dues revenue increases 6%-7% or declines 4%. If resources are an issue within the association, staying put and accepting a 0% revenue change may be your best option if current economic conditions and member perceptions truly prevent you from implementing normal, low-threshold increases.

3) Decreasing dues tells a strange 'story' that affects your ongoing communications and relationship to your members and audience at large. In contrast, periodic/CPI-type increases in dues can often pass without any communication, and larger dues increases can be accompanied by statements that it's really a deferred increase because dues haven't changed in 5 years; increase dues are required to fund increasing quality and quantity of programs and/or to reflect increasing costs of doing business, reflecting your circumstances.

Decreasing dues is enough of a 'man bites dog' story that even a small change warrants some communication, but if you're not careful, it's hard to escape the sense among members that you will have to do 'less with less,' or you'll reinforce the sense that the organization had a big cushion before and now you're trimming fat. Either implication isn't terribly productive, and in my mind a small percentage decrease may still beg the question of why not just stay put. As long as our economy isn't in a true deflationary cycle, holding off increases for a few years is the same as implementing a 5% decrease today.   – Kevin

Managing Your Checkoffs … Foundation Contributions via Member Renewals

The degree to which people respond to a renewal form checkoff depends first and foremost on the level of awareness and positioning of your Annual Fund. If it's well understood what the Annual Fund does and it's seen as legitimate and unique, then a check-box by itself can be very successful: a service "that needs no introduction" is the only kind that tends to perform well on an automatic marketing vehicle (such as a renewal form that allows no space to provide a proper introduction). If it's not well-understood, consider testing a buckslip with one renewal effort that helps to explain what the Annual Fund has done, and what it could do with more support. Keep it to just one effort for starters and allow some time before evaluating the results.

Form clutter is the enemy of timely response; since the primary objective of your membership renewal is to renew the member, look at past donation performance and consider the tradeoffs before you decide. In the scenario at right, dues revenue is 600x greater than donor revenue. Even if the inclusion of an additional choice led to only 2% or 3% of members to think about it, delay processing, and thus not pay until the next renewal form is sent, I'd skip the check-off.

If many of your renewing members go online to close the deal, you might include an alternative checkoff there if it can be programmed in what remains a very clean, neat Member Application. But if you have to direct them to a second donor screen to complete the transaction, I wouldn't—it's again a distraction from the membership renewal. As an alternative, choose a logical time to mount a dedicated fundraising effort among renewing members, say 4 months into the new membership year for that individual. A dedicated effort will effectively cultivate and fundraise to the prospective donor.

Our fundraising work has shown quite a few charities who generate 15+% of their total direct response funds through "second asks" (i.e. gifts made in response to a solicitation included with the donor acknowledgement/confirmation form for their first gift). So we know that good donors will give frequently, but asking for a gift within seconds of the online member renewal will get a response that generates a small fraction of what you can generate with subsequent targeted efforts. It makes sense to allow sufficient space and time between efforts to cultivate, perhaps suggest and explain other successful fundraising techniques such as matching gifts, restricted fund solicitation, major/planned giving inquiries, and continuity giving through EFT or credit card.

By far the best performance achieved by associations is with forms that are prepopulated with a suggested gift that the renewing member must consciously omit if they don't want to give. Ideally a personalized gift array featuring their highest previous contribution + a small multiple to upgrade them, or a flat amount slightly higher than the historical average gift made by all donors, if you can't do that. If the vast majority of your members are relatively indifferent toward your Annual Fund as a cause, a large proportion of them who currently don’t take the active step of opting into the forms you used in the past also won't take the active step of opting out of making a reasonable donation. You could easily go from 4% of members donating with a $25 average gift to a 40% rate with a $35 average gift. This would be an impressive increase in the proportion who give, but of course it's still not much money: $50,000 with 5000 members for example.

It would be key to go any of these option prepared to address the occasional member complaint. As your members are fundraisers themselves, they should understand the techniques and not be terribly resistant to them. So many good marketing programs are killed in response to kneejerk reactions of just a few individuals; if you address those complaints quickly and in-person, you have an opportunity to turn them around (or at worst, agree to disagree but show good business courtesy) while accepting those few contacts as a cost of doing business and a slight deduction from the otherwise positives of higher participation, more revenue & awareness for your Annual Fund. 

Bottom line, effective association foundation fundraising often begins with managing your checkoffs (not your Checkovs!), consciously and effectively.

-Kevin

Member Value is Something You Talk About ... AND Measure

It's becoming far more common to think about our value proposition in associations, yet these discussions often seem to debate qualitative issues. To me member value is primarily an empirical thing—something we can measure.

Certainly, guiding the activities that generate member value requires a strategic mindset, and tactics drive the success of the activities that 'feed' value, but measurement is not tough to do or to interpret. Data analysis is a nice way to disarm some of the ambiguities and unnecessary level of navel-gazing that often seems to accompany these discussions. ('Values' on the other hand are relative, and the basis of one's perceived value varies by person, but this is irrelevant to our ultimate goal.)

Thinking very directly and simply, I summarize and understand value with very simple premises:
- You use things you need and like.
- If you like the experience, you'll like and probably need the thing more.
- If you don't like it, you won't use it.
- If you don't use it, you won't value it very much.
- If you don't like or use it, you probably won't tell people unless they ask (since it's not polite to complain).
- If you don't know what something is, you can't use it.
- If you don't know much about it, you're unlikely to use it.
- To figure out what it is, people talk to each other before they'll ask you. Then they will complain.

This isn't much of a framework, but it gives a very practical and easy to understand way to process your member/customer experience metrics regarding awareness, satisfaction, importance, and usage. So often I see research done to collecting data that collects new findings, compiles data that's been collected previously, then reports them in a 'sports story' format without actually guiding the analysis creatively to help us understand and influence our value chain.

If we do ask our audience these basic questions and really work with the resulting data, we shouldn't have to worry much whether we're serving the profession/industry at large or our members; defining success only by membership and/or revenue, operating more like a non-profit or a business, or if we're measuring success by inputs and outcomes. Either way it's key to collect and work with this data; if we're not, that's just bad management, period.  - Kevin

Advice on Optimal Email Frequency (Part #3 of 3)

It's easy to critique email programs and to philosophize. To end this series, we suggest the following approaches …

1. 
   
   Continually test your messages for the best approach, relying on both clickthroughs and open rates as testing criteria. For promotions, often the former; for general interest communications, the latter (even though it is an increasingly flawed measure due to mobile devices, etc.).
2. 
   
   Experiment with truly new formats periodically, giving each of them several chances to catch on and outperform the current formats you use. For example when we launched an e-newsletters with our donor base at CRS, we tested the basics (length/tone of subject line, acronym vs. organization name), content (which lead story to feature first, second, third and so on), content format (full article in text, headline only, x lines ending with ellipses leading to the web article). As I recall my staff didn't like it, since this alone entailed perhaps 45 unique combinations, but it was more easily done over several issues, testing the combinations, choosing winners, ties and losers, then testing again to ensure the content didn't drive the findings. (It's interesting as I dug through my own emails to see that the format we tested in has continued to change, so that it looks far more like a personal letter than before ... I hope this also reflects testing more so than personal preferences.)
3. 
   
   Pending test results, I'd also seek to maintain a frequency of regular communications focused on industry news and information to be weekly at minimum, then delivered at a regular, consistent time that's convenient for the members.
4. 
   
   Rely as much as possible on using your newsletter formats to carry promotional messages for events and products with navigation bars, banner ads, and advertorial copy—i.e. use frequent contact, but put the promotions in their place, a little less important than the content that members tend to value and not see as self-serving to the organization. As with print media, most of us notice ads better when we're reading editorial content than when we're given a purely promotional insert. Standalone promotional emails will seem to perform better, but to use a traditional mailbox analogy, if you're presented with a magazine and a pile of flyers, chances are you will discard the latter and at least glance at the former.

Of course, one might object that, as associations, you have a different relationship with your constituency than traditional advertisers. This is true as long as you avoid engaging in a long term practice of carpet bombing them with email.  -Kevin