Three Critical Must-Do's
for Onboarding Member Success

By Andy Steggles

Launching a new community is exciting and can be overwhelming. It can be easy to get so caught up in the details of planning and launching your community that you forget one key component: getting people to participate in the community once it’s live.

Assuming you’ve fully launched your community, one of the most important next steps is to ensure any member who is new to the association is properly onboarded and welcomed into the community. For most organizations, a new member is the member most likely not to renew. Your online community is an incredible tool that can be used to fully embrace new members and, at the same time, increase your overall level of member engagement. Here are some must-do tips that will help you use your association’s online community to increase your new member retention rate.

Welcome New Members
Most organizations send a welcome email to new members, which is great, but be sure the email is personalized and includes a Call-To-Action (CTA). The CTA should invite members to complete their online profile as the first step toward learning more about the new community. Encourage them to add a photo and to fill in as much detail as possible to help them showcase their professional expertise. If there is an integration to LinkedIn, encourage members to import their profiles from LinkedIn versus having to upload their photo, bio, job history, etc. from scratch. This initial email should be part of an overall campaign where you reach out to the new member on a regular basis until they’ve completed this task.

It’s imperative you get them to follow through on this CTA. Send another email to those who have not completed their profiles a week after the initial one, showcasing members who have filled out their profiles and who are starting to engage. At the one-month mark, reach out to the remaining holdouts and, if necessary, try to schedule a phone call with them to ensure they add their key profile elements; you can even offer to do it for them if they’re having problems or are hesitant for some other reason. Remember, they are only a new member once!

Introduce Yourself Thread
Once the new member has completed his or her online profile, the next step is to get the member to post an introduction message. Typically, this is done by creating a new thread called “New Members – Introduce Yourself Here” or something similar. Then you would create a tailored “reply” page, which you can provide them a link to. This page invites new members to introduce themselves by answering a few very short/simple questions. Typically the questions are broken down so they are a mixture of professional and personal. For example:

  1. Please provide a brief summary of your industry experience.
  2. If there is one question you could bounce off of your industry peers, what would it be?
  3. Name one unusual personal thing about yourself that you think other might find fun or interesting.

Be sure to set expectations with the questions. Explain how they only need to provide three or four lines for each response and link to some other responses as examples. Go so far as to offer to proofread it for them if you are sensing people are reluctant to post because they do not want to post a wrong answer. We often hear how the top barrier to engagement is “fear,” so offering to help new members post their first message will really improve engagement by getting them past that initial hurdle. Once their introductory message is posted, they will hopefully be welcomed by their peers, which will serve to both help them feel part of the larger association community and also makes them feel good about posting. One of the many things we’ve discovered (Engagement Benchmarking Report) is that the member who is most likely to post a message is the member who has previously posted at least one message.

Check In
At the two- or three-month mark after welcoming new members to the community, send another email asking for feedback. This could be a link to a survey or a link to a feedback forum asking members what they like or dislike about the community, and inviting them to share suggestions for future features. In that email, also link to their primary forum and encourage them to post a work related question as a reminder that the community is there to help them professionally.

Andy Steggles is President & Chief Customer Officer, Higher Logic, LLC, 202-559-7733; andy@higherlogic.com; www.higherlogic.com. He was a speaker at NYSAE’s 2014 Technology Institute.