Most associations have a pretty good idea of what their members need at an aggregate level. After all, you are the experts in the industry which your association serves. Maybe you run an occasional survey, maybe you have a feel for it from anecdotal conversations, or maybe you can parse it out from transactional data. When asked why members join their associations, most leaders can put together a pretty accurate guess of what the reasons are and what percentage of people would choose each one as their primary motivation.
In fact, we see this play out with new member campaigns in PropFuel. A very common question to ask is some variation of, “What is your primary reason for joining our association?” This is a multiple-choice question, so we generally present the new member with a list of four to five reasons to pick from. Our client will need to come up with a handful of options, with “other” being the final choice.
Generally speaking, most of the respondents fall into one of those preselected categories, with very few selecting “other." This result tells us that the association has a good understanding of why people are joining. In addition, the association leader who sets up the question is usually able to make a good guess as to what percentage of people will fall into each category. This shows that they have a good understanding of what motivates their people to join as a whole.
The problem is, your members are not all perfectly representative pieces of your whole membership. They are individual people with individual needs. Knowing that 35 percent of your members are interested in online learning does not tell you what Britney is looking for right now. Statistics are useful for looking at the big group, but they do not apply to individuals.
This is the problem with relying on surveys to dissect your membership. A survey can tell you what people want as a group, when it is a representative sample of the membership, and when the average 10 to 15 percent of a membership responds. However, surveys cannot take that aggregate data and apply it to the individual needs of any one person.
That is the difference between surveys and conversations. Both activities involve asking people questions; a good conversation may contain as many questions as a survey would. But when you are having a conversation with someone, your goal is not just collecting data to put into a pool for analysis. Your goal is to interact with and help that person as an individual.
Conversations allow you to connect with Britney at an individual level and serve her particular needs. Rather than guess which category she belongs to, based on her demographic information, and take her down a path she may or may not be interested in, you are allowing her to drive the interaction, learning more about her needs as you go through the process. Being able to have that conversation enables you to take the guesswork out of meeting Britney’s needs. You no longer have to use her demographic information to try and put her in the correct bucket for communications; you let her drive the conversation, and the more she tells you, the more relevant value you can deliver.
You can read this excerpt as well as other Association Marketing practices that focus on two-way, individualized digital communications in the Conversational Engagement eBook. Download it here.
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