Conversational Engagement flips the personalization aspect on its head. Instead of deciding what your member is most likely to be interested in, you simply ask them! The goal here is to be personal, not just personalized. Ask questions, be curious, turn some of your one-way broadcasts into two-way conversations.

Every engaging conversation starts with a prompt and a question, leads to capturing an answer for context and then drives a relevant response.That's what this thing called "Conversational Engagement" is all about. It's mimicking the structure of real human interaction and creating an automated way of doing it with thousands of people, all at once.

If you have a choice between sending personalized and non-personalized broadcasts, personalization is always better. But, there is still something missing: at the end of the day, you are still sending mass communication.

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 earning 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.

Conversational Engagement is based on the premise that what your members have to tell you is just as important as what you have to tell your members. There are many ways to get your members to talk to you; we call them conversation starters.

As association professionals with heaps of valuable information to share digitally with our members, we’ve all found ourselves asking “what’s missing?” That is, “why am I sending emails and not getting the response I need.” Whether event or education registration, membership renewals and everything in between, we all wish engagement was higher.