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The MemberClicks Blog

When the typical association professional reviews their full member list, you’ll often find they spend most of their attention focusing on trying to reign in those outlying members that are on the brink of leaving your organization. While that’s a necessary step, there is another group of exiting members that is more commonly forgotten: retirees!

Think about it. Retirees are usually ready to make some big changes and enter a new season of their lives. So it’s your job to make sure they don’t kick you to the curb too! Check out these three ways that you can make efforts to retain your retirees within your association.

Looking to expand your marketing efforts by introducing video to your event campaigns? Video is one of the best ways to promote your association to a new audience as well as to remind your members of the value that you provide to your industry. However, learning new technologies can be an intimidating experience, especially when you’re going to use those results to publicly market your association.

Don't fret! Check out these tips to follow before, during, and after your video process to help keep you on track.

Have you been looking into some ways to gather some additional funding for your association or chamber? We have one word for you: Grants! Applying for grants will offer your organization a chance to bring in funds that don’t have to be paid back as well as help you expand out more robust programs to better serve your members and industry.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed at how the process works, we get it. The grant application process is no joke! Take a look at this simple outline to follow how the grant writing process generally plays out.

Presenting your best self in person can be hard. Presenting your best self in writing can be even harder! No matter your industry, you’ve probably been asked for a professional biography to sum up your identity in 100 words or less. No problem, right?

If you’re trying to figure out where to start, we’ve got you covered! Check out this basic template to follow so you can knock out a professional biography in ten minutes or less.

Starting a referral program from scratch can feel like a pretty overwhelming task. First, you have to target the members of your association that you think could be strong advocates in helping you acquire new members. But then, how do you actually get them to start sending referrals your way?

Take a look at these five steps you should try to start building up a solid referral program for your association.

No matter who you are, walking on the trade show floor can sometimes be an overwhelming experience. You’ve got vendors known and unknown looking to catch your eye as well as countless other attendees all walking and interacting in one dedicated space.

If this visual is making you nervous, don’t fret! We’ve come up with nine questions you can ask almost any vendor at your next trade show to see if their product would be a good fit for your association! Check them out below!

Being placed in your organization’s online directory is an important benefit to membership. It gives members exposure to the rest of your membership (and the industry or community at large), it means that you have endorsed this member and their expertise, and it’s a huge source of business referrals.

Beyond including each member in your directory, what else are you doing to really help them gain visibility and take advantage of those perks? It can be pretty easy to do, given that most member-based organization directories are online these days! We have a few thoughts you may want to consider:

Association friends: While we usually talk about associations’ operations in this blog, today we’re focusing a little bit on chambers of commerce. But, given that you are both membership-based organizations, a lot of this still applies to you and maybe it can give you some ideas to bring into your industry and organization!

Ok, so managing a chamber of commerce will never be easy. With hundreds to thousands of members (and their benefits) to keep track of, on top of any other entities you manage, events to plan, finances to keep accurate, not to mention your advocacy and community building efforts...so much to do, so little time.

That’s where having the right membership management system comes into play. There will always be a lot on your plate, but these platforms are built specifically to:

• give you some of that time back
• give you more resources to accomplish your goals
• give you the tools that will in turn help you provide more value to your members

Sounds like a dream, right? Well it can be a reality with the right solution! Each membership management system is a little different, but generally speaking these are some of the features you can expect to see: