Membership cultivation is a critical aspect of non-profit organizations and other membership-based groups. It involves building relationships, engaging with members, and nurturing their connection with the organization to encourage long-term engagement and support. Chatbots powered by GPT technology can be a valuable tool to aid in membership cultivation efforts. Here are some ways how to use Chat GPT for membership cultivation:

1. MEMBERSHIP MESSAGING

• Welcome and Onboarding: Write your member welcome message with Chat GPT. When a new member joins your organization, you can use a chatbot powered by GPT to send a welcome message, provide relevant information about the organization, and guide them through the onboarding process. 
• Donation Letters: Write donation solicitations with ease. Speak to your mission and use the best practices in donation requests by using Chat GPT.

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2. RESPOND VIA EMAIL WITH EASE

• Do yourself a favor a get the Ellie Chrome Extension for your Gmail. Member engagement and communication are key to fostering a good relationship with your donor, but sometimes those relationships require more time than you have. Ellie is powered by GPT-4 to learn from your writing style and craft personalized replies as if they were written by you.​

It's important to note that while Chat GPT can be a valuable tool for membership cultivation, it should not replace human interaction and it should not be used unchecked. Chat GPT is a tool meant to complement and enhance the existing efforts of your organization's membership cultivation strategy. Human touch and personalized engagement are still essential for building strong and meaningful relationships with members. Chat GPT should be used as a supportive tool to augment your organization's efforts in cultivating and engaging with members.

Specific: The goal should be clearly defined and specific. Avoid vague or broad goals that are difficult to measure. The advantage of using SMART goals is that these practices should help you Identify clear quantitative objectives and deadlines. Ask yourself: What exactly do you want to achieve with your membership efforts? Who is the target audience? What are the specific outcomes or results you aim to achieve?
Example: Increase the number of new members from the target demographic (e.g., young professionals aged 25 to35) by 20% within the next six months.

Measurable: The goal should be quantifiable so that progress can be tracked and measured. Establish concrete metrics or indicators that can be used to assess progress toward the goal.
​Example: Track the number of new members from the target demographic who join during the six-month period and compare it to the baseline data to determine if the 20% increase has been achieved.

Relevant: The goal should align with the overall strategic objectives of the organization, be relevant to the membership cultivation efforts, and be relevant to the needs of your members. It should be meaningful and contribute to the overall mission and vision of the organization.
Example: Ensure that the goal of increasing new members aligns with the organization's strategic plan and supports its mission and vision of expanding the reach and impact of the organization's programs and initiatives.

Time sensitive or time-bound: The goal should have a specific timeframe for completion to create a sense of urgency and accountability. Set a deadline or timeline for achieving the goal to keep the membership team focused and motivated.

​Example: Set a deadline of six months to achieve the 20% increase in new members from the target demographic, and regularly review progress towards the goal during the timeframe.

​By using the S.M.A.R.T. framework, you can create clear, actionable, and measurable goals for membership cultivation efforts. These goals can help guide your organization's strategic planning, resource allocation, and performance evaluation, ensuring that your membership efforts are focused, effective, and aligned with your organization's overall objectives. Regularly review and update your S.M.A.R.T. goals to adapt to changing circumstances and maximize the success of your membership cultivation efforts.

​Creating a welcome email for members is an important part of your marketing strategy. The right email can entice new members to stick around and eventually become loyal customers. These emails should also include helpful content that helps new members get the most from their membership.

All emails should also include the logo and colors of your organization. This will help your association stand out from other organizations and create brand awareness. If you're new to creating HTML emails from scratch, and you've used up those three wishes from your genie - we have your back! Include your info below and instantly have access to our free HTML template with instructions for customization. 

Track and log emails with the HubSpot Sales Chrome
When you reply to an email from a customer, member or complete stranger, the HubSpot Sales Chrome Extension give you the ability to:

• Automagically add the sender to your HubSpot account as a Contact.
• Creates activities on Contact’s Timeline about the email and shows the content.
• Updates the Contact’s “Last Contacted” date and time.
• Create a HubSpot Task to follow up with the email.
• Create or Load an email template.
• Add the Contact to an automated Email Sequence.
• Propose meeting times and schedule links.
• … and more.

This is all critical to keeping your contacts and your team up-to-date and on the same page. If someone emails you out of the blue, when you reply, the HubSpot Chrome Extension will create a new Contact in your HubSpot account.

So let's dig deeper into these features, so you can get started and start saving more time.

Building off of templates, if you have an upgraded HubSpot account, you can even move the email into an automated Sequence, making your life simpler, and giving your customers the sweet content, they desire!
Many people do not realize that HubSpot also has some awesome tools for scheduling meetings and proposing times to fill your calendar in the most effective way possible. If you haven’t already checked out HubSpot’s meetings booking page, you should check it out here. Aside from simply putting in a link that will send the reader specific meeting windows, you can propose preferred meeting times that you have already curated. Again, all available right within the Gmail message compose window.

How to Install the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension
 
All this sounds pretty good right? Well how do you start using the extension so that hypothetical version of yourself on the beach can be a reality? Easy, open Chrome, go to the Chrome Extension web store and search for the HubSpot Sales Chrome Extension. Click the “Add to Chrome” button and breeze through the tour to connect and sync Gmail to HubSpot and away you go!

VALUE PROPOSITION
You should offer up content to your audience at predetermined levels. This can include free content, and paid subscriptions at differing levels. Your free content should act as marketing tool to intrigue paid users with a clear call-to-action for further engagements. For paid members, it's important to make sure that your gated content is worth the cost. Think about your user and how it creates value for them. By offering valuable content, you can build your brand name and establish an expert status.

USABILITY
It's is a good idea to make your gated content easy to use. This includes a table of contents, and instructions on how to navigate the content. 

Here at Member Center, we provide gated content for members with easy access, so all they need to do is provide their email address and we check it against your membership's status in HubSpot, so no password is needed.

ENGAGEMENT
Gated content can also be a a good way to build a community and will give you an opportunity to interact with your users. This can be through a member-only forum, online classes with a chat feature, an online book club, a blog ( commenting on).

Watch out Ikea, our users are expert Hubspot hackers who are dedicated to getting the most out of the free version of HubSpot. So let's talk about how to use HubSpot for events... Here are a 3 of our favorite ways to use HubSpot to host events for free (or pretty close to it):

There is almost nothing that you need in the starter package that you can not achieve with the free version of HubSpot and a plug-in. Obviously there are a few exceptions, but we have found there is almost always a workaround using a plug-in or service like Zapier. One exception to this rule is when accepting payments, but only because depending on otherother form or registration tools you may or may not get a better deal.

If you are budget conscious  and interested in our other content, we are going to make a bet that HubSpot Sales Professional is the best upgrade for you. Why? Well, you probably actually would prefer Marketing Professional, but at $800, sales professional's price tag of $450 seems a lot more reasonable and many of the most significant features can be achieved with this plan.

​HubSpot Sales Professional

• Automation with Sequences and Workflows
• Send up to 5,000 emails a day
• Create up to 1,000 active lists
• Accept payments

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That is not to say that HubSpot Marketing Professional will be the best plan, but it is the most cost effective option for the included features and a great place to start.

Did you know that HubSpot offers significant discounts to nonprofits and Startups? Talk to a HubSpot sales rep, they are helpful in making the determination for what is best for you, but also for helping you find a good deal. 

HubSpot for Start Ups
Small startups can be eligible for up to 90% off their first year, 50% off in the second year and 25% off ongoing. 

HubSpot for Nonprofits
Nonprofits get 40% off indefinitely. 

3. PRIORITIZE MEMBERSHIP IN YOUR SIDE BAR EXTENSION 
The right hand sidebar in HubSpot can be adjusted in whatever best fits your priority by dragging and dropping. By adding Member Center to the top of this panel, you have quick and easy access to renew members and see their membership status.

4. MAKE MEMBERSHIP CHANGES WITH EDITS TO  YOUR CONTACT PROPERTIES
Set Member Center properties as your default to see them on your contact's left sidebar. Once there, you can make manual changes that will be automatically (or auto-MAGIC-ly as we like to say) saved and updated with Member Center. Pro-tip: You may want to not include this in your sidebar if you are worried about multiple people within your organization making membership changes.

Now that Hubspot offers payment options, you could build a custom membership system. This will run you about $1,200+ a month plus the cost of transaction fees, or you could use a plug-in like Member Center for $5+. Is this a shameless plug? Why yes, yes it is. But we were built exactly for this reason and we purposefully are priced to accommodate small businesses and nonprofits. 

Use HubSpot forms as a tool for member onboarding surveys. Learn more about what drives your members and what value you can provide by surveying them to learn more about themselves.

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing tool and customer relationship management software (and no they do not pay us to say such nice things about them!) They have an amazing and robust knowledge base, but we thought we would create an all encompassing resource for newbies first adding a tracking code to their website.

Tracking code is a snippet of code that tracks the activity of a website user by collecting data and sending it to HubSpot. You have heard of cookies right? No not the ones you eat, but the ones in your browser! The tracking code uses a cookie to anonymously track a visitor across your site. When a visitor fills out a form, say for example to join your mailing list, that submission will then add them as a contact to HubSpot, or associate them to an existing contact!

WIX

1. Navigate to your Site Manager.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Tracking and Analytics.
3. Click Custom or Add new tool > Custom.
4. Paste the tracking code in the Paste code snippet here field.
5. Set the Name of the new tool to HubSpot Tracking Code.
6. Under Add Code to Pages click the radio button for All pages and use the dropdown menu to select Load code on each new page.
7. Under Place Code in section, click the radio button for the Body - end option.
8. Click Apply to save your changes.

SQUARESPACE

1. ​Log in to your Squarespace account.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Settings.
3. In the Website section of the menu, navigate to Advanced, then select Code Injection.
4. Paste the tracking code into the Header field.
5. In the upper left, click Save.​

SHOPIFY
This one and the next one are a little tricky, so we recommend following the instructions here: tinyurl.com/mtcn7j3k

​WORDPRESS
Follow the instructions here: tinyurl.com/bp8fah46

WEEBLY

1. Log in to Weebly
2. Click Edit on the Site you want to edit
3. Click Settings 
4. Click SEO
5. Paste the HubSpot Tracking Code in the Footer text box.​

What are some different membership models? Asked almost no one, anywhere. But it could be a very valuable question to ask. As we know, sometimes learning from others can be vital when evaluating what may work for you. (Just think about that childhood memory of you watching your wild cousin touching that hot stove top ... Aren't you glad you didn't try that yourself?) But in all seriousness, when looking at your membership value proposition, engagement, retention, and growth, your metaphorical cousin in membership may know a thing or two, so let's look at a few different models:

CRMs are not just for commercial businesses. Nonprofits can make use of them too! CRMs are a tool for managing and tracking relationships. These tools can help maintain engagement by sending timely communications, inviting them to events, volunteer activities, fostering a sense of belonging and community in your organization.
There are several CRM options out there that are custom-built for nonprofits. Some of these include:

• Member Center built on HubSpot CRM (shameless plug! www.membercenter.net)
• Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (www.salesforceforce.com)
• DonorPerfect (www.donorperfect.com)
• NeonCRM (www.neonone.com)

WHY HUBSPOT?
If you're thinking about trying HubSpot CRM, there are a few things to consider.

• First of all, it's a great choice for nonprofits with a small budget because the free account tier gives you a lot to work with.
• HubSpot integrates with tons of other tools (and I mean tons) which means that it is powerful! Mailchimp, Square, Zoom, Gmail, Eventbrite, Constant Contact, and Stripe are just a few.
• HubSpot CRM is beautiful and the interface is user-friendly and intuitive. This means that your staff and colleagues will have an easier time getting started, and will want to use it.
• In addition, HubSpot has a lot of functionality built in so you can customize everything from marketing campaign management, revenue forecasting all the way to remembering the birthday of your donor's dog!
• HubSpot has a robust knowledge center filled with videos and articles to help you learn and grow.
• HubSpot makes it easy for any nonprofit looking for an alternative solution to switch quickly and easily and grow with you. Simply sign up and upload your contacts to get started. 

If you're considering HubSpot but want it to manage your membership, Member Center is your solution.

What is a CRM? What is a reoccurring member? If you are new to memberships, we've got your back. Think of this as the cheat sheet you refer to before saying something embarrassing in front of an important crowd... and we have added tips along the way!

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Automation
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce manual processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, relationships, and related actions. Of course, our favorite automation tool is zapier.

AMS
AMS is an Association management system to support association operations. 

Capital Campaign
A capital campaign is a large-scale effort conducted by a nonprofit organization in order to bring in a large injection of capital investment. (If you are a HubSpot user, may we suggest trying Fundraise Up? We are pretty big fans.)

Churn Rate
Churn is the term used when a member ends their subscription. The total number of churned members over a given period of time – when calculated as a percentage of how many members you started that period with – gives you your “churn rate”. So if, for example, you start August with 100 members, and 10 of those members leave during the month, then your churn rate is 10%. You want your churn rate to be below 10% at most.  (PS: As fellow geeks, we totally loved this definition from Membership Geeks and give them full credit.)

CRM
A CRM is a customer relationship manager. (If your wondering what's makes this different than a donor management software, AMS, or membership system we did an entire blogpost about it, but spoiler the key is in the name)

Crowdfunding 
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing.
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Demographics
These are the statistic of your membership, including data on gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, estimated wealth, type of employment, and member status, etc.

Donor Management
Donor management is the process of leveraging your donor data to build relationships with your supporters. A donor database, such as a CRM and donor management platform, is the best way to keep your donor data organized and nurture your relationships.

Drip Campaign
An email campaign that helps ensure engagement with members over a long period by sending a series of messages to their inboxes.

Engagement
The process of interacting with a member in order to produce ongoing value for that member. 

Email Marketing
​Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email to promote your business's products or services. Five types of emails include newsletter emails, lead nurturing emails., promotional emails, milestone emails and survey emails. Personally, we are big fan of mailchimp for most of our email marketing needs. 

Event Management System
An event management system is a tool to help in the planning and managing large events such as conferences, trade shows, classes and parties. Hosting events is one of the most important things you can do to engage your members. Events connect donors to your mission and they can empower donors to give more money and invite their friends, family, and colleagues to do the same.

Exit Survey
A survey given to members as they leave the organization. This type of survey is important for improving future offerings.

Gated Content
Gated content is online materials, such as white papers, articles and videos, that require that users fill out information before they can access them. Gated content is often used to generate leads or add value to membership.

Onboarding
The process you have in place to help your new members acquire the knowledge and skills that they need in order to make the most of membership. This process also allows members to learn about your organization, its values and perks, while giving associations the opportunity to create a relationship with new members, and make a great first impression.

Member Directory
A member directory is a list of your organization's members, along with their basic contact information. Common data in an online member directory includes: Member name, email address, social media handles, geographic location, professional title and workplace, optional information such as academics, intersts, etc.

Member Journey
A member journey is your customer's experience with your organization. Five common stages of the member journey is awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. For nonprofits, this is often how your member moves through your donor cycle.

Retention
Member retention is the measure of how many of your members keep their membership active. The importance of member retention cannot be underestimated. Even a small 5% increase in membership retention can result in between a 25% and 95% increase in profits over time. We recommend your membership retention goal to be at least 75% or higher. 

Segmentation
The process of grouping contacts based on common characteristics so organizations can market to each group effectively and appropriately.​

Private Community
A forum or similar digital discussion hub where association members can engage with fellow members on issues relevant to their field or organization.

"My staff used to spend 8 hours a week overseeing our transactions, and we additionally paid a book keeper for an additional few hours a month to reconcile the accounts. Now we just have the expense of our book keeper and $40/month for Bookkeep.com. I estimate that I'm saving about $750 a month" - says our Member Center customer. This might not seem like much but this tip comes from a small arts nonprofit, so saving $750 and 8+ hours a week by automating accounting processes can really add up!
 
What does Bookkeep.com do?

• Maps your sales, and fees from all your sales platforms to the right categories in QuickBooks or on Xero
• Capture and summarize all financial data from your sales channels.
• Bookkeep posts journal entries daily automatically (or as we like to say auto-MAGIC-ly)
• Gives you the ability to double check, make changes or make bulk edits when needed
• They match daily sales with your bank deposits to make reconciliation a breeze.

Most of us know the story of goldilocks and the three bears. Something is too big, maybe too small but then there is that is just right. Increasing your donors or developing a system to steward your donors is the same way. There is no one method. Each organization, development director, and donor is different but that is not to say that you can not streamline your efforts to more efficiently grow your donors. 

To create your system, let's look at the top three cultivation frameworks that are used both in nonprofits and large corporations.: Donor cycles, flywheels and sales funnels (oh my! .... just kidding - now we are mixing up our fairytales). These are all marketing concepts used to drive conversions, but they have slightly different focuses and objectives. Let's explore the key differences between and how they can be applied to create a fundraising pipeline that works for your donors...

​A donor cycle is a framework for managing relationships with donors or potential donors to a non-profit organization. The cycle typically consists of five stages. In each stage, the non-profit organization aims to build a relationship with the donor, educate them about the organization's mission and impact, and encourage them to contribute financially or in other ways.

• Identification
• Qualification
• Cultivation
• Solicitation
• Stewardship.

3. Provide Value

• Membership Benefits - What do your members receive for their support? Are these benefits clearly outlined? Do these benefits need to be re-evaluated? Are they actually beneficial?
• Valuable Content - Your potential members care about your niche. Promote your values and mission, not yourself. What if you wrote an educational article for a trade publication or as a guest blogger?
• Sharing is Caring - Share information about others in your field. You not only get their attention, but also the attention of their friends/members/customers and gain positive reputation. If you do this on social media, don't forget to tag them and if it's on your website, link to their page and email it to the person/company that you are writing about. 
• Resources - If you provide valuable resources for prospects, they will keep coming back and begin to think of you not only as a reliable source of information, but a partner who helps them reach their goals. This could be a jobs page, a how-to guide, webinar, or a loan program for something you have and could share. 
• Events - Consider the value you could provide at both events you host and ones you attend. 
  Events you attend: Are you going to that popular conference next month? Are you in the position to host an unofficial event related to your values/mission? How about a lunch, happy hour, demonstration, invite-only talk or tour for potential members?
  For events you host: What is the value of your event? Does it have value to your members? Does it have value to your field? Are you inviting targeted potential members? Have you made it as accessible as possible with painless registration, event reminders and easy navigation?

4. Simplify the path to membership
Joining MUST be easy to do. The top recommended way to register members is through your website. A membership form should not be longer than one page. You need the basic details, not a life story. Also consider easy opportunities to recruit members at events. If you can not register prospects for membership at the event itself, it is almost always best to get the person's information and follow up with them 3 days or less from the event. If someone takes a membership brochure or card, they may forget but if they receive a personal email, they may sign up on the on the spot. ​

5. Don't forget to ASK!
This may go without saying, but I have been guilty of it myself. Ask at events, ask in one-on-one conversations. Just ask. The more you do it, the easier it gets. 

Here's the story... 
We know multiple businesses and nonprofits have been trying to use HubSpot for free as a tool to run their membership, communications, marketing, and sales pipeline but Hubspot does not offer the opportunity to track members. That means if you are an organization that has a membership you are forced to use a system that literally makes you want to pull out your hair! This was our co-founder. A nonprofit director of a small arts organization, trying to get by with little infrastructure and limited resources. What did she do? She quit! But not without realizing the problems that she had faced effects countless nonprofit organizations. She was determined to find a way to automatic things, makes things easier, and affordable for all nonprofits, big or small..... Well a few years later, and in walks handsome tech guy...... One marriage, a pet tortoise, countless cups of coffee, and a few years later, Member Center now stands strong as an online membership platform that makes membership tracking, auto renewals, and member engagement easy for anyone!

​What can you do with Member Center?
With Member Center you can:

• Create multiple membership types for individuals, groups and/or families
• Accept reoccurring one-time or subscription membership payments using Square
• Send automated email notifications including welcome emails, payment acknowledgments and renewals
• Create an embeddable opt-in membership directory
• Create gated content pages on your website for members only (with no passwords needed!)

You can also use HubSpot to link with other apps like Eventbright, Zoom and Google to track your member's activity. You can log your personal interactions with them. 

We all know engaging with your members leads to higher retention and stronger interest and volunteerism. So what are some ways we can automate these processes to make our engagement easy?

1. Increase engagement by hosting an event.
We all host different events with different budgets, guest lists, etc. but how can we leverage the engagement from these events? Try sending a personalized message inviting major influencers/donors/investors to attend in addition to your usual marketing and don't forget to thank guests for attending. Events can easily be automated in HubSpot with their paid features, but even with the free version there are a multitude of ways:

• Make registration as easy as possible for your guests and you by automating your registration system to update your CRM, and emailing platforms (Pro tip: Both zoom and Eventbright have HubSpot apps)
• Try using the Gmail HubSpot extension to make email templates so you can quickly send for FAQs, or use Canned Responses in the gmail lab (found in settings)
• Is your registration system automatically sending event reminders? It should be. 
• To send physical automated cards, check out a service like Postable

2. Survey your members.
Survey Monkey is just one of the many survey services out there to get feedback from your members. Ask members and participants about their overall opinions or ask them questions regarding about a specific event.

• Schedule your surveys in advance to happen the day after an event
• Include open ended responses and pick your favorite quotes for social media posts the following week
• With Survey Monkey, you can email the participants directly from the service. When you do this, you can have the survey seem anonymous, when in actuality each response is linked with the person's email.
• And did we mention, there is a Survey Monkey app for HubSpot?

3. Meet up with members.
Going to a conference? Traveling? Let your members know. Set up a meeting if they live in the area. Ask if anyone else will also be traveling to the conference. Ask for recommendations of people you should meet while there. Host a get-together 

• If you are meeting with members often, and need help scheduling, you have to check out this mind-blowing tool called X.AI that gives you a virtual AI assistant that does the scheduling for you (or you can use HubSpot's booking page)

• If this is just a few times a year, canned responses should help you quickly contact a number of people who are receiving the same message
• Asking someone important in the field? Use HubSpot's gmail extension to track the email to see if it the recipient opens it, this way you can follow up with a phone call and pin down the person

4. Write a blog and automate your content.
There a number of cutting edge computer softwares and apps to write blog posts that are being developed. Though most still have a long way to go, our favorite is AI Writer. Chances are it will need some editing, but it will definitely help you get started. Also, do not re-invent the wheel. Make your content once and share it across your platforms. When making a blog post, use images that are square to fit on your multiple social media channels. Copy and paste quotes from the article into your social media scheduler. 

5. Send eNewlsetters.
Mailchimp is our favorite way to send eNewsletters, but there are plenty of options for creating colorful emails that keep your members up to date. We recommend trying a few types of emails: Maybe your members prefer a round-up, others may want specific event-related emails or "how-to" content. To automate these take some time and set up a flawless template you can use every time and use that scheduling tool. (Pro tip: Make a fabulous graphic for your email that can be used on your social media, or take a screenshot to post later)

6. Create fast and easy videos.
Are you always running trying to work on the next project, and still trying to make fabulous video content for your audience? Try Canva or Magisto. Take a few video clips and a few photos and quickly make them into a video to increase your marketing reach and increase your engagement. (Pro tip: Pick one editing style that works with your branding, one music style and pick them every time, this will help with both your branding and your time!)

7. Utilize tools to help with your social media outreach.
Schedule your posts and use a schedule to keep this simple. There are so many options for scheduling posts: Hootsuite, Buffer, Later, Sendible, and now you can just use the Meta Business Suite. Pick one that works for you, and then create a schedule. 

8. Have an easy-to-use, engaging website.
There is NO reason to have a poorly designed, static website. There are multiple ways to build a website literally in minutes and good branding has a huge impact on your member engagement. Our favorite website builder is Weebly. To keep your content timely, try adding the Bloggons app to automatically update your homepage with your latest blog posts or try tockify to create a user-generated calendars that can be added to any site.

​​9. Create opportunities for volunteerism. 
Most people want to be apart of something larger than themselves and if they can find a sense of belonging in what you are doing, they will most likely become your best promoter. But how can you automate volunteering? Well, you can post volunteer opportunities on Idealist, this will make the process of finding volunteers easy. Then use a volunteer sign-up tool, like SignUp or Sign Up Genius to schedule when you need help and allow the volunteer to select a time. This means the only work you have to do, is be yourself when they arrive.