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.