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When we think about membership, a lot of thought goes into recruitment of new members, but what about retention of existing ones? According to data from GrowthZone, 75% of associations had no written plan for increasing engagement. What does your organisation do to turn year 1 into year 2 and beyond?
For professional bodies, learned societies and membership organisations, that question deserves as much attention as the joining process. Recruitment matters, but members also need reasons to stay. If recruitment dominates the website or project brief, success can become a matter of counting new registrations while overlooking what happens to those members. The website has a role throughout that relationship, helping people use their benefits and find their place in the organisation.
In our earlier article, Why membership should serve the user, not the database, Rich explored how internal systems can shape the member experience. Here, we want to consider what a website should help members do once they have joined.
Give new members somewhere to start
A list of benefits can help persuade someone to join. Once they have joined, they need to know how to use them. In Marketing General Inc.’s 2025 benchmarking survey, 52% of organisations identified “insufficient engagement or members not using benefits” among the leading reasons people did not renew.
Good onboarding gives members a manageable first step to engagement:
- a drip-feed of emails, talking about the benefits and features (and how to access them) of membership
- a scheduled catch up with a member of member services in the first month
- highlighting some upcoming events that are included in their membership
The website should make those next steps obvious, with a useful welcome page and straightforward access to resources. An email sequence can introduce further opportunities over time, linking directly to the relevant pages. Asking for interests gradually, through connected pulse surveys, also avoids turning registration into a lengthy questionnaire.
Make useful content easier to find
Members arrive with different interests, experience and reasons for joining. A homepage or dashboard showing everyone the same announcements leaves them to work out which ones might matter to them.
Personalisation can start simply. Topics a member selects (potentially on their first login), their career stage or their membership category can inform which resources, events and training opportunities appear on their account. They should still be able to browse beyond those recommendations and change their preferences.
That requires thoughtful content structure and taxonomies. Consistent topics and audience labels help the website connect a publication with a related event, recording or course. Search and filtering matter too, especially when a member needs a particular piece of guidance quickly.
For organisations offering continuing professional development (CPD), the journey can extend to booking training, finding course materials and accessing certificates or recording completed activity.
Use email to bring members back
Even a useful website needs to give members reasons to return. Timely email automation can connect what happens on the site with the rest of their membership. Identifying triggers and grouping them by audience helps clarify who needs what, and when:
- A new member could receive a relevant event recommendation
- An attendee might get a follow-up linking to a recording and related resources
- Someone who has already booked should stop receiving invitations to book the same event
- Event recommendations based on declared interests and previous events attendance
These journeys depend on reliable connections between the website, membership records, event tools and email platform.
Help people feel part of the organisation
Content also helps members understand the community they have joined. Member interviews, practical accounts of shared work and updates on what membership makes possible or what you’re doing for the community, can give the organisation a recognisable human voice.
Provide ways to contribute, too. A member might share expertise, submit a question, volunteer or connect with a local group. Make those opportunities visible alongside the resources they already use.
An online discussion space may support this, but it needs a clear purpose and people to moderate and sustain it. Sometimes a well-supported network of groups or events will be more useful than a new forum.
Participation will look different for different members. Someone who reads guidance quietly or attends an occasional event may be getting exactly what they need. We should understand that value before treating low website activity as disengagement.
Make renewal a natural next step
By renewal time, members should have had opportunities to experience the value promised when they joined. A renewal message can remind them of relevant benefits, shared achievements and what is coming next. For more advanced platforms, displaying what benefits have been used (and, potentially, which ones haven’t) can be a really compelling selling point.
The transaction itself should be straightforward.
- Show the price and membership period clearly
- Make updating details simple
- Avoid asking members to enter information the organisation already holds
- Test the whole journey on mobile, including login and payment
There may also be opportunities to recommend paid training, specialist events or a different membership tier. These should relate to the member’s needs, with a clear explanation of the additional value and cost. Basic membership benefits must remain easy to find without an upsell getting in the way.
Build engagement into the website brief
These experiences need to be considered during discovery, design and development. A rebuild brief should ask how existing members find resources and participate, alongside how prospective members join.
We would start by talking to members and the teams supporting them, then mapping the journeys that matter most. Prototypes can test whether people understand their next steps. Technical planning establishes how access, payments, content, personalisation, and communications will work across the systems involved.
Editorial responsibilities matter as well. Recommendations are only useful if resources stay current and events have accurate information. The solution needs to be manageable for the people maintaining it.
After launch, measure more than registrations. Resource use, event bookings, onboarding progress and renewal rates can help identify where to investigate. Consider opening that data up to members; would it help if they could see their own or their team’s usage? Member feedback is essential to understand why people participate, stay or leave.
Review the experience after joining
Try looking at your website as someone who joined yesterday. Is it clear where to start? Can they find something relevant, use a benefit and see how to get involved? Other datapoints, like number of renewals per year and average membership lifetime paint a clearer picture of any discrepancies.
Those questions can reveal priorities for your next website project or improvements to your current platform.