You’d have to be under a rock not be familiar with the phrase “member engagement.” A google search on the phrase returns over 300,000 hits. Count me as one who believes member engagement, is, in fact, critically important. But what is it? I especially like David Gammel’s definition:
Member engagement is the result of a member investing time and/or money with the association in exchange for value.
In my mind, David is kind of the grand-daddy of this line of thinking, having written the book on engagement, Maximum Engagement, over two years ago.
Since then, several of the AMS providers have been taking a serious look at this and developing products to address this issue. For example, Avectra has developed their “A-Score” procedure, a proprietary process that “measures the engagement level of individuals and organizations on an ongoing basis.”
And more recently, Aptify’s CEO Amith Nagarajan has published a free e-book, Scoring Member Engagement, which you can download here for free. His e-book does a nice job of outlining why measuring engagement is important and provides some guidelines of you might be able to do this in your association.
The importance of quantifying member engagement is only going to increase in coming years. So you’ll need to start preparing yourself and your organization for how you’re going to manage it and measure it. I’d suggest starting now.