Whatever the purpose for which your club or society was originally created, it’s important to keep the membership engaged and up to date with its activities. If you don’t, people will quickly begin to lose interest, and you may find membership numbers beginning to decline.
You’ll find plenty of advice available when it comes to setting up and running a club or society. However, there’s less to go on when dealing with keeping things fresh.
Stay Relevant
One of the key things for any organisation is to remain relevant. Lose that, and there’s little reason for people to remain involved. You need to focus on the original reason why the club was formed in the first place. Things around that may evolve, but you should always keep an eye on the core purpose. Having membership management systems in place can ensure you’re able to send out information which your audience will find useful.
Provide Opportunities
Whether you offer seminars, training courses, exhibitions or simply monthly meetings, you need to have opportunities for people to get something out of your organisation. The advent of the internet means you can often organise these things virtually using webinars so that even members in far-flung parts can take part. If you need help in organising these things, why not visit Ofec for a membership management system to help?
Encourage Participation
This is closely related to the previous tip. Whilst some people are happy to be ‘sleeping’ members who keep up to date with a monthly news letter, others want to get involved. Bringing new people into the organising of events also means that the burden doesn’t fall on the same few people all the time.
Stay in Touch
It’s important for members to feel they’re not forgotten, so you need to keep in touch on a regular basis. Email makes this much easier, but do make sure you use a proper mass mailing system to ensure you don’t fall foul of privacy and spam rules.
Strengthen Connections
With a local organisation this isn’t too much of a problem, but with national bodies members can often be located a long way apart. You can consider setting up local sub-groups for different parts of the county, allowing members to get together without the need to travel long distances.