In April I went to a workshop led by the coauthors of The Decision to Join, a book that came out of a monumental study conducted by ASAE. I sat stunned throughout the day as one by one my assumptions about member recruitment and retention were systematically dispelled.

One thing that surprised me was how much less important direct mail and other forms of advertising are for recruitment compared to word of mouth. Direct marketing has certainly been my focus, and I suspect that is a very common way of thinking. After all, direct marketing is more tangible than word of mouth, and association staff, who are generally responsible for marketing initiatives, have more direct control over those kinds of efforts. Word of mouth is up to members, right?

Members certainly are the ones doing the word-of-mouth promotion, but staff can play a role that fits with their function as staff. The Decision to Join study shows that the more deeply members are involved in the association, the more likely they are to become promoters. Staff and members both can work to get new members on the path to deep involvement. To get members deeply involved, staff and members provide small, ad hoc tasks to start them off with. Involvement on a small scale will encourage involvement on a larger scale.

So finding ad hoc tasks for new members becomes a critical recruitment tool, more so than direct forms of advertising. That means associations must wrestle with several questions: What ad hoc tasks can we provide? How do we connect new members with those tasks? How do we track these efforts? These are questions I plan to discuss in later posts.