Membership surveys are to associations as customer satisfaction surveys are to businesses. Measuring customer satisfaction is important for every business, whether they use customer surveys with defined customer loyalty metrics or something else entirely. The same should be said for associations and non-profits. When it comes to associations,
membership dedication and participation is what makes the chapter worthwhile. As a result, how could you not want to conduct attitude surveys? When you're still small, you may know all your members personally and not have a need for a formal survey process. But as your chapter grows, it will be come nearly impossible to keep in personal contact with all the members to ensure they're happy. If they're not happy, well they'll let you know - by not renewing their membership.
Like with community surveys,
by conducing membership surveys often you provide an outlet for members to give honest, relevant feedback. Sometimes the feedback collected in a survey is different than what someone will say directly to your face. By conducting surveys frequently, you'll have
all the information you need at your fingertips when it comes to making critical decisions, such as how many events to have next year, what programs receive the most funding, etc.
If you've never conducted a survey before, let alone a membership survey, it can feel like a daunting task. Here are five tips to help you get the most out of your next association survey.
Understand who's answering your survey. Understanding what types of members are answering your survey will help you better understand the survey results at the end, because you'll be able to segment the data better. Here are a few membership segments you might want to consider:
How long have you been a member?
Have you ever served on the board or a committee?
How many chapter functions did you attend this year?
It shouldn't matter what type of survey (anonymous or not) you're conducting. Having this type of information is very helpful. If you choose to conduct anonymous surveys, asking these questions is even more critical. If you aren't conducting an anonymous survey, hopefully you already know all this information - and if you don't, you should only have to ask it once.
Understand why they joined your chapter. Your current members are the best way to grow your membership. You should be using this to your advantage, and ensuring you're doing everything you can to keep your members satisfied is a good step. But beyond that, understanding the answers to some critical questions can help you recruit new members in the future:
How did you find out about the chapter?
What made you decide to join the chapter?
Are there any other people that might be interested in joining? If so, please list them.
Find out how members feel about each aspect of the chapter. You should ask specific questions about new projects, as well as old ones:
How valuable do you think the chapter newsletter is?
How would you rate the usability of the chapter's event registration process?
How smoothly do you feel the board elections went?
Ask about events. The events your chapter hosts are a major component of the chapter's value. As such, you need to make sure your membership believes the the programs you're putting on are valuable. Again, if you don't ask and they don't see them as valuable they'll let you know, by not renewing. I suggest conducting a short post-event survey after every seminar or workshop:
How valuable was last month's speaker series?
What was the best aspect of this year's conference? The worst?
What venue have you liked best this year?
If you host a big conference, it's important to also have a post-conference survey to better prepare you for next year. Conferences are much bigger than a workshop or a seminar so you may want to give that survey more thought than you would a seminar survey.
Plan for the future. Like businesses, associations depend on renewals, repurchases and continued loyalty. Conducting surveys is one way to help you build these strategies. But you also have the opportunity to gauge future income and identify key areas for improvement during these surveys.
How likely are you to renew your membership?
Do you have any suggestions for improving next year's annual conference?
What would you like to learn about in the next continuing education event?
People often separate out for-profit, not-for-profit and associations as being completely different. While there are a lot of things that are significantly different about these groups, there is also aspects that are very similar. One of these similarities is that they all
need to collect feedback from their stakeholders and constituents. Say it with me: membership surveys are to association chapters what customer feedback questionnaires are to businesses.