“It’s the little things in life…” – We’ve all heard that saying and probably uttered those words ourselves at least once in recent memory, but how true those words are!
What does this have to do with community management?
The same concept applies to community management and the member experience… are “the little things” sabotaging your member experience? The keys to cultivating an engaged audience and happier members are often not big things at all – it comes down to evaluating the member experience through THEIR EYES.
A few months back, I had a client launching a new open forum community and members were less than happy about the switch from the old forum to the new one. They were mostly complaining because no one likes change, but one person pointed out that it would be really helpful if the threads could expand/collapse because it wasn’t efficient to be scrolling through the threads and re-reading the same content over and over – it was a bad user experience on a computer and a critical issue on mobile devices.
As it turns out, the expand/collapse thread issue was a system glitch that was easily resolved. So one of the members’ key actionable complaints turned out to be something completely fixable at no cost to the association. But what would happen if we had let that glitch go unnoticed or decided it wasn’t important enough to follow up on? That glitch might still be there today and as a result, the community would likely have less engaged members due to a clunky user experience. Taking this scenario a step further, less engaged users may have meant higher website bounce rates (bad for SEO), shorter time on site (bad for SEO), a shortage of good content being produced (bad for member experience), and a whole host of ripple effects – it could ultimately have impacted membership, which would have been a big problem.
How does this apply to you?
While you are working to solve important issues going on in your association, what “little things” are you missing? Are you paying attention to your members’ experience? How difficult is it for them to join your association or renew their membership? How hard is it for them to access member resources or find member documents? How interesting or relevant are the discussions happening in your community?
My point is this: While spending time planning your annual meeting, fundraising to support an important cause, and sending out a monthly e-newsletter are all important and necessary function, the most important elements to evaluate are often the small ones – the ones we might overlook until they turn into bigger issues.
I encourage you not to lose sight of your member’s perspective. Pay attention! Don’t lose sight of what you’re driving members to do through that e-newsletter or event signup form. Make sure your member experience is as easy and enjoyable as it can be.
There are thousands of things in this world competing for your members’ attention. If your association isn’t monitoring the little things that impact your member experience, you may very well end up with disengaged, uninterested members who will find something else to occupy their time. And then the “little things” will become very big issues indeed.
#FranchiseAssociation #Association #Planning #CommunityManagement #blog #Strategy #AlumniAssociation