Using Automation to Run Your Association More Efficiently

Community Engagement

One key area where automation can drive positive impact is community engagement. Automation tools, like the Automation Rules in Higher Logic Thrive Community, can facilitate member onboarding, deliver personalized outreach to community members based on their activity (or lack thereof), and optimize community moderation – all of which fosters a continuously vibrant and inclusive environment for your members. 

“When we’re speaking with associations and nonprofits, one of their biggest areas of concern is how do I drive community engagement. With Higher Logic Thrive specifically, we have this amazing feature called Automation Rules – and I like to say it’s your virtual assistant. It’s doing work in the background for you so you don’t have to remember to do it.”

Community Automation Rules can be set up to send emails, add users to specific sub-communities, add users to security groups (which allow you to control what they have access to and what they don’t in your community), give ribbons and badges, or adjust demographics. These can be applied in a variety of ways to move, celebrate, and communicate with your members

For example:

• You can automate a notification to new community users who haven’t posted in the community yet, telling them how to make their first post. 
• You can set up an automated welcome/onboarding sequence for new members.
• You can set up an email notification for staff that warns you when one of your members has posted a question in the community that hasn’t been answered yet, enabling you to seek an answer for them.
• You can set up reminders for community users who haven’t logged in and highlight current conversations in the community that are relevant to them based on interests they’ve identified.

Automating tasks like these helps you build and reinforce community engagement while making the job of community management easier to handle – you no longer have to manually juggle an endless number of tasks or communications for every possible path a member might take.

Marketing and Communications

Marketing automation tools also hold tremendous potential from a marketing standpoint. Associations are better able to deliver targeted content to the right members at the right time, driving engagement and participation.

You can automate standard email campaigns like:

• New member welcome campaigns
• Membership renewal campaigns
• Event promotion campaigns
• Fundraising campaigns
• Win-back campaigns

In fact, Higher Logic Thrive includes premade automated campaigns for all of the above to help associations get started.

Expanding on one of these examples, let’s say you run the marketing for your member events. With automation tools, you could automate a series of promotion emails to folks who still haven’t registered, while automatically filtering those who have registered into a separate attendee communication campaign. This frees up your time to focus on the things that can’t, or shouldn’t, be automated, like fostering relationships with vendors, coming up with new, clever ways to do presentations, and planning engaging and exclusive in-person networking opportunities. 

Not only does all this benefit your staff – it benefits your members! They receive communication that’s highly tailored to them and you’re often able to facilitate more member benefits and experiences because you don’t have to manually send out every email.