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The Great Resignation: Ensuring Continuity for Your Members

Wondering how to keep the member experience continuous during the Great Resignation? Check out the highlights from our podcast conversation with Josh Slyman.

The work world has never been more in flux. Workers are reevaluating what they want out of their lives, their jobs, and their careers. As a result, many are in transition, which is both a risk and an opportunity for associations. Will you be forgotten as they go about this reevaluation or go about seeking a different job? Or will you step up and be a valued and appreciated constant that keeps them turning to you for tips, job leads, mentorships, and encouragement?

And what about your own association staff? Have you been hit by the Great Resignation and are having to do more with fewer people? Is the answer more people or more smart automated processes? It’s a discussion worth having, and we’re having it over on The Member Engagement Show.

The Guest

Name: Josh Slyman

Who They Are: Josh is Director of Product Strategy at Web Scribble, a company providing software for job boards, associations, publishers, and recruitment marketers.

How to Reach Josh: LinkedIn

Episode Takeaways

Best Clip from the Episode: “Understand that people do want to belong to something. They want to belong somewhere. Yes, some members just join to put the association on their resume. But most people who join associations are looking to be a part of something and grow their knowledge and career. They want to advance themselves and their opportunities. Deliver on that and you’ll build a member for life.”

Just How Big is This “Great Resignation Thing”?

68% of current employees are planning to quit their job in 2022.

Just Remember: Just because they’re planning on doing it doesn’t mean they are doing it. There’s still some opportunity to offset the risk of your association losing good people. There’s also the opportunity to leverage your own association to acquire and bring in new talent.

Using Data to Align with What Members Value

If you don’t know what members value, how can you possibly align with those wants and deliver? There’s so much data you can look at just in your email. Go beyond open rates and see what people click through. What are people clicking through on the newsletters? They’re telling you what they’re interested in, and you can tailor their experience from that.

Just Remember: Data gathering is the digital equivalent of listening to someone if you were with them in person and learning what they’re interested in.

Can Marketing Automation Really Help Keep Members Happy?

Marketing automation generates twice as many results as a one-off email blast, which makes sense because you’re messaging the right people with just what they want to see, right when they want to see it. Automated email messages average 70% higher open rates. This kind of relevant communication plays a heavy hand in retention, which saves associations money. It costs up to seven times more to get a new member than to keep an existing one.

Just remember: There’s only so much you can know and do manually, and no, marketing automation does not come across as impersonal. It’s the opposite. It lets members feel known and seen and cared about. 

Help Them Not Just in One Place, But in All the Places

Take a look at your technology stack. Are there any tools you have that can be used cross platform? This is about supporting the member experience. Things like single sign-on (SSO) so members can move smoothly from platform to platform. There’s leveraging the flexibility of RSS feeds. You can deliver member value across platforms and today’s users are used to that and comfortable with it, provided you make it easy.

Just remember: Tech tool integrations can smooth out the member experience so they can get more out of it. And for the Great Resignation, there’s opportunity to bring these pieces together around employment and career development.

Get all of Josh’s advice over on The Member Engagement Show. 

Mike Stiles

With backgrounds in TV, radio and theater, Mike Stiles took the lessons learned in storytelling and audience engagement to enterprise content strategy and writing services. Before serving his own clients, he was Manager Global Content Strategy for IHG. Prior to that he was with the Oracle Social Cloud where he led content and created, produced and hosted the Oracle Social Marketing Minute podcast and ran the thrice weekly blog. Clients have included Oracle, P&G, Delta, PayPal, the CDC, Equifax, IHG, UCB, Fiserv, and many others. He is author of the eBook “Showtime: Brands as Content Producers.”