Elevating member experience with UX principles

As an association professional, you know you’ve created meaningful and useful member benefits – so how can you ensure members can find and make good use of those benefits? And how do you make that experience reflect the quality and value of your organization?

Here at Fíonta, we help organizations answer these questions by applying our expertise in user experience (UX) design principles and over twenty years of association industry expertise to the overall member experience. By applying UX best practices to the technologies associations use to interact with their members, we help our partners increase membership retention and grow overall reach.

In the two parts of this post, we share some of the core principles of good user experience applied to the overall member experience. And if you need some help, we’re here to support you! Just reach out to us.

But first, what is user experience (UX)? And why does it matter to your association?

UX typically describes how a person feels when navigating and performing tasks within any digital interface, like your website or member portal. How that person feels in that moment directly correlates with how they feel about your association. Are they satisfied and content because they found what they needed to find? Or are they feeling frustrated and confused?

The same techniques can be applied to the way an association interacts with members in general. Does your association provide a Member Experience (MX) that makes your members feel satisfied and content? Or frustrated and confused?

An MX that meets members’ needs and eliminates friction points is essential to creating a good overall member experience and, thus, a great member sentiment about your association. Great member sentiment means they renew and stick with you, and that’s what we want to foster.

RELATED: Association websites: 7 ways to optimize user experience

Applying UX principles to improve the member experience

We hear about many common problems members face when interacting with association websites and portals. The experience is not intuitive, the site is clunky and slow, resources can’t be easily found, and logging in is difficult. The same premise can be applied to the overall MX—members are confused about benefits and how to access them, don’t know who to reach out to when help is needed, or find that membership staff is slow to respond.

These are not things we want to hear your members say, so we look to some foundational UX principles as well as others to help us improve how we interact with members. To that end, associations must make sure the MX is:

• Usable
• Useful
• Customized
• User-centric

Usable

The UX principle of usability is all about creating streamlined and intuitive pathways to getting information without instruction. Membership is only beneficial if members can easily figure out how to use it to help them achieve career and business goals. Make sure the journey to using member benefits is clear, intuitive, and easy to use.

Traditionally, new members receive a surplus of information sent in onboarding campaigns, which causes cognitive overload. Instead of feeling like their membership is usable and useful, they feel overwhelmed. According to the data, there is a better way.

According to the New Member Engagement Survey by Kaiser Insights and Dynamic Benchmarking, associations with higher retention rates follow a 3-3-6 onboarding schedule: three emails the first week, once weekly for the next three weeks, and then monthly for the next six months.

These more measured campaigns can prevent overload and make the process of learning about your member benefits more manageable. To make this easier for staff, you can set up sophisticated journeys in your email tools (like Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) to automate a series of strategic touchpoints with new members.

Other automated campaigns later in the membership journey can help new members take simple steps that lead to deeper interaction. Share explainer videos from peers or quick start guides that show members how to:

• Find and connect with members
• Find free educational information or career resources
• Read the latest news on a topic that interests them

You can customize the content to specific sets of people based on data you maintain in your AMS or CRM.

A usable membership fits into a member’s life because it’s convenient and easy. A mobile-friendly website, online learning portfolio, and active online community allow members to access benefits whenever and wherever they want.

Useful

The UX principle of usefulness comes down to: Based on your site’s purpose, how useful is your content? A useful member experience delivers value by helping members move toward and meet their membership, career, and business goals. Ask yourself: How helpful is having a membership? Are our resources and benefits helpful? Can members use what we have given them?

This starts during the new member onboarding phase. Make sure new members know how to easily access their most important (and useful) membership tools like:

• Member portal
• Member community and directory
• Newsletters
• Website and career center resources
• Learning management system (LMS)

In particular, make sure the key content on your website and the member portal is easily accessible so new visitors can find the information they need. Having advanced search and filtering features helps ensure people can find what they are specifically seeking.

For existing members, gather the right data through surveys and online forms, and crunch those numbers in an analytics tool like CRMA or Tableau. Once you understand how useful you are to members, you can change the MX to continually meet and hopefully exceed their expectations. It’s important to know that this is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done.

Finally, always keep your website content fresh so the organization retains its usefulness. Encourage members to update their member profiles when they renew so you can personalize their experiences, thus remaining useful.

Valuable

Good UX is all about providing value to your audiences. Just as a good website and member portal experience increases the perception of your organization’s value, a rewarding and meaningful MX correlates to a perception of high value.

So, how do you provide that meaningful experience? One way is through a personalized approach to membership. Collect data your association will use to better understand your members and deliver the content and experience they desire. Use online forms and occasional surveys directly integrated with your CRM or AMS to gather information efficiently and tie data collection to prizes and membership milestones.

When you know your members’ needs, you can offer what they need to achieve their individual goals. That is how they feel valued and, in turn, find your association valuable. Personalize their experiences with:

• News and resources on topics they care about
• Matches with peers, mentors, and leads
• Educational programs and events that match their preferences and interests
• Volunteering opportunities that suit them
• Need-to-know legislative and/or regulatory information

Once you know more about your members, you can create customized experiences within websites and member portals, interest-specific or location-based groups, tailored membership types, or niche resources.

User-centric

It sounds obvious, but too often we think about association problems we want to solve with members as the means to that end. Instead, look at membership through the eyes of your different segments of members (and prospects).

User research helps you become more user- and member-centric. These activities help you identify the experiences and resources that solve members’ problems and move them closer to their aspirations. You also learn how to deliver those experiences and solutions in the way your members prefer.

Many UX research tasks, such as member experience audits, journey mapping, and data analysis, can be done in-house. In Part II of this blog post, we’ll share some tips on how your organization can use UX research to improve the overall member experience.