The Boss Blog

Someone signed up to become a new member of your organization. That is terrific news! It is now time to welcome this new member, to make an amazing impression and guide them on their way to becoming a participating, engaged and involved member of your association. There are few ways to welcome new members to your organization, the most common one being via email. Here are some tips and tricks on what to include in a great welcome email:

A Personalized Subject Line

Personalizing your email to new members is one of the best ways to make them feel welcome. The subject line should let them know that you are reaching out to confirm their membership. Plus, personalizing the subject line adds a personal touch that lets them know that you are not just sending an automated, general confirmation email. It may just be an automated email, but the perception is more positive with a personalized subject line.

Include the Important Details

As you confirm the new member’s membership, send every bit of important detail. Include things like membership type, membership duration, renewal date, login details, auto-renewal options, etc. Basically, everything that a member needs to keep for their records should be included in the email.

Reiterate the Benefits of Their Membership

The welcome email is a great place to reinforce the value your new member is going to receive from being part of your organization. It’s good for your new members to be reminded of the benefits they’re getting from a membership with your organization. They may have forgotten, or may need to refer to it as they report back to their team.

Include Useful Links

Navigating a new association’s website can prove to be tricky. Make it easy for your new members. Include useful links in your email, especially links to online resources. Key areas of your website, such as a members-only area, member directories, event calendars, and the like should have links in your email.

Help Them Get Involved Right Away

As you acquire more and more members, some of them are going to want to get involved immediately. It’s exciting to join a new organization. New members are going to want to access and use the resources you have for them right away. However, with the amount of options and information they have at their disposal, it can get quite overwhelming. Show them where to get started in your email. It could be something as simple as registering for an account or registering for an event. Put some thought into it and guide them to a proper starting point.

Show Availability for Support

One of the most annoying things for any organization member or even a business customer is not being able to get the help they need. You want to convey from the beginning that your organization has a culture where questions are welcome and help is readily available. Make sure to include ways for your new member to receive help in your email. Offer different ways for your new members to contact your organization, whether it’s a phone number, a live chat, or an email address specifically designated for help and support.

Sending a welcome email is just the beginning of your relationship with your members. As time progresses, you’d be communicating more and more with your members. Whether it’s an announcement, an event invitation, or a drip campaign, sending emails is vital to your member-based organization. Without proper Membership Management Software, sorting through the appropriate members to email or even sending automated emails based on user action can be quite a challenging and daunting task. Using Membership Management Software like MemberBoss makes sending group emails easy. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

As your member-based organization grows, the work necessary to manage your membership grows as well. Keeping your members happy and engaged will require more work, on top of the work needed to obtain more members. The more work needs to be done, the more time is needed to accomplish all the required tasks. If your organization is not using Membership Management Software, all the work required to manage your membership can become quite cumbersome. This is because as your organization grows, you’ll likely be using different tools to accomplish different tasks. You might need to use an Excel spreadsheet to manage all your members’ data. You might need to use an Event Management tool for all your events. You might also need to use a CRM, an email platform, etc.

Using Membership Management Software, eliminates the need to jump from platform to platform in order to perform different tasks. Membership Management Software brings all the tools you need to manage your membership into one platform. Membership Management Software like MemberBoss helps streamline the process and enables you to handle the tasks that come with a growing membership. Here are a few benefits of using Membership Management Software as your organization grows:

Time Management

A common problem that growing member-based organizations face is that at a certain point there will be a lot more tasks related to managing members, leaving very little time to focus on growing membership. You might think that a good solution would be to either split the workload with other team members or hire someone to take on the growing workload. This seems like a reasonable solution, and it is, but only up to a certain point. It won’t be too long until the amount of work to be done increases again and you reach another saturation point, especially if you’re doing a good job attracting new members. What will you do now? Hire another person? Sure that might work temporarily again. However, this strategy is not a viable one. It will put you at risk, because all it would take is one bad year where a lot of members don’t renew and you’ll be operating at a loss with additional team members that you didn’t have to bring on board.

Having Membership Management Software helps solve this issue in a preventative way. Without Membership Management Software like MemberBoss, management-related processes become inefficient and time-consuming as your organization grows. These processes are much more efficient and in some cases even automated with Membership Management Software. This will allow your team members not only to be more effective, but also to have more time focusing on gaining more members in your organization. This way, you know that if you have to add more members to your team, they will actually be more effective and more valuable.

Better Track Member Engagement

If you’re not using Membership Management Software, having useful data and tracking the behaviors of your members can be quite challenging. As mentioned earlier, you’d be using different software platforms to accomplish different tasks related to your membership. This makes it especially difficult to get an overall picture of your membership engagement. Subsequently, knowing where to focus your efforts to better serve your members and drive engagement will be problematic and burdensome.

In addition to doing everything the different software platforms are doing, Membership Management Software will also track member interactions across each engagement undertaking and give you a better understanding of how your members are engaging. This is vital to any member-based organization.

Still Being Able to Create Value

Possibly the biggest overlooked issue with growing a membership without Membership Management Software is not having the time to create value. Growth is not just about more of the same to a bigger audience. It’s also about innovation and serving better. Operating without a Membership Management Software takes that away from you as you grow. As you grow, without Membership Management Software like MemberBoss to streamline all your management-related processes, you’d be spending most of your time maintaining the value you’ve created and not having time to create additional value. Your time will be mostly absorbed by managing your existing membership. It will become more and more of a struggle to keep the members you’ve worked so hard to acquire. Using Membership Management Software will free up your time to implement ways of adding more value to your existing customers and your newcomers.

It’s a no-brainer. For a growing member-based organization, it is far more beneficial to have Membership Management Software like MemberBoss. The only constant thing in life is change. That applies to organizations as well. There comes a certain point in the growth of an organization where a change has to happen in order to keep growing. That change might as well be adopting Membership Management Software. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

If you’ve recently been working remotely, then chances are you are familiar with the video conferencing platform Zoom. Teleworking arrangements have been made across many businesses, organizations and even schools with many of them adopting Zoom as their video conferencing platform of choice. Zoom has quickly become a vital tool for millions of people to communicate during this time of stay-at-home orders and social distancing.

Zoom-Bombing

Unfortunately, the world is succumbing to a new type of internet trolling with disturbing, aggravating and irritating circumstances: Zoom-bombing. If you haven’t fallen victim to Zoom-bombing, count your blessings. Zoom-bombing occurs when someone hijacks the screen sharing feature of Zoom to bombard other viewers with the most appalling and downright nasty videos. These video hijackers even go as far as promoting violence, racism, sexism, and even shockingly monstrous pornography.

These video hijackers can gain access to a Zoom meeting when the video conferences are hosted over a public channel and the URLs or meeting IDs are shared over the internet or made accessible to the public. Video hijackers can also use an app that cycles through various meeting IDs until it lands on one that is correct and instantly gives the hijacker access to the Zoom meeting.  

How to Prevent It

There are a few things that can be done to mitigate and prevent Zoom-bombing during your next Zoom meeting. Your first line of defense is to not share your meeting link on social media where everyone can have access to it. Instead, only share your meeting link privately, directly to specific meeting attendees. Here are a few tips on what else to do to prevent getting Zoom-bombed:

• Change screen sharing to “Host-Only” before a meeting starts
• Disable “Join Before Host”, that way people can’t get in the meeting before you and start wreaking havoc
• Designate a “Co-Host” that can help you moderate while you are presenting
• Only allow hosts to share screens.
• Lock the meeting once all attendees have joined
• Disable File Transfer to stop any participants from sending or receiving malicious software or even viruses

All these are valuable steps to take to mitigate the risks of getting Zoom-bombed. However, the best protection from Zoom-bombing is to set up a meeting password, which all participants must enter in order to join. Doing so ensures that only those with the password can join the meeting, and it stops any hijacker from being able to access your meeting. Even video hijackers using the app to cycle through meeting IDs will not be able to gain access to your meeting as the app has no recourse for a password-protected meeting.

Zoom-bombing may soon, itself, be classified as a punishable crime. Certainly, the actions taken by the video hijackers are worthy of lawful punishment. As we use the internet more and more, the number of cybercriminals will increase. It’s up to us to always be careful and take the necessary precautions as to not fall victim to any cybercrime. Stay vigilant, and as a general rule if anything seems weird or fishy, do not proceed forward.

Unless you are a Martian, or are on a space odyssey, you should be aware of the global crisis we are facing due to the Coronavirus. Throughout the whole world, governments and health organizations are taking unprecedented measures to fight and mitigate the impact of the virus. Stay-at-home orders have been implemented. Multiple businesses aren’t able to function properly. Some have even shut down all operations. The economy has taken a hit, and more and more people are in self-isolation.

Amidst all of this, online businesses are still able to operate, and in some cases even thrive better than before the crisis. Member-based organizations that operate in part or completely online are not much different. It’s absolutely normal, during these uncertain times to not be sure what the best thing to do for your organization is. We’re here to offer some guidance on how to proceed forward; however, no matter what you decide to do, you should always take your audience into account and do right by them. Whether you are a large organization with membership running in the thousands or a small-size group with few members, here are some things to do to keep running your membership during this crisis.

Be There For Your Members

In times like these, it’s quite easy to suspend everything and momentarily disappear on your members, and justifiably so. However, right now that would be the wrong move to make. More than ever, showing up for your members right now is critical. Your response to what is happening will definitely shape how your member base views your organization. Disappearing on your members, especially without notice and a viable explanation can only have a negative impact on your image and your brand. Everyone, including your members, is to a certain degree affected by what is going on. Your members are feeling just as anxious and uncertain as you. Now is the time to be a leader and give them some reassurance. Now is the time to give them helpful resources. This is the perfect time to create content that is tailored to the current climate, as everyone is tuned in to this topic. This is also the perfect time to open up ways for your members to connect with one another. If you’re using Membership Management Software like MemberBoss, a collaboration tool can be added onto your platform to allow a forum-like space for your members to communicate.

Don’t Stop Marketing

Right now, everything that is happening might be encouraging you to stop selling and slow down your marketing, maybe even shut down all marketing efforts. However, if your organization is able to function in these new circumstances, then shutting down your sales and marketing is completely erroneous. Additionally, there are some people for whom things haven’t really changed that drastically. So, if your organization is able to service people during this time, then it is completely fine to keep marketing. You can help a ton of people. Just make sure your content or efforts are not misconstrued as you being insensitive to the situation. If you know you can help people right now, it’s also worth taking into account offering a free trial or a specially discounted membership. People will remember that you’ve helped them during a difficult time.

Prepare and Position Yourself

In times like these, it’s very easy to rush into things out of panic. Don’t fall into that trap. Best thing you can do is take your time assessing the situation. Take your time and prepare. Prepare for every contingency. What is your organization going to do once everything returns to normal? You want to be ahead of the curve, so prepare now. Plan your marketing accordingly. Build your site the way you’ve always wanted it to be. Create tons of content. Think about the problems you can solve for people right now and when the crisis is over. Can you offer additional services that you weren’t able to put into place before? Do everything you can right now that will put you in a great position when everything settles. This includes mastering all your operational activities and tools. Among those tools is your Membership Management Software like MemberBoss. In case you weren’t aware, MemberBoss puts on live webinars to help you master the platform.

We’re facing a very unusual crisis, and how we respond might shape our future in ways that we can’t predict. This doesn’t mean that we have to stop being productive. It doesn’t mean that we have to stop serving others. It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to stop managing your membership. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.