Summary of Podcast
This is an HPO podcast episode from Zzeem Studio, hosted by Erin Roberts (a partner with Zzeem, an association management and consulting firm), focused on practical tactics for increasing member engagement in membership associations.
Erin opens by framing why engagement matters: engaged members renew, attract new members, and feed the volunteer pipeline, which together drive an organization’s sustainability. In the current uncertain economic climate, he stresses that retaining existing members matters even more than chasing new ones, though both remain important.
The bulk of the talk walks through four areas:
- engaging members,
- recruiting volunteers,
- engaging and motivating volunteers, and
- recruiting new members,
in that deliberate order, since nailing the first three makes the fourth far easier.
On member engagement, she focuses heavily on events as an underused lever, advising organizations to make events compelling by offering both learning and networking value, assigning board members as deliberate “hosts” who actively work the room rather than clustering with people they already know, building in semi-structured icebreaker activities, varying the format/venue/timing to reach different segments of the membership rather than always pulling the same loyal crowd, and tightening the practical mechanics of event marketing and registration. He also recommends annual surveys and creating niche special-interest communities within a broader membership as engagement tools, plus treating onboarding and renewal as key engagement touchpoints, including personal welcome outreach, financial incentives tied to early renewal, and always having a forward-looking event calendar visible to members.
On volunteers, she argues engaged members are the best volunteer prospects and that recruitment depends on finding “rallying points,” causes or issues members are passionate about, rather than generic appeals. She reframes complaints as a gift, since a member who complains is already engaged and often a strong volunteer candidate. She stresses building a standing volunteer pipeline (not just filling vacancies reactively), targeting outreach by skills and demographics, and pitching volunteering as a leadership and growth opportunity. She uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to argue that associations satisfy belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs through volunteering.
For retaining and motivating volunteers once recruited, she emphasizes immediate training (governance, processes, who to contact, and the organization’s member value proposition), fast personal connections to other volunteers and leadership, guaranteeing each committee at least one “quick win” within 12 months for a sense of accomplishment, articulating a visible volunteer career path, and balancing autonomy with enough staff support that volunteers feel real ownership of outcomes.
Finally, on recruiting new members, he notes people join for one reason (the organization’s mission resonates, or people they trust are already members) but renew for a different reason (the relationships and network they’ve built), so recruitment should lean on existing members’ personal networks and warm referrals rather than generic outreach.
The episode closes with a Q&A covering how to manage engagement with corporate (multi-contact) memberships, board/committee succession planning, tailoring volunteer management across membership tiers, and engaging time-strapped volunteers, where Erin’s core point is that people make time for things that genuinely interest them, so the real lever is relevance and respect for their time rather than just availability. She ends by encouraging viewers to pick just one tactic to implement and mentions a follow-up podcast on governance.