Your member survey reaches one in twenty. Your events reach everyone.
Every plan you take to your board, and every audience claim you make to a sponsor, rests on the members who answer surveys. The ones who register for your conference tell you what they want too, in their own words, and at the moment that goes in the bin the week after.
“Membership organisations are rarely short of member feedback. Hearing from members isn't necessarily the same as understanding the membership.”
Better answers for your board, out of an event you already run.
There is no new programme to launch and no extra thing for your team to build. The questions go on the form, and the summary arrives written.
A sponsor conversation with something in it
Sponsors have stopped accepting a headcount and a demographic breakdown. What they want to know is whether the people in that room have the problem they solve. After your conference you can tell them, in the members' own words, and that is a renewal conversation rather than a discount conversation.
Programming built on what members asked for
Seventeen members wanted to talk about one thing and seven could. Six asked about something nobody in the room could help with. That is your call for papers written for you, and it comes out of an event you were running anyway.
Members who leave having met the right person
Your conference is the one time a year most of your members are in the same place. Everyone gets three names and a reason before they arrive, so the person who flew in to find someone doing what they are doing finds them.
Small team, no extra work
Two boxes go on the registration form you already use. Nothing else changes about how you run the event, and the write-up arrives without anyone on your team having to build it.
Two questions in, a board paper out.
Two boxes on your registration form
What they are working on this year, and what they could help another member with. Members answer because it is part of registering, not because you chased them.
Everyone arrives with three names
Three people worth finding, and a sentence each on why. It goes out by email a few days before, and it works the same for a hundred people or a thousand.
The write-up lands
What the room wanted, what it offered, where the two did not meet, and which sub-groups inside your membership are big enough to be their own event.
The bit you can take to a sponsor.
At a legal convention with 71 people, seventeen wanted to talk about legal practice and seven could help. Fifteen wanted career development and eight could offer it. Six came looking for help with data and nobody in the room had it. Meanwhile wellbeing was offered by eighteen people and wanted by eight.
That table is a programming brief, a speaker list and a sponsorship prospectus, and it came out of two boxes on a form.
- Demand against supply, by topic. What members came wanting to discuss, next to what the room could actually give them.
- The cohorts inside your membership. The groups big enough to justify their own stream, their own event or their own special interest group.
- Two pages in plain English. Written to go straight into a board paper or a sponsor report without anyone rewriting it.
One yearly price for the whole membership.
You run a flagship conference and a calendar of smaller things, so paying per event does not fit. It is a yearly subscription set by the size of your membership, covering everything you run. The tiers sit on our community pricing page.
What association teams ask first.
See a real report first.
Tell us what you run and we will show you the write-up from a real event, so you can judge it before anything else.
Find out what your members actually came for.
Run it at your next conference and see what comes back. It would be great to walk you through one we have already done.
Talk to us