Guest Author: Christina Green, Socious
Have you ever noticed the large number of corporate brands that market on some variation of having it your way? There’s Burger King, Subway, Kmart, Walt Disney World, and many others.
While Burger King started marketing that way 40 years ago, with the advent of social media and online retailers, personalized shopping experiences like you find with Amazon—offering people what they want on their terms—are becoming more of an expectation than a luxury.
This trend in customer expectations extends well beyond consumer brands. For associations and other membership organizations, part of meeting members on their terms is allowing them to interact with your organization in the hours that are convenient for them.
This means more virtual engagement opportunities and offerings for members who are unable to attend member events, committee meetings, and industry conferences in person.
However, one of the challenges to offering a virtual membership option is deciding what benefits and features will be appealing to virtual members. Then, how do you can maintain a distinction between virtual memberships and what we’ll refer to as a full or traditional memberships?
The term full membership is used because a virtual membership, while complete in its ability to entice members to join, should not offer the same things as your traditional membership levels. You do not want existing members to migrate from a traditional membership to a virtual one unless it means they would otherwise drop their membership completely.
Virtual memberships allow you to accommodate and appeal to the needs of several groups that you may not otherwise be addressing:
