Engaging your Members

Many organisations have difficulty growing their membership base and involving their members in the work of the organisation. This article gives you some ideas about improving your membership engagement. Sections include:

• Why Members Matter
• Communicate with your Members
• Serving the Membership

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Why Members Matter

In law, if not always in practice, an incorporated association is a member-based organisation. Staying engaged with your members and involving them in the operation of the organisation is good practice and will benefit your organisation in the long term by building community support, providing you with resources such as volunteers, pro-bono advice and donations, and become a source of new board members who are interested and engaged with the organisation.

The membership is also the final level of accountability for your organisation, but they can only perform this function if they know what is happening.

Communicate with your Members

Make sure your members are informed about the work of the organisation in an open and accountable fashion. Remember the members are the owners of your incorporated association and elect the committee to govern on their behalf.

Ensuring that there are ways that you communicate with members is also a good way of keeping them interested in your work. If they don’t know what their organisation is doing then they are less likely to be interested in supporting that work on an ongoing basis. The members need to feel confident that their values and ethical framework are informing the way the organisation carries out its work. This is part of the accountability equation, but it also provides guidance for the staff and volunteers. Sometimes not all members agree with all the work of the organisation, but they support the overall direction and reasoning.

Serving the Membership

It helps if members, and potential members, know what they may receive when they sign-up for membership. They also need to know how the organisation will treat them and how accountable to them it will be for its work.

Organisations are required to keep an up-to-date membership database under the Associations Incorporation Act 1991. Yo may receive requests for information from that database, but divulging this information to others, including interested government officials, may be infringing privacy laws unless the members have agreed to their information being distributed. It is good practice to guard the privacy of your membership database. Listing the membership names in publications would also require the permission of members.

Some ideas for engaging members include:

• Call or survey your members to ask what skills they could contribute or what opportunities they would like to get more involved
• Advertise any opportunities for engagement in newsletters and other communications
• Use membership surveys as an evaluation tool to ensure that your organisation is fulfilling its membership duties effectively
• Hold member events where members can engage with the board and staff in a social environment and develop closer personal relationships with your organisation

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