Your role in membership recruitment and retention.

How volunteers contribute to attracting and keeping members.

While staff roles in an association's membership development and retention efforts are usually welldocumented and understood, the roles that volunteer leaders can and do play in these activities are often much less understood - but they're equally important. How these volunteer roles are defined from one association to another will depend in large part on the size of the association and how much staff support is available.

POLICY SETTING

As a volunteer, your most important role in membership recruitment and retention efforts is to set policy - to determine the strategic directions of the association in accordance with member needs. In the area of membership, these strategies will flow from the basic policy determination of which industry, cause, or professional segments the association can serve effectively. In times when entire industries, causes, and professions are undergoing monumental change, these strategy determinations by volunteer leaders are critical to an association's competitive position for retaining current members and attracting new ones.

RESEARCH

Other policy discussions and decisions you make will focus on how the association can best serve its members. In these discussions - whether at the board level or within the membership committee or task forces focused on specific issues - it's important that the perspectives of all key member segments are represented adequately.

Association leaders can help ensure that member perspectives are heard and represented by instituting calling trees or other similar activities for which each individual board member solicits perspectives of members on a regular basis. While you must remain sensitive to the fact that not all perspectives will always be totally representative of the membership, the research you do to compare leadership and member perspectives on key association issues and activities will ensure that no serious disconnects occur between the leadership and the members at large.

COMMUNICATION

Another key membership role for all volunteer leaders, regardless of the association's size and complexity, is to demonstrate and provide tangible evidence of the association's value to its members and prospective members and its industry, cause, or profession. Many associations solicit leader testimonials for member and prospective member communications, including membership brochures, advertisements in trade publications or professional journals, and new-member information kits. These testimonials can be in a letter from the board president, a report to the membership in the association's monthly publication, or an item on the association's Web site. Other associations extend their leaders' influence on other members and prospects through feature articles or conference presentations about specific programs or association activities.

MEMBER CONTACT

Another valuable role for volunteer leaders is to demonstrate personal commitment to membership by making phone calls or personal visits to key members or prospects. These are opportunities to talk about the association's goals and accomplishments and ask for continued support or to join the association. Both members and prospects are more likely to respond positively to member contact than to staff contact. Primarily for that reason, many associations regularly use member-get-a-member campaigns and provide incentives and special recognition to their leaders for getting the largest possible number of members involved.

When available, staff can provide logistical and tactical support to ensure that volunteer activities will have maximum impact. In associations with few or no staff resources, however, volunteer leaders need to involve themselves in many of these activities. This may require fielding service-related requests of members, communicating directly to members and prospects on the association's behalf, conducting research on member needs and satisfaction with the association, and so forth.

Your role in each of these activities - policysetting, research, communication, and member contact - will make a huge difference between the success and failure of your association's membership development and retention efforts.

Arlene Farber Sirkin is president and Miriam T. Meister, CAE, is senior consultant, Washington Resources Consulting Group, Inc. (WRCG), Bethesda, Maryland. WRCG wrote Keeping Members: The Myths and Realities, published by the ASAE Foundation in 1995. E-mail: [e-mail].