In the May issue of Forum (Association Forum of Chicagoland), there is a brief article about membership retention. Strategy number two, in the article, is “promote community.”
This intrigues me! I’m hoping to find some examples of how associations are building community among members who are dispersed around the country. As an example, the article uses the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which has a great retention rate of 98 percent. They attribute that, in part at least, to promoting a sense of community—of veterinarians helping veterinarians. Sounds good so far, but the only examples they gave were an insurance program and a credit card! I guess when they market these programs, they focus on the “we’re helping vets” theme.
Okay, it’s great that they market to the community “feeling.” But that is not the same as building community. You build community when veterinarians actually do help other veterinarians. I assume that this indeed happens at AVMA, but I would rather have read about that in the article.
this is interesting. I am working on communtiy projects for neigh group in Orlando and have found two interesting neighborhood groups:
one in Providence and the other in Buffalo. The Buffalo project concentrates on true neighborhood projects ie residential zoning etc. The providence group, Summit Neighborhood Association, is very active. In fact, it seems they have quite a bit of money. They spent between $8,000 and $12,000 on a commercial revitilization project and they rejected the study's report. It wasn't "what they wanted". Then there were able to get more money from the City.
Do you know of similar situations, since there is one like that in our town. Just trying to see who has similar situations.
Posted by: John Lane | January 17, 2009 at 04:21 PM