Successful COVID-19 Responses by Member-based Organizations

Association professionals said:

We held a very successful two-day virtual conference in early October, partnering with another organization that shares our goals and objectives. Good content and quality speakers will attract attendees online, but it has to be good.

Surveyed our members about COVID’s impact on them and published a report with the results, highlighting their hard work and extraordinary effort during this time.

The staff shows up daily, whether it’s from home or in-house. We’ve grown our membership base by 8% this year, and it’s all attributable to staff.

We are in the healthcare provider industry, so our members are in the midst of COVID response. We seized every opportunity to understand and respond to their needs, including engagement with media. We were recently awarded a Platinum Award from MarCom for our communications work around COVID.

We did two successful social media campaigns highlighting our members’ work during COVID.

We had an increase in the number of premium members in our association. Our overall membership level is comparable to the prior year, but more companies have upgraded or joined at the premium level. The premium level brings in more revenue than other membership levels and indicates they know the value of what our organization is doing for our industry.

We will continue to present many of our services (education, meetings, events) virtually instead of trying to bring speakers and attendees together in person. It draws an expanded audience and allows us access to speakers we wouldn’t have otherwise.

We’ve experienced more success with live-streamed events rather than webinar-type events. Attendees have preferred watching what feels like a typical presentation rather than a speaker in front of their computer.

We immediately implemented twice-weekly industry conference calls so our members could share best practices, ask questions, etc.

We have fantastic support from industry leaders, contributing their expertise to our overall body of knowledge made available to all our members.

We began a 1:1 outreach program to all our members and launched a multi-lingual, online group where members can participate in English or Chinese; this increased membership renewals.

There is increased recognition of our industry’s (trucking) value because of the pandemic.

Our organization worked with the governor’s office to ensure safe and reliable electricity service. It has simultaneously been a crazy but rewarding experience.

We’ve learned a tremendous amount and are delivering more value than ever to our members and partners.

There’s a lot more cross-team collaboration.

I took over in January from prior ED, who had led the organization for 26 years. It was pretty daunting to consider stepping into those shoes. Had it not been for COVID, I think I might have encountered more resistance in trying to make any changes to long-standing programs.