Member Recruitment and Your CRM

Why Use a CRM?

One of the biggest advantages of a CRM system is the ability to segment and select members based on their characteristics. This means you know who your members are and what's "typical" about them. Perhaps more than half of your members are between 30 and 40, or you have more women than men. When you capture this kind of information reliably, you can identify prospects who fit the profile perfectly to become members. It's audience targeting based on your existing membership. You can then use these insights to drive your recruitment efforts. All this information is readily available from your CRM system. Let's dive deeper to understand how this works in practice.

Member Recruitment with Complete Insight

As an association professional, you know better than anyone that your members vary widely. If you want to deepen your relationship with your audiences, you need to understand what interests them. This can be challenging—where do you start? A good CRM is an excellent starting point, provided it's continuously and correctly maintained. This isn't a problem when you have a fully automated CRM system. All entered and modified data is immediately and automatically saved in the CRM. This saves you significant time and ensures you always have up-to-date relationship management.

What works exceptionally well in a CRM is maintaining data on relation cards. Every relationship in your CRM has one. This is incredibly useful because it provides insight into individual members and their characteristics or areas of interest. By maintaining this data properly, you build a detailed profile of your relationships. You can then use this profile to continuously strengthen your relationship and give your member recruitment a substantial boost.

Another advantage of relation cards in a CRM system is their flexibility. A relation card consists of tabs, sections, and input fields. You also have different relationship types, which help you quickly distinguish between a member and a volunteer, for example. A good system gives you custom fields on your relation card where you can add characteristics relevant to your organization. For instance, a foundation might add a field like "interested in news about the fund." Or an association might include "interested in events about theme X" on the relation card. This way, your organization gains perfect insight into your relationships and can provide everyone with the information they want to receive.

Creating Engagement with Your CRM System

With the insights you create through the use of your CRM system, you can increase engagement with your relationships. Thanks to a clear overview, you know who's interested in what, making it easy to create content or organize events for specific groups. This makes them feel more connected to your association. Someone might have zero interest in industry news but would love to receive updates about new training courses or industry standards, for example.

The power of the relation card lies in its ability to connect various data and information. This allows you to gain insights you didn't have before. This applies to individual members, but of course also to groups of members. You might discover that a large portion of your members needs knowledge about a specific topic. You can then respond to that quickly.

This way of using your CRM is just the beginning of what's possible when it comes to member recruitment. Because when you can connect all your data in such a way that all your applications can use it, you can really start working on engagement. To learn how that works, read this article about engagement and the future of associations.

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