By Mike Lenz, Associate Digital Marcom Manager
Membership growth is the lifeblood of any association. New members lead to new interactions at meetings and events, new perspectives to share, new leaders to contribute to the organization, and, most importantly, increased revenue and possibilities for the future.
But many association leaders are often left scratching their heads at just how to achieve the ambitious, target membership growth that their board sets.
SUMMARY
NADCA, the HVAC Inspection, Maintenance, and Restoration Association, has taken advantage of industry-leading content and a related membership campaign to boost new members.
BACKGROUND
NADCA has over 1,100 HVAC and duct cleaning professionals as members in 28 countries around the world. The members are mainly small business owners and their staff. NADCA offers a range of valuable membership benefits, including two industryleading certification programs, an online directory for potential customers, and two meetings per year, focusing on the education of HVAC technologies, trends, and practices.
NADCA’s Board of Directors set the staff with the task to grow membership. The staff enlisted AH to assist with this key strategic goal. NADCA’s leadership also was particularly interested in expanding membership across key international markets, which would need to be incorporated into the marketing efforts.
Step 1: Use Industry-Leading Content to Grow Prospective Member Lists
One of NADCA’s greatest assets as an organization is its industryleading standards, written to provide HVAC professionals with a guide to assess their work and make sure that they’re providing the highest level of service possible to customers.
Promoting the use of these industry standards is a high priority for NADCA’s leadership. Ensuring that HVAC contractors are following the highest standards helps not only those individuals, but raises the reputation of the entire industry, which often suffers from negative publicity due to fraudulent or low-quality service providers.
When NADCA first enlisted AH to promote its ACR Standard, an additional opportunity was presented: growing NADCA’s prospect list.
Using Hubspot, an inbound marketing software, AH’s in-house marketing and communications team was able create a custombuilt landing page that included a contact form for site visitors to fill out before downloading a free copy of the standard. To target NADCA’s key international markets (Italy, Latin America, and France) translation services were utilized to write the copy.
These gated landing pages allowed NADCA to gather contact information, such as e-mails, company names, job functions, and NADCA membership status, from everyone downloading the ACR and DEDP Standards.
The information is exportable through Hubspot, making it easy to analyze, as well as easy to upload non-members to an ongoing list of prospects. These pages remain active, making sure that NADCA’s industry-leading content is constantly working to gather leads and grow prospect lists.
NADCA’s growing collection of educational content has been downloaded over 3,000 times, with almost 2,000 downloads coming from nonmembers. The standards increase brand recognition for NADCA and provide value to non-members from their target industry. Building this relationship pays dividends when it comes time to run a membership campaign, removing the cold calling factor, allowing NADCA to use “warm” leads from people who already have familiarity with the association’s offerings and value.
Step 2: Design a Suite of Membership Collateral
Even when organizations have a strong brand, creating a specific membership theme and tagline will help prospective members quickly understand the organization’s mission and value. In creating a membership theme for NADCA, AH sought to capture the core value of NADCA membership: professionalism and quality of service.
Utilizing AH’s in-house creative team, NADCA developed a suite of marketing collateral and graphics that could be used in outreach efforts to prospective members. NADCA worked with one of AH’s award-winning graphic designers, with support from its marketing leads, to create a new brochure, benefits infographic, and an email banner.
Using NADCA’s brand and color scheme, AH’s design team crafted a suite of clean, updated pieces to use for communicating the value of membership to prospects:
AH’s Digital Media team also created a membership experience video, detailing NADCA’s mission, member benefits, and annual meetings.
Step 3: Email Campaign to Prospect List
With a steadily growing membership prospect list and a new suite of marketing collateral, the last step was to start reaching out to prospective members.
Over a six-month period, six email messages were sent to prospects explaining the benefits of NADCA membership. These covered topics such as education resources and the reputation of NADCA among the industry and consumers. They utilized many of the membership-theme collateral and graphics created by AH’s creative team, as well as the NADCA membership experience video.
The results for NADCA have been tremendous:
Conclusion
There’s no easy road to grow membership for associations. It requires a commitment to lead generation and list building, and the process is not an overnight solution. Often it takes a long-term, strategic approach to yield the best results.
NADCA has leveraged existing content and resources to provide a positive ROI, deliver on its board’s membership targets, and set itself up for sustainable growth and success.
