3 Ways You Can Engage With Your Board & Membership Each Month

What are you doing to engage your Board and general membership with the activities of your chamber?

The following are three easy ways to keep your Board aware of what you and your staff are working on and any accomplishments that you may have made:
  1. President's letter;
  2. Conference call; and
  3. YouTube chat.
President's Letter - what a great way to stay connected with your Board and for that matter your membership.  Are you sending a weekly or monthly "President's Letter?"  It's a great tool to keep everyone informed and up-to-date on the issues of the day.  Great tool to keep your Board and membership informed when your state legislature is in session.

Conference Call - this tool will allow you to have a give and take with your Board members if they happen to have any detailed questions for you based on what the Chamber is working on.

YouTube Channel - many Chamber's have set-up a YouTube channel to communicate with their Boards and general membership.  This venue allows you go show media or have a give and take session with a policy expert on an issues that your Chamber may be facing.

These are just three simple communication tools you could utilize to keep your Board and membership informed.

While there are many more options, I'd find no more than three that work for you and your Chamber and get started today.

3 Tips To Increase Member Engagement

There's a lot of discussion on the blogosphere on member engagement and how that affects your retention rate.

In fact, I wrote a previous blog post (HERE) that goes into detail with that very subject.

In this post, I want to talk about engaging your members in your program of work.

As you may know, I personally believe chambers should mainly be in the business of advocacy and helping your members run a better business.

Use these 3 simple tips 1) Ask; 2) Follow-up; and 3) Give credit.

Ask - the first step in getting your members engaged is to ask them.  It's important that you have a specific task for them with clear expectations on what it is you want them to do.

Follow-up - now that you've asked them to do a specific task on behalf of the chamber it's important to give them feedback on how they are doing. Communication is key for both parties to be winners.

Give credit - make sure you give credit where credit is due.  Publish in your communication vehicles what your members (by name) are doing on behalf of the organization and thank them.

If you keep to these 3 simple tips you will get more buy-in from your membership at large and the more buy-in you get the higher retention rate you'll get at the end of the year.

That's a win/win for all involved.