7 Feedback Collection Strategies to Drive Association Success
Member feedback is vital for establishing trust and nurturing a healthy relationship between your association and its members. When you act on their feedback—whether solving member difficulties or enhancing their overall experience—you strengthen their connection to your association and boost their confidence in your commitment to meeting their needs.
So today, in order to help you improve your member feedback collection, we’ll be covering why member feedback is important, the types of feedback, and methods for gathering it. If you’re looking to improve retention, increase membership, or enhance your strategy for gathering insight, understanding and acting on feedback is the key to your association’s long-term growth!
Why is Member Feedback Important?
Before we get into the how of collecting feedback, let’s go through the why: why do you want to ensure you have a good system for eliciting feedback? Well…
Retention
For one, collecting member feedback gives members the impression that you strive for continuous improvement. It gives them confidence that there are solutions to their challenges, which can increase member satisfaction and boost their trust in your association. Moreover, when your association uses member feedback to prioritize delivering quality service and direct improvement strategies, it can help strengthen member commitment and loyalty.
Growth
Recommendations and referrals from colleagues and professional networks play a significant role in attracting new members; after all, these endorsements are influential because they come from personal experience and trust!
When your association collects feedback and addresses concerns effectively, you open the door for satisfied members to share their experiences and attract new members by word of mouth. This means that by maintaining open lines of communication and keeping a good reputation, you can turn existing members into vocal advocates of your association. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing, after all!
Validation
When members feel that their opinions not only matter, but also directly influence their association’s direction, they feel a stronger attachment to their organization. Seeing an association make an effort to deliver better experiences and resolve issues quickly sends a strong message: that members are important and that they are heard!
Types of Feedback
Direct Feedback
Direct feedback is when members contact you directly to share their experiences or concerns. This is a particularly valuable form of feedback because it will contain specific details about their personal experience. Direct feedback can be made through emails, phone calls, or even face-to-face interactions.
Indirect Feedback
Indirect feedback is when members share their thoughts through platforms or channels that are not communicated directly to you. For example, social media (not including posts that tag your association or direct messages to your association’s account!), online forums, or word-of-mouth conversations can all be considered forms of indirect feedback.
Inferred Feedback
Inferred feedback is an implied form of feedback. It involves analyzing member behaviours, patterns, and trends to make data-driven decisions. Some examples of areas that can provide valuable information for inferred feedback include tracking your organization’s most-used features, your membership retention rates, and your usage statistics.
Methods for Collecting Member Feedback
1. Feedback Surveys
A survey is an organized approach to collecting feedback. A survey typically consists of several questions with either multiple choice or write-in answers. If you’re looking for opinions on a recent event or offering, you may also consider using the Likert Scale.
Surveys can be emailed, integrated into a website, or distributed through social media or post-membership follow-ups. For example, many social media channels have a “poll” option; this can be used to gather member thoughts on certain decisions your organization may be considering (e.g. “Should our next event be in-person, virtual, or hybrid?”).
2. Feedback Boxes
Feedback boxes are typically placed on a website, often as a popup or a question with a box to fill in quickly.
These boxes may ask general comments or suggestions, or else ask questions that align with a member’s recent experience, such as “How can we improve this page?” or “Was this information helpful?”
3. Interviews
Interviews involve one-on-one conversations between your association and its members. You can ask members about their experiences in detail, including their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. You can use interviews to explore member insights and clarify their opinions by asking them open-ended questions.
Focus groups are a lot like a group interviews, as the opinions of many members can be gathered simultaneously in a collaborative setting. Focus groups should contain a spread of all member types, which can include factors like “new to your organization”, “veteran member”, “student member”, and more. Make sure to adjust your focus group members based on what you’re looking to gather data on. For instance, if you’re looking into collecting thoughts on a future mentorship program, ensure you invite both potential mentors and mentees to share.
When interviewing or conducting focus groups, you want to tailor your questions to gather as much (and as relevant!) data as possible. Then, when you’re finished, you may consider offering participants a thank you gift in the form of a discount.
4. Suggestion Boards
Suggestion boards (sometimes called idea boards or forums) allow members to propose ideas, share suggestions, or vote on the ideas of others. These boards are typically digital (such as a section on your website) and provide members with a platform to suggest new events, benefits, or improvements. Members can also see which suggestions are most popular currently and provide additional input.
5. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are automated emails that are sent to members as a form of confirmation after a specific transaction, such as course purchases, event registration, or help ticket submissions. You can include a request for feedback at the end of these emails, such as a survey link or a prompt asking how the experience went.
Have you ever gotten a receipt from a store directing you to fill out a questionnaire at the link provided? This is just the email equivalent of that! And, similar to many stores, you can even offer discount codes to those who complete your form.
6. Social Media Listening
Social media listening involves monitoring and analyzing public conversations about your association on social media platforms like X (formerly called Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Using social media monitoring tools (for instance, Hootsuite), you can track mentions, hashtags, and general sentiments around your association. This will uncover honest, genuine member insights and let you understand how they truly feel!
7. Live Chat
Live chats allow members to interact with an association representative in real time. This representative may be an association staff member or even a chatbot–the main thing is that this feature offers immediate support to those who seek it. Not only that–it’s an excellent way to collect live feedback on a member’s needs and satisfaction during and/or after an interaction!
Conclusion
For associations, member feedback should be considered a treasure. Not only can it be wielded to retain (and attract!) members–it also functions as an important ingredient in the continuous improvement of your association.
By leveraging different methods like surveys, live chat, social media listening, and suggestion boards, you can better understand your members’ needs and then offer tailored solutions to meet them.
Build a bond of loyalty between you and the members by continuously improving their experience. Make feedback collection an essential part of your process: create stronger connections with your members and ensure steady growth for the future!
References
9 Best Practices for Collecting Customer Feedback | Descartes. (2024). Descartes.com. https://www.descartes.com/resources/knowledge-center/9-best-practices-collecting-customer-feedback
Collecting Customer Feedback: Methods and Best Practices | Miro. (n.d.). Https://Miro.com/. https://miro.com/research-and-design/collecting-customer-feedback-methods/
How To Gather Customer Feedback (And Tips To Improve It). (2024). Indeed Career Guide. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/customer-feedback
Tousley, S. (2019). Customer Feedback Strategy: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need. Hubspot.com. https://www.hubspot.com/customer-feedback
