How To Increase Revenue & Member Value
For seven years I worked for a global membership organization. The organization provided outstanding content to its members. There were conferences and seminars with high-profile speakers, and workshops with industry experts teaching hands-on skills and techniques.
While the costs of hosting events increased, the travel budgets for many of the organization’s members decreased. We had to find cost effective ways that would both give value to our members and at the same time add much needed revenue to the organization. I’m sure many of you reading this are familiar with the situation. The goal of this article is therefore to showcase some alternatives. You could increase revenue and member value by repurposing resources you already have in place.
Your Content Is Your Key
You have all heard the saying “Do the work once, and get paid for it over and over again”. This is usually referring to royalties made by for example authors or musicians who get paid for every copy of their book or album sold. On-going or royalty income is no longer something that is or should be exclusive to these type of individuals. All content creators can take advantage of recurring payment from their work. Let’s take a look at exactly how you can do that for your organization.
Your content is your key. For example, you may have spent months planning an event your organization is hosting; deciding a theme for the event, reaching out to speakers, promoting the event, etc. Some of your members will come, while others can’t fit it into their calendar, budget, or whatever other reason they are not able to attend. For those who do attend, they enjoy they speakers and their messages, and the networking opportunities they have. Unfortunately, when they go home much of what they learned is quickly forgotten. What if you could give all these, both the ones attending and the ones not attending, access to review each presentation after the event?
With technology you can! You can design an area of your membership site where members can access videos from your events as well as other types of material you publish. You would of course have to make a video recording of your events, but you may already be doing so. If not, you don’t need a professional film crew to make it happen. A video camera or a smartphone mounted on a tripod can do a wonderful job. Once the video has been recorded, you can upload it to your members area.
Sounds too complicated? Check out this tool that will make all of this so easy anybody can do it, even without any experience in coding or web design.
3 Ways to Turn Your Content Into Revenue
1- Access To Everything
Create a library of all events you host and make it part of what makes a membership valuable. If a past event created a lot of buzz in your industry, let people access what they may have missed. Both those who could not attend and members joining later will appreciate the ability to learn what others are talking about. By limiting the library to members only, you increase the value of being a member In turn, this will help you sell and renew more memberships, thereby increasing your overall revenue.
2 - Teaser Access With Paid Upgrade
This is a method you can use both with existing members and with potential new members. For potential new members you can give them access to a few of your videos – enough that they will be able to see the qualify of what you provide. If they want to get access to it all, they will have to pay.
For existing members, it could be a similar deal. Depending if their membership gives them access to everything, or if you set it up to have different levels depending on their membership level. You can use teasers to encourage members to buy into higher levels of membership to get access to the best content.
3 - Selling A Past Event
Many of those who were not able to attend your event in person may still be interested in learning from the event, and so you can give them the option to purchase access to the event content. This can be done either upfront for those who know they won’t be able to attend, but is probably better used as an after-market promotion so to not diminish the value of attending in person. Give event participants free access to the content as a bonus for having attended in person.
Bonus Method 1 - Continue To Promote Sponsors
I have been an event sponsor, and solicited event sponsors, and know through experience that sponsors want as much exposure as they can get. With re-marketing the events after they have take place you can throw in as part of the package that their company or service will be included as a sponsor in the event material you product for your members. Happy sponsors lead to more sponsors and renewal of old ones.
Bonus Method 2 - Resell Or Add As Benefit To Local Chapters
For those of you with multiple chapters you may give you could set up ways for the local chapters to create and manage their own content, and either give this to them as a benefit that will tie them closer to you as a parent organization, or charge a nominal fee to give them access to the features.
Bonus Method 3 - Exclusive Content With Gamification
Why not add an aspect of gamification to your content? These could be action steps to complete as part of the content material, encouraging implementation of the principles learned in a given presentation.
Depending on the type of event you host, you could even work gamification into part of the event. Say for example you have a hands-on workshop teaching social media marketing specific to your industry niche. During the event participants could be informed of a competition that will be part of the post-event delivery. This could be anything from seeing who first completed a number of steps to learn a new skill, be measured by results, or any other form of gamification you could think of. You know your industry and your members – be as creative as you want!
In Conclusion
I have now addressed 7 methods (method 2 really includes two options) you could use to increase revenue and member value. There’s a good chance you liked one or more of the methods. You may even have thought of other ways you could implement concept of re-marketing events and other resources. However, knowing what to do is not enough. I don’t want you to get stuck here!
Implementing something like this will, as stated, require the use of technology. Over the years I have looked at many different membership platforms, and what has been a common thread is that they are all fairly expensive, and usually require some customization or knowledge of web development to set up in the right way. If you already have some sort of resource library in place, you know what I’m talking about.
No more. On August 24th, 2016 a new platform was launched. The developers have gone above-and-beyond to make setting up a membership portal as easy as uploading a video or file. The platform is called MemberHub and you can view a demo of the platform here. During the first week they are hosting a number of FAQ webinars to help answer all your questions.
MemberHub comes with a number of features, including:
- Content library
- Create or use existing templates
- Monetize products
- Gamification
- And more…
And the best part? If you sign up during the launch, you get it all for a one-time fee of only $297. Most other membership platforms start out at $197 or more per month. Getting it during the launch period is a STEAL.
If you already have a membership resource library in place, ask yourself what abilities you have within your current system. How much time and money do you spend on your current solution? I know it’s more than $297, so do yourself a favor and at least watch the demo video to compare what MemberHub does with what your current solution has to offer.
Final Word
I said I really don’t want you to get stuck, and I mean it. So, if even after watching how easy you can do this with using MemberHub, you still feel it’s too much to take on, contact us and we can discuss what you need to get this up and running.