I'm not big on buzz words for the sake of it so I wanted to take a quick look at what might be the difference between a traditional Membership Management System and one of these shiny Engagement Management Systems. I guess the clue is in the name, engagement, but haven't we been talking about engagement in the membership management space for ages?
What do we mean by engagement anyway?
Engagement
As far as I'm concerned, engagement refers to the interaction with the members both ways. This can be relatively passively in terms of them simply reading your content or more involved interaction by posting on a forum or attending a course. But what we are all after is true engagement, that is when a member takes action from what you have done. We don't want to just take up some of their time, we want to empower them to take action to do their job better or support their cause better. Traditionally this is via knowledge which is gained via content, courses, human interaction with like minded peers and of course, thought and planning.
If we were able to determine what action was taken and what benefit was gained by reading content or attending a course we would all be creating the perfect content and courses before you could say referendum. The sad truth is we can't, and this is why we are all fired up about engagement, because it's the important bit and we just don't know how much benefit members are gaining, and that sucks.
How it works
So, what do we do about it? Well, I guess the simple answer is that we do what we can! We track to see:
- which members are reading what
- what links members are clicking on
- what courses and events members are attending
- what posts and comments members are making
And this all goes into the pot to help direct what we do, are we creating the right content and courses etc. and are we communicating the right messages with direct comms such as email?
But you know all this anyway, so what's this Engagement Management System term about? Well, if you ask me, it's really what you might call the latest incarnation of a Membership Management System and it's a bit of marketing fluff. As far as I'm concerned, in order to justify the industry creating a new term for everyone to understand, there needs to be real benefit, so the question I'm asking myself is what would an Engagement Management System offer that you wouldn't want in a Membership Management System? Surely all Membership Management Systems would have tools to track and measure member engagement if they could? If you want to look at membership engagement at a deeper level to see how it interacts with project management then this article could tell you more.
Magic tricks? no just personalisation
I guess you can answer this for yourself, and it's fair to say that not all clients use our personalisation and engagement tools, but, I would love it if they would and the reason they don't is always down to resources rather than desire. If this is true for you i.e. you do use, or would like to use engagement tools, then what we are really talking about is a "good" membership management system.
If you need a new system, we'd be delighted to talk to you, Satori MM does have personalisation, it does have engagement tools and it is a Membership Management System - all the things you need to engage with members better! Call Anita on 01865 556070 to see how we can help.