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The time to reignite your membership recruitment efforts is now. Don't wait till the bottom falls out. Associations are no longer in a bubble or immune to market realities. The time is now to transform your associations so companies are coming to you because they either can't operate without you or it is too risky for them to ignore you. Listen in to this week's episode for three things you should to to reignite your membership recruitment efforts.             Transcript: Hello and welcome to JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. President of The Moery Company, JP’s mission is to arm today’s associations with insight and strategy to thrive and a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. 21st century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core. Here’s JP.   “How do we reignite membership recruitment in our association?” I get this question, a lot. “How do we get things going again?” “How do we get more energy around our program?”   I've got three main themes that I hope will help move you forward into this new era that we're facing.   Purpose Ask yourself, why do you want to reignite your membership recruitment? For what purpose? Is there a real reason to move forward with this campaign? Don’t just go through the motions. Are you doing it due to obligation and not because you can achieve mission or spread success around the industry? Are you just keeping things moving along? “What is the reason we're moving forward with our recruitment efforts?” Set goals for the program. I'm amazed that, often, associations don't set standards or goals to move forward. When we asked them, "Hey, what do you want to accomplish with this?" They're like, "I don't know." I don't think that answer is going to give you the purpose and the energy to move forward. Set the stage of what might be possible if we reignite this association from a membership perspective. What can we achieve with our mission? What kind of influence could we have? How much more valuable would we be to our industry and how can we make our companies more successful?   Holistic Approach Make the effort to make this an organization wide program. Sometimes, I see that we put way too much emphasis on the sales and business development team. I recognize that because we're in that game. Every single part of the organization has something to bring to the table if you truly want to reignite membership. For example: Advocacy team – how about a new webinar series to inform and educate the organization's priorities and what you see happening in this new political and legislative, maybe even regulatory, landscape. You might learn what your members really care about based on registration. This is a fundamental opportunity for us in associations because what we often talk about, as a key part of our value proposition, is government relations, but we rarely connect the government relations team to the membership recruitment process. Communications team – have a contest for your members to tell a real story about their participation and how it helps their companies thrive. We've talked about this in a number of different podcasts. The stories members tell is the most effective way to communicate the value of membership. It has to come from them, their authentic story. Finance and accounting department. Oh, you don't think you're involved in this? Yes, you are! Determine new processes to streamline applications, such as wire transfers to join, and other ways to smooth out the registration and the joining process. I see this all the time. Someone's fired up, they want to join the association and it takes weeks, if not months, for this association to get out an invoice to get the person to join. This shows that the association really doesn't care if you join or not. Get them smoothed out and enable them to join quickly.