Maximum Engagement: Moving Members, Donors, and Customers to Ever-Increasing Levels of Participation

The daily news is riddled with stories of events that can precipitate drastic change such as business failures, international conflicts, new technologies, economic turmoil all of which can lead to loss of interest in an organization or the lack of time and funds to support it. Savvy association leaders know that one way to manage the risks that these events can trigger is to diversify, to deepen and broaden their relationships with members, customers, and donors. Doing so requires increasing member and customer engagement. Increased engagement is measurable in terms of money and time: In exchange for money and time customers feel they get value from the organization. This relationship between time/money and value forms a curve. Author C. David Gammel shows how to use that curve to lead customers into progressively deeper, more engaged, and more value-producing relationships, thus diversifying your audience and reducing your risk. Gammel argues that purposeful development of these relationships is the path to greater success and influence, describing ways to use social media to shift people toward greater and greater engagement. He ends each chapter with a self-assessment to determine where your organization may be in terms of engaging its followers and provides an appendix with The Big List of Engagement Ideas, which describes 30 specific ideas to create an engaged audience and tips for taking any audience to the next level of engagement.

C. David Gammel, CAE, is the executive director of the Entomological Society of America and a former long-time consultant and speaker. He has been widely quoted on topics such as social media, web strategy, and the impact of the web on businesses in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wired magazine. He wrote the book Online and On Mission: Practical Web Strategies for Breakthrough Results and has spoken regularly to Fortune 500, small business, and nonprofit executives on topics such as web strategy, technology, international business topics, and online culture. As a consultant, he focused on helping organizations increase engagement by increasing the time and money members invest in their products, services, and mission.

ASAE is a membership organization of more than 22,000 association executives and industry partners representing more than 11,000 organizations. ASAE members manage leading trade associations, individual membership societies and voluntary organizations across the United States and in nearly 50 countries around the world. ASAE is the preeminent source of knowledge, learning, community, and advocacy for the field of association management. ASAE s publishing imprint, Association Management Press, reflects the ASAE mission by publishing relevant, reliable content focusing on helping professionals tackle their organizational leadership and management challenges.