A recap of the AuSAE open access webinar presented by Olena Lima CAE, founder of MemberBoat and Membership Marketing School

Membership is a lot like a gym membership. You can sign up at the best gym in the world and hire the best personal trainer, but unless you turn up, you won’t get fitter. That analogy ran through AuSAE’s recent open access webinar, where Olena Lima CAE (MemberBoat and Membership Marketing School) put association professionals through a “bootcamp” built around her five-stage Membership Marketing Circle: Understand, Nurture, Grow, Optimise and Thrive.

Here are the key takeaways you can take back to your own organisation.

Why membership marketing is different from customer marketing

Before the exercises began, Olena explained why borrowing a standard customer-experience playbook doesn’t work for associations:

• It’s a relationship, not a transaction. A member joining is the start of the story, not the sale. Success is celebrated every year when you retain them, and the relationship can span decades, from student to retirement.
• The experience is delivered by many hands. Staff, volunteers, conference speakers, caterers and other members all shape how your association feels. A community that is unwelcoming to newcomers can undo your recruitment work.
• Members shape their own experience. Value is only unlocked through use, so your job as a marketer is to make participation easy, visible and rewarding.
• Associations face specific constraints: small budgets and teams, marketing that isn’t part of the culture, growing competition for membership (not just money), and rising expectations.

In a live poll, about 30% of attendees said membership had grown over the past year and about half said it had stayed the same. Olena noted that growth is the exception in the current climate. The biggest barriers named were cost, value proposition, budgets and time.

Stage 1: Understand — find the leaks before you spend

With limited budgets, you can’t afford to guess where marketing effort should go. Olena’s advice:

Don’t rely on the member survey alone. Surveys are often completed by the same 10% of members every year, so they miss why people don’t join, disengage or leave. Pair them with behavioural data: email clicks, website analytics, portal logins, event attendance and unsubscribes.

Watch your competitors, not just other associations. Every business is now running events, building communities and publishing benchmark reports. They’re competing for your members’ attention, and when members run out of time, they conclude they “didn’t see the value”.

Plot yourself on the Membership Health Quadrant. Compare your membership growth rate (horizontal) with your retention rate (vertical). As rough global rules of thumb, healthy retention is above 85%, and healthy growth is above 5%.

• The Healthy Zone (high growth, high retention): Scale what’s working and invest in the channels that bring the best members.
• Fix the Acquisition Engine (low growth, high retention): Your value is solid, but awareness is low. Olena calls these her favourite clients because the fix is relatively easy. About 70% of webinar attendees placed themselves here.
• The Leaking Bucket (high growth, low retention): New joiners mask a retention problem. Pause acquisition and plug the leak first.
• The Burning Platform (low growth, low retention): Either you have great value but weak marketing (47 benefits that nobody uses), or there’s genuinely no value. Fix retention before worrying about growth.

If you’re in the low acquisition zone, work out whether your problem is no pipeline (you’re not building a community of non-members) or no conversion initiatives (you have the audience but never invite them to join).

Olena also recommended mapping your member journey from awareness through recruitment, onboarding, engagement and involvement, with a clear content goal and key message at each step.

Stage 2: Nurture — your renewal campaign starts the day they join

When asked when the renewal campaign should start, the best answer from the audience was 12 months. By the time a renewal notice goes out, members may have spent months missing your emails, overlooking events, never logging into the portal and having no idea what their benefits are. A better renewal email will only take you so far.

The retention engine has six parts:

1. A clear value proposition: one sentence the whole team can repeat.
2. Strong onboarding: the first 180 days should prove value fast and build habits, such as saving the portal as a bookmark and moving your emails into the focused inbox.
3. Relevant communications: matched to segment and persona, not one blast to everyone.
4. Community connection: mentoring, chapters, committees and peer groups. Olena says nothing beats community for retention.
5. Renewal confidence: renewal becomes a habit, not a decision made from scratch each cycle.
6. A win-back pathway: a structured process for members who don’t renew.

The big shift: from “we send renewals” to “we build belonging every month.”

Practical nurture tactics

• Be specific, not generic. Swap “empty calorie” phrases like “access our extensive resource library” for the exact guide that answers a current question, the next event they can attend, a conversation they can join, a person they can learn from or a tool they can use today. Olena’s challenge: stop being a library and be the Netflix of your industry, curating for each member.
• Be relevant to life stage. Her teenage son took three weeks to unsubscribe from a free student membership after being sent information about a $2,000 conference and advocacy campaigns. Younger members are protective of their inbox and will leave quickly if content isn’t for them.
• One call to action at a time. Every onboarding email, webinar or call should invite one next step, so members build the habit of returning.
• Make participation bitesized. Mid-career members are especially time-poor. Replace “get involved” with a 30-minute online discussion, contributing one case study, answering one short question, reading one white paper or volunteering for a defined task rather than a year-long commitment.
• Recognise people. Thank participants, acknowledge volunteers, share member expertise, celebrate milestones and show how member feedback influenced a decision.

Spot disengagement early, without expensive tech

You don’t need a sophisticated engagement score to begin. Start with three questions:

1. Who hasn’t engaged with our emails recently?
2. Who hasn’t attended or participated in anything this year?
3. Who hasn’t logged in to the portal since the last renewal?

Then prioritise higher-value, long-standing and strategically important members, and anyone showing multiple warning signs. Olena also recommends checking your unsubscribes and bounced emails regularly. An unsubscribe is an early warning that a member won’t renew, and a bounce often means someone has changed jobs. For associations with high sector turnover, make bounce checking a weekly team habit and ask corporate contacts who have replaced the person who left.

Stage 3: Grow — do the maths on your pipeline

Growth depends on both retention and recruitment. Olena’s worked example:

• You have 7,500 members and a healthy 85% retention rate.
• You still lose about 1,125 members a year.
• To grow at a sustainable 5–7% annually, you need to recruit 1,650+ new members a year (around 135 a month). That would take you past 10,000 members in five years.

Then work backwards to build the pipeline. In her illustrative funnel, recruiting 2,000 members a year at a 40% conversion rate needs 5,000 engaged non-members, which needs 25,000 newsletter subscribers and followers, which needs a reach of about 500,000 professionals. Olena was upfront that a 40% conversion rate is “a rare and magic number” (typical marketing conversion rates sit between 2% and 10%, and high performers reach around 20%), so most associations will need a bigger audience than the maths first suggests. If your industry doesn’t contain that many people, you need to improve conversion or recalibrate your target.

Key insights for growth:

• Don’t propose marriage on the first date. Membership is a commitment, so build a community of non-members first: newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees, people buying resources at non-member prices.
• Rethink the “non-member” label. One attendee noted their CRM tags these people as “non-member”. Olena suggested “prospective member” and reminded the group that you serve your industry, not just your members. A non-member’s lifetime value can even exceed a member’s if they keep attending events and buying resources.
• Be discoverable by the questions members ask. Olena compared what primary teachers search for online (lesson plans, worksheets, phonics activities, behaviour strategies) with the word teacher associations use on their sites (membership, resources, professional development). Search engines and AI tools can’t connect the two. Write content that answers real member questions, including the internal worries behind them, such as “I worry the kids who need the most support are falling through the cracks.”
• Use the full toolkit: brand awareness, paid advertising, PR and influencer partnerships, lead generation, member stories and conversion rate optimisation.

Asked for the single best marketing action to drive growth, Olena’s answer was retention first. If retention is already strong, build and measure a lead-generation funnel by working back from your target to the audience size you need.

Stage 4: Optimise — technology is a tool, not a barrier

Olena pushed back on the idea that your CRM is what’s holding you back: “CRM is only the tool.” Around 90–95% of association services are now delivered digitally, even for in-person events, because people find, register for and follow up on them online. Your MarTech stack typically spans:

• Core: your AMS or CRM
• Engagement and communication: email, SMS, CMS, mobile apps, publications and podcasts
• Member services: portal, events, learning, community, awards, CPD tracking and job boards
• Data and insights: analytics, dashboards, surveys and business intelligence
• Internal operations: finance, project management, collaboration, e-commerce and AI tools

Use the 15-1-1 test to decide what to automate: if a task takes more than 15 minutes a day, an hour a week or an hour a month to do yourself, or to teach someone else to do, it’s time to automate it. Good candidates are repetitive, manual, high-volume, error-prone or time-sensitive tasks.

Looking ahead 3–5 years, expect demand for AI-enabled operations, personalised member journeys, data-informed engagement, integrated ecosystems, operational agility, smaller teams doing more with automation, and strong digital trust and governance. And remember technology is like a driverless car that isn’t quite there yet. You still need to invest time and skill in driving it.

Stage 5: Thrive — build the association your future members need

A thriving association doesn’t just serve a market; it helps shape one. Olena’s positive signals to look for:

• Young members see a place for themselves, and student members convert to paid graduate members.
• Diverse voices, including under-represented sub-sectors and regions, shape decisions.
• Membership options match modern careers rather than structures designed decades ago.
• The association leads the conversation about the future of its profession.

Areas to review include membership models, renewal methods, DEI initiatives, special interest groups and accessibility.

Your action checklist

Olena’s advice was to print the Membership Marketing Circle and revisit it monthly, asking:

1. Understand: Are we using analytics and metrics as well as surveys? Where is our leak?
2. Nurture: Do we have a guided onboarding journey, bite-sized ways to participate and a way to identify disengaged members? Could our renewal campaign start today?
3. Grow: Do we know our retention number, our recruitment target and the size of the pipeline needed to hit it?
4. Optimise: What manual tasks pass the 15-1-1 test and can we automate them?
5. Thrive: Who isn’t at the table yet, and are our membership options still fit for purpose?

Free resources mentioned

Olena shared the Membership Pipeline Calculator and the Association Membership Health Toolkit, which includes a health dashboard (retention rate, first-year retention, growth rate and non-member audience conversion), a diagnostic questionnaire and the Association Membership Metrics Workbook. You can find more at membershipmarketingschool.com and memberboat.com.au.