Launching a membership campaign? Nine steps to make it a success

 

Membership campaigns can be a great thing. They unite members, raise the profile of your organisation and usually do something for the greater good.We have just launched a campaign on behalf of the Society of Radiographers and it is working really well. I am going to share some of the factors that are making the campaign a success.

1. Choose your campaign well

The Society of Radiographers decided to support an existing campaign. In September 2013, Dr Kate Granger launched the #hellomynameis campaign. Kate is terminally ill with cancer and her experiences as a patient highlighted the lack of communication from doctors and clinical staff. The campaign encourages healthcare professionals to pledge to introduce themselves to every patient they meet. This is a good campaign as it has been sparked by a real need, it doesn’t ask people to do much and it is clear what its aims are.

2. If piggy-backing on an existing campaign, add your own twist

The Society of Radiographers has taken the campaign a step further by launching a survey to understand the barriers to patient communication so that it can work to overcome them. This makes the campaign more relevant to their members and gives the organisation’s involvement a clear purpose.

3. Make your campaign fun

To raise awareness of the campaign, SoR members have been encouraged to take photos of themselves holding a sign which introduces them by name and explains that they are a radiographer. This allows members to really get involved with the campaign and make a fun and personal contribution. People like to see photographs of themselves and colleagues.

 

4. Get the ball rolling

We encouraged the Society’s Council members to submit the first photos to encourage others to copy. It also allowed members to see what exactly we were asking for and how their photos would be used.

6. Make your campaign social and shareable

We shared the members photos on the Society’s website, Twitter and Facebook. This added to the fun element and spread awareness of the campaign.

7. Make participation easy

Radiographers are busy people and their time is precious, so we made downloadable signs to make joining the campaign quick and easy – they just needed to print the sign, write their name, snap a photo on their mobile and Tweet/email it. The more steps a member has to take before actually taking part in a campaign, the more opportunities for them to get bored or distracted, so make participation quick and simple.

8. Plan your resources

We made sure we launched the campaign at a (relatively) quiet time so that we had the resources to deal with the photo submissions, share them and respond to the Tweets and Facebook posts they generated.

9. Monitor your success

It’s only day two of the campaign but we have already seen a massive spike in activity on the website and a huge increase in engagement on Twitter and Facebook. We are able to monitor the campaign’s impact as we have a range of analytics tools and key performance indicator measurements that track success. If you need help launching a campaign, promoting it via social media or measuring its success via analytics, we can help.