Getting members more engaged (and keeping them engaged) can be challenging for any association. Does your association have a membership engagement strategy? Do you know how your association can provide members with greater value and get them more involved.
A robust online career center – one that goes beyond a job board – is key. Offering your members an online career center to connect them with their next great job opportunity is a must-have for delivering member value.
Once you have a career center in place, there are multiple ways to put it to work to get members more involved with your association. Here are four ideas for using your career center to increase member engagement:
1. Become THE Career Development Destination for Your Members
Using career center software to offer an online job board is an ideal starting point for providing the career-related benefits your members seek. But your job board can be so much more than just a place to post and find jobs.
You can transform your job board into an actual career center destination that helps you engage and retain members. The key is to make it the go-to resource for career advancement in your industry or profession.
For example:
- Provide career resources and advice. Give members the support they need to land the jobs they’re seeking by incorporating the following offerings with your job board:
- Job seeker articles, tips, and recommendations, such as résumé writing tips, interview techniques, job search ideas, and tips on networking
- Resume review and coaching with certified career coaches
- Recommendations for your association’s online learning courses and credentials that are automatically presented to members through a connection between your career center and your learning management software (LMS)
- Offer a career pathing tool. Give your members a way to create a clear roadmap to reach their professional goals. Provide them with an online tool to visually map out and achieve their career aspirations. With this type of tool, members choose a desired job title, and then they are presented with a career path – including job descriptions and relevant skills required for the next job in their career journeys.
- Deliver career insights. Help your members dig deeper into their chosen career paths, including career descriptions, salary benchmarks, and employment/unemployment data. By giving them access to data about their potential careers, your career center can help them gain the insights they need to move forward or even change direction.
You can easily build a career center with these types of features using career center software.
For example, YM Careers offers job board software for associations that includes the Career Planning Portal to help you support and engage members throughout their career journeys. It consists of a career pathing tool that enables your members to map out their careers based on their goals. It also gives your members the insights they need to plan and develop their careers – all in one convenient location – making it a true career planning destination.
2. Cross-Promote Your Career Center Through Other Member Activities and Resources
Simply having a robust career center in place is a great way to engage members. But to really increase member engagement, your members (and prospective members) need to know about it.
What better way to get members more involved than to promote the valuable resources your career center offers? And, what better way to do that than to reach members where they are?
For example, promote your career center resources through:
- Your association’s website – Place a banner ad, widget, or top navigation link on your association’s website to promote your career center.
- Email – Remind your members about your career center and all the benefits that it offers. Your members might know it’s there, but there may be many aspects they don’t know about.
- Your online member community – Use your online member community to post announcements about new or commonly overlooked resources available in your career center. You might also ask some of your most involved members to post about their positive experiences with your career center to encourage more members to get involved.
- Virtual, in-person, and hybrid events – Promote career center resources to your event attendees by hosting a networking event “sponsored” by your career center. You can also include a career center booth (virtual or in-person) at your events. You can even offer a career-building session that highlights a sampling of the tips and resources available in your career center.
3. Put Member Data to Work
At the heart of increasing member engagement is your ability to track, analyze, and act on member data. Once you have a strong career center in place, you can connect it with your association management software (AMS) and begin to capture and store career center activity within each member’s record in the AMS. You can then use the additional data and insights about their interests to drive more informed member engagement efforts.
For example, you might pull a list of members who have been actively searching for a job. Then, send them an email highlighting the resources in your career center that can help them land a job, such as résumé reviews, job seeker articles, and access to career coaches. Many of YM Careers’ partners use one of our integrated AMS systems, Nimble AMS or YourMembership, which provides deep integration and visibility into data within a single platform.
4. Ask for Feedback
One of the best ways to better understand how to boost engagement with your members is to get input from them. Ask about their experience with your career center. Ask them what aspects they find most useful and what would make their member experience even better. Then, use their feedback to inform your member engagement activities.
Membership engagement is a challenge every association faces. A career center gives you one more powerful place to engage members and help ensure they understand the benefits of ongoing membership with your association.
