Stop Guessing If Your Members Are Happy

Measuring member satisfaction is essential for organisational growth and reducing churn. Many committees rely on guesswork, making it hard to retain disengaged members. Utilising automated engagement tracking with your membership management software provides valuable data on active members. The Member Jungle engagement widget tracks metrics like event attendance and app logins, helping administrators pinpoint community interests. By using this data to reward dedicated members and re-engage less active members, you can effectively retain club members year after year.

Trying to work out what is going on inside someone else's head is nigh on impossible. Once, I was in the car with a friend of mine, just driving along as normal, when he announced he needed to sneeze, stuck his head out the window, and looked up at the sky. When I politely inquired as to what the hell he was doing, he hit me with a sentence I could not have predicted in a thousand years.

He informed me that in order to sneeze, he had to “stare at the sun,” and that he was completely unable to sneeze if he was “in a house or a shed.” I could never have seen that coming. This was someone I had known since school, someone I had lived in a share house with, someone I’ve known for over half my life, and there was no way I’d ever have guessed that one day he would tell me he was physically unable to sneeze in a garden shed.

It gets even harder to guess what people are really thinking when it isn’t one of your oldest friends, but instead 400 of your closest members. Did people like that event? Will they sign up again next year? If they need to sneeze at night, are they totally screwed? There’s no knowing. Well, actually, there is knowing, and that’s exactly what we’re here to talk about today. 

Quick Answer: How Do I Know If My Members Are Engaged?

If you are just looking for the short version, you don't need a crystal ball to figure out what your members are thinking. To track engagement and stop members from quietly slipping away, you just need to do a few simple things:

• Measure member satisfaction: Stop relying on guesswork and vibes to figure out if people are actually enjoying your organisation.
• Prevent member churn: Identify the silent middle majority who are most at risk of quietly quitting when renewal season hits.
• Automate engagement tracking: Let the Member Jungle Engagement Widget automatically track member activity, like event attendance and app logins, without you having to configure a single spreadsheet.
• Customise your metrics: Adjust the widget's sliders so it tracks the specific activities that actually matter to your organisation.
• Retain with data: Use this hard data to settle committee arguments, launch pre-emptive rescue missions for fading members, and reward your biggest superfans.

Measuring Members’ Happiness

I’m sure you know who your happiest members are. They’re the first ones through the door at every event and the first to volunteer their weekends to help out. You also know exactly who your least happy members are, because they send you strongly worded emails and threaten to cancel their memberships every other week.

It’s the middle majority of members who are harder to keep track of, because their feelings aren’t as extreme, how they feel isn’t as obvious. If you don’t know how your average member feels, it's a lot harder to give them what they actually want. If you don't know who is actively enjoying the club and who has quietly checked out, you have absolutely no way to save the people who are slowly slipping away. You can't just rely on vibes to gauge member satisfaction. You need a way to actually measure it.

This is where Member Jungle’s Engagement Widget comes into play. Instead of having to guess who is happy and who is drifting away, you can see in real time who is engaged and who is not. 

The system quietly works in the background, tracking exactly how your members are interacting with your organisation. Without you having to lift a finger or configure a single spreadsheet, the widget automatically monitors a massive range of interactions, including:

• App Interactions
• Catalogue Items Purchased
• Chat Engagement
• Courses Completed
• Events Attended
• App & Website Logins
• Membership Duration
• Total Revenue
• Total Transactions
• Website Engagement

The widget crunches all of this background data and assigns every single person an Engagement Score. You can drop this widget right onto your main admin dashboard and, at a simple glance, see a live ranking of your members. It instantly shows you how all of your members are behaving and how engaged they are with your organisation. 

You can also see a breakdown of members’ engagement scores when you click their profile, allowing you to see exactly how they interact with your organisation.  

Customising Your Engagement Tracking

Happiness doesn’t look the same to everyone; for some people, happiness is getting up to go jogging at 4 am before work, for others, it’s not getting home from the bar until 4 am. Personally, both of those both sound horrible, but who am I to judge?

My point is that a happy, engaged member at a classic car club is going to look quite different from a happy, engaged member at a medical association. That’s why the engagement widget can be fully customised to your needs. You can change the weighting of every single metric it tracks or turn them off completely. 

In your engagement settings, you have a bunch of different sliders that allow you to adjust the weighting of each data point. You simply slide the dial left or right to indicate how much each activity should influence a member's overall score. 

If you run that classic car club, you might set "Events Attended" to 100% because showing up is the most important thing. You might turn "Catalogue Items Purchased" down to 50%, because buying merch is great, but not crucial, and turn "Courses Completed" off entirely because you don’t even run courses.

On the flip side, if you run a medical association where members live thousands of kilometres apart, you might turn the event slider right down and bump "Courses Completed" and "Website Logins" up to 100%.

My advice would be to turn everything up to 100 to start, then turn down (or completely switch off) the things that don’t matter to your organisation until you find your sweet spot.

You get to define exactly what an engaged member looks like for your specific organisation, and the algorithm will automatically adjust everyone's score to match your rules.

Why Measuring Engagement Matters

Being able to see who is and isn’t engaging with your organisation, and exactly what they are doing, is great and all, but you should do something with this information to really make it worthwhile. So let’s talk about a few things that you can do with this engagement information. 

Stop Guessing What People Actually Like

Every committee has arguments over which events are the best or what merchandise members really want. Tracking engagement removes emotion and guesswork from the debate. If you spend three months organising a massive weekend event and your widget shows a huge spike in member activity, brilliant, do it again next year. But if you launch a new initiative and the data shows absolutely zero increase in attendance or app usage, you now have the mathematical proof that it’s not working. It tells you exactly what your members care about, so you can stop wasting your time and club funds on the things they don't.

Launch a Pre-emptive Rescue Mission

Instead of having members quietly disappear when renewal time rolls around, you can figure out exactly who is at risk of leaving and reach out before it’s too late. By checking their engagement data to see what they are and aren’t participating in, you can make a targeted attempt to re-engage them. Send them a quick email asking if there’s anything they’d want to change, or what their biggest obstacle is to attending events or completing courses. Not only will this personal touch stop some of them from cancelling their memberships today, but the feedback you gather will help you make changes to prevent others from leaving tomorrow. 

Reward Your Superfans

It is incredibly easy to take your best members for granted simply because they never cause any trouble. But these are the people keeping your organisation alive, and they need to know you appreciate them. Look at the top 10% of your engagement list. Then send them a personalised thank-you email, offer them a surprise discount code for the next big event, or give them first dibs on new club merchandise. A little bit of unexpected recognition goes a long way in making sure your best members feel valued and stick around for the long haul.

Don’t Forget Your Middle Child

While it’s tempting to spend all your time showering your superfans with praise and frantically trying to save the members at the very bottom, you can’t ignore the massive group sitting right in the middle. These are the people who quietly pay their dues, read their emails, and show up to most events, but don’t draw attention to themselves. 

The engagement widget allows you to work out exactly what these people are doing and what they’re less interested in. By doing this, you can help keep them happy, engaged, and safely away from the bottom of your list. By paying attention to what this silent majority actually interacts with, you can tailor your organisation to what they genuinely want, ensuring they keep renewing year after year, and maybe even nudge a few of them up into the superfan category. 

Keep Your Members Engaged 

Unfortunately, I will never have an engagement tracker to help me work out what my friend is thinking, and for him, at least, I think I'm better off not knowing. But when it comes to your members, getting as clear a picture of what they’re doing and why is really important. 

To find out more about how to set up and customise your engagement tracker, have a look at Member Engagement Tracking and Reporting. 

For a look at all the different data reporting tools in Member Jungle and how to get the most out of them, check out Why You Need Data Reporting.