This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau, your host. Today we've got a listener question from Jenna in Chicago. Jenna is involved with a nonprofit organization.
She's looking for effective strategies to improve this organization's membership drive. So it's fundamentally a question about marketing. If you have a company or a business or just a side hustle, if you sell a product or a service, whatever it is you do, you want to attract more contributors in some way, whatever those contributors might look like. They could be customers, could be clients, could be readers or subscribers or followers, but the whole point is you want to attract people who make commitments, who follow up on a call to action or a CTA. So let's see what we can do to help Jenna, some effective strategies to improve a nonprofit membership drive.
We'll do all that in a short action-packed episode. Detailed question from Jenna and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Jenna from Chicago. I'm involved with a nonprofit organization and we're planning a membership drive to increase our numbers. We tried a few approaches in the past, but the results have been underwhelming.
Can you tell us what are some effective strategies to improve our membership drive and attract more people to join our calls? We want to ensure that our efforts lead to significant growth and engagement. Your podcast has always been a source of great ideas. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.
[Music]
Hey Jenna, so a nonprofit membership drive is fundamentally a marketing campaign. Like we're talking about a nonprofit here, but basically you want to increase pledges, right? Increase subscriptions, increase one-off donations, whatever the specific objectives, we have a marketing challenge here. So what do we do? I remember hearing this interview with Ira Glass, who's basically the co-founder and long running host of This American Life, wonderful radio show and podcast now.
He talked about how when he was getting started, he wanted to get his show on as many public radio channels or stations as possible. And so he did all this stuff, going around to all these different stations, focusing on how to increase their memberships and coming up with some creative ads, 'cause basically you're running ads. So how do you make your ads not boring? How do you make people not change the station or otherwise tune out, not read the emails, not click on the emails, whatever it is. And so it's just about getting attention and it's hard to get people's attention these days.
So you need to take it as a significant challenge and you need to say, well, why should people care? You know, who is the audience? Why should they care? What can I come up with that is a compelling story that gets them to take action. And there might be some incentives.
There might be, oh, when you subscribe, you get this, you get the tote bag or you get your name listed somewhere, or you just get goodwill, but whatever it is, there is some sort of reward in exchange for your partnership subscription and so on. And then the next thing to think about is personalized outreach. So not just the big like widespread appeal, but personalized emails, direct messages, phone calls to potential members. I mean, this is what a lot of nonprofits do and the ones that are successful, they do have some way of standing out. They do focus on that call to action.
And then they also focus on retaining members because it's a lot easier to keep somebody around than it is to get somebody new, just like with any business. So once somebody joins or once they make their pledge, make sure they're welcomed and valued, send them a personalized welcome message, give them updates as you go, ask for their participation and feedback, you know, just kind of make people feel like they're part of something 'cause that's what they are when they're donating to a nonprofit. So you've got a marketing challenge. You want to come up with a clever call to action. You want to think about why they should care, how you can get their attention and get them to respond.
And then what can you do to keep them around once you've got them in the first place? Jenna, wishing you and your nonprofit every success. Listener's always cheering you on as well, sidehustleschool.com/questions or just sidehustleschool.com. We've got notes for every single episode, lots of resources there. And of course, a new episode out every single day, thanks for being there.
My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
