5 signs that you need to rethink and reboot your membership engagement effort

In your volunteer-run, virtual organization, how do your members become engaged in sharing their time and knowledge? Do they come away from these activities enthused? Or do they feel like they never want to come back? Here are five danger signals that mean you should rethink and possibly reboot your organization.

1. You can’t agree on what engagement is.
   What are your metrics for engagement? How are you collecting these? What does engagement look like in your organization? If you cannot answer these questions, then you need to start over and rethink why anybody should become a member.
   
2. When members tell you what’s important to them, you have no way to respond.
   Engagement is where your organization shows it’s value to its members. Your members are intelligent, enthusiastic, and busy. They showed up. Every member needs to be able to find support to do what is important for them (inside the boundaries of the vision/goal of the organization). When your organization can amplify the efforts of each member to solve their immediate problem or support their creative input, they will be engaged. And they will engage each other. Remember the first rule of a volunteer organization: each member needs to get more than they give. Members need every reason to come back and bring their colleagues. When a new member shows up and tells your staff, “I really need to solve this problem” that becomes a priority for your organization. If it’s not then you need to start over.
   
3. You’ve invented a list of tasks that you want volunteers to work on.They need to chose from this list if they want to engage with your organization.
   Helping the organization with higher-level organizational work: planning, strategy, etc., is not engaging. It’s a service. This is something that people who are already engaged will do in small doses. In volunteer-run organizations members eat the pudding first, and then get the meat. If your answer to a member is to look at a web-page with a list to things you want them to do, then you need to start over.
   
4. You’ve got an “engagement team” instead of being an engagement organization.
   Volunteer-run organizations are propelled by engagement. This is the locomotive that pushes all other activities. If your organization has an engagement team somewhere trying to figure things out, then you’ve lost your locomotive and you’ll only grow and move as fast as the team can pump a hand car. If engagement is not your first order of business, then you need to start over.
5. Nobody is certain how decisions are made.
   Engagement runs on trust and and is propelled by a governance that is open and responsive. Members of volunteer-run organizations need to know they are in control. Every time a decision is rethought or rescinded by the staff or through some back-door conversation with donors; every time the membership only gets to vote on a document somebody else wrote, every election where the nominations fall to the same people: members become less engaged. If your governance is not actually run by the volunteers who are your members, then you need to start over.
   

Photo credits: poor doggie: bull-dog story