Many membership software programs offer job, classified and announcement board features. For some organizations they are a great way to increase revenue and member engagement online. For others they may be a waste of resources and create pages that illustrate your member’s lack of online engagement. Let’s take a look at the positives and negatives of boards and how to decide if they are right for your organization.
What are the benefits
- Gives members more value for their membership. Providing members the opportunity to post on boards can help them save time by getting their job posting, classified ad or announcement out to the right people.
- Encourages more engagement on your website. Not only does it encourage members to interact on your website, but it also brings nonmembers to your website. While on your website to look for a job or check out the announcements board to see what is happening, they may end up finding an event they want to attend or another way to get involved with your organization.
- Gives your organization another stream of revenue. Whether it is someone paying to post, or a member upgrading for permission to post on boards, it all adds to your revenue stream. Although they take some time to set up and may need some monitoring, overall boards are an easy way to increase your revenue.
What are the potential drawbacks
- Empty boards may highlight a lack of engagement or interest in your organization. This may discourage people from getting involved.
- Posters will expect a return on their investment. If they don’t get any response to their posts they may be disappointed. If this is a new feature for you, setting realistic expectations and allowing for free posts until traffic builds up could help.
- You will need to invest some time in setting up the boards and keeping an eye on posts to ensure that they are appropriate. The amount of admin work needed for board creation and maintenance will largely depend on if you are using the best membership software for your needs.
How do we decide it’s right for us
- Do you have the time to invest in the boards? Depending on how comfortable you are with the software you are using, it may take an hour or a day to get your boards up and running. You should also set aside some time for monitoring the boards. If you allow the general public to post to your boards you will need to monitor them more frequently. If you trust your members it may just be a weekly or monthly check. You may also need to guide your members through posting. You know your member’s ability with computers so you can best estimate the amount of time this would take.
- Is your website a logical place to go for this information? If your membership organization is for an afterschool sports program then a jobs board is probably not going to be worth the investment. However, a classifieds board may be a great place for parents to sell or purchase gently used sports gear.
- Do you know why you are considering adding boards to your website? I know I have been guilty of seeing a feature someone else has and wanting it too. However, if the majority of your members prefer to stay offline for most tasks, a board feature may not be worth the investment just yet. Taking time to discuss who will use the boards and how it will benefit your members before diving in may save you wasted time and effort.
A few tips for setting up your boards
- Should my board be for members only or visible to the public?. Should your board be visible to members only or the general public? This depends on what the main benefit of the board is. For example if the benefit of your jobs board is that your members can have their job posts reach more people, you’d want to have a public job board. This will help the most people see it. However, if the benefit of the job board is being able to apply to jobs you would want to set it to be members only.
- How do I avoid my board looking like a ghost town? This is where volunteers and more active members come into play. Let them know ahead of time about the board. Ask them to post before your announcement so when you do tell people about the page there is already some action there.
- How do I launch my boards? First get some volunteers and members to post on them. Then you can include an announcement about them in your newsletter. Highlight posts in subsequent newsletters to keep it in people’s mind. Talk about the boards at your events and consider having someone there that can guide members through creating their own posts. Have a raffle where people get an entry by posting on your boards.
- Should I allow the public to post on our boards? This can be a really tough decision. The first thing to consider is if you have the bandwidth to monitor your boards more frequently. If you’re charging the public to post you need to make sure to charge a high enough fee that your board does not become a place for bad actors to test credit cards. Another thing to consider is would allowing the public to post on your board disincentivize new members from joining?
Every membership software’s board feature will be a little different. You can take a quick tour of the MembershipWorks board feature below.
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