By Pam Sefrino, WebLink Director of Sales, Northeast Region (formerly with Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce)

In this tough economic climate, member retention rates are falling and even long-time chamber members are scrutinizing every dollar they spend and looking at the return on their annual membership investment. What are you doing to ensure that renewing membership in your chamber is an easy decision, even when belts are being tightened?

No longer are chamber professionals able to get away with talking about the “benefits” of Chamber membership in intangibles. Saying that you host 50 networking events per year or that your Chamber played a role in defeating important anti-business legislation at the State House just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Chamber members want hard evidence as to how they are benefitting by being a member of your chamber - and that evidence needs to be easily accessible, both to them and to you, well before the renewal notice is received.

Using strong technology for your membership management system is truly the only surefire way to gain the member intelligence necessary to demonstrate real value. Show AND tell them how they are benefiting, don’t just tell them and hope that they’ll renew.

Show your members exactly how many times their business listing or banner advertisement was displayed on the chamber’s website with instant referral reports for their company. Demonstrate how many times they were referred on the phone to those who called your chamber looking for a business or services in their industry, by using an automatic “front desk” phone referral system built into your database.  Provide members in the top categories searched on your website with real evidence of their return on their membership investment by sharing those reports regularly. Give non-members in top categories searched a “trial” membership for one month. Then run the referral report, share the top categories searched report and sign them up for membership!

Purposefully using technology to address the question “what’s in it for me?” before it’s ever even asked, goes a long way in increasing member retention and even selling new memberships.