Every month, we host a Membership Masterminds roundtable basically, we get a bunch of association pros on a call and let them talk through whatever's on their mind. No slides, no agenda, just real conversation.
This month's topic was online engagement, and I'll be honest — it hit close to home. We have a LinkedIn community for Membership Masterminds with over a thousand members, and it's pretty quiet. Meanwhile, these roundtables? Packed. People show up, they talk, they share. So clearly the interest is there. The engagement just looks different depending on the format.
That theme came up again and again throughout the conversation.
They're reading. They're just not posting. One of our participants kicked things off with a frustration I think a lot of us share. He launched an online community for his healthcare association, he's posting regularly, and he's mostly hearing crickets. But when he looked at the data, 75% of his members were opening the daily digest emails. That's higher than their newsletter open rate. And here's the kicker — when his team ran an advocacy campaign, they got double the response of comparable organizations using the same tool. So his members aren't checked out. They're just picky about what they engage with. Another participant said something similar. Her association's discussion boards look dead, but when she pulled the download numbers for their resource library, the board was shocked. People were quietly using the community all the time — they just weren't making noise about it. I think there's a real lesson in that. We tend to measure community health by visible activity — posts, replies, reactions. But a lot of the value is happening in the background, and if you're only looking at surface-level metrics, you might be missing it. So how do you get people to actually participate?A few things came up that I thought were genuinely useful (not just the usual "post more content" advice).One association bakes community participation into their committee structure. Each committee is responsible for at least one post a month, and they rotate who's on deck so nobody feels overwhelmed. Their membership committee does a monthly member spotlight. Their communications committee posts wellness content twice a month. It gives the community a rhythm, and it gives volunteers something concrete to do. Another organization took a different approach — they created about 20 interest-based forums and recruited one or two member facilitators for each one. Those groups basically run themselves now. And a nice side effect: a lot of those facilitators eventually end up on committees or the board. So it doubles as a volunteer pipeline. Then there was a smaller state-level association that runs a weekly 20-minutephone call. No sign-up required, same phone number every week. They started it during the pandemic and just never stopped. They regularly get over 150 people on the call, which is remarkable for their size. During those calls, they point people toward related threads and resources on their discussion board. The live call creates the energy, and the community becomes where people go afterward to dig deeper. That last one really stuck with me. One of our participants made the point that sometimes people are just tired of screens. They don't want another platform to check. They want to talk to a real person. And I think that's worth sitting with, especially if you're putting all your eggs in the online community basket. Thepaywall questionWe also got into a really good conversation about what should go behind the member wall when you have an online community — especially if you're an organization that's historically made a lot of content publicly available
.One participant was getting ready to launch their community and was running into pushback from staff who were used to putting everything on the public website. Another participant had the opposite situation — his staff was the one pushing to lock things down because membership numbers were declining and lapsed members were still showing up to events without rejoining. The general consensus was pretty practical: if something is quick to produce and works as a window into what your org does, keep it public. It's a marketing tool. If it took your team real time and effort to build and it provides significant value, that belongs behind the wall. One creative move that came up — an association opened their newsletter to their entire database, not just current members. They dramatically expanded their reach and picked up significant ad revenue in the process. The newsletter became a way to stay in front of non-members without sending them the kind of cold email that ends up in spam. Another approach: send teaser content to everyone, but link the full articles to member-only pages. Non-members click through and get a prompt to join. You're catching them at the exact moment they're interested. What I took away from all of thisHonestly, the biggest thing I walked away with is that engagement looks different than we think it does. The associations that seem to be getting it right aren't necessarily the ones with the busiest forums — they're the ones that understand how their members actually use the community and build around that. If your members are opening emails but not posting, that's not a failure. It's data. Ask them what would make the community more useful — we actually suggested using PropFuel for exactly that kind of question — and then build toward what they tell you. And if live conversations get more traction than yourdiscussion board, lean into that. Use the live events to feed the community, not the other way around. Your community doesn't have to be loud to be valuable. It just has to be useful. Join the next conversationOur next Membership Masterminds roundtable is on February 19. These are free, open to anyone in the association space, and — as you can probably tell from this recap — the conversation is always worth showing up for. Register hereto join us. In the meantime, join our LinkedIn community to connect with other membership pros between sessions.
