Episode 4: Why Your Membership Needs More Than a Community Manager

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

Do you have a habit of only working on your membership when you're about to promote it?

If you're stuck in a cycle of adding new bonuses and changing up the member area only before promotions -- and feeling super frantic and stressed while you do it -- this episode is for you.

We also discuss how to think about the role of your community manager in a new way, and how to work on optimizing and improving your membership all year round.

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

So tell me if any of this sounds familiar: you’ve got a big promotion or launch period coming up for your membership, and you’re all-in. This launch is consuming you right now.

Maybe it’s every September, or January — that’s when you have a big enrollment period for your membership, and it’s on your calendar every year. So you and your team are fully focused on the membership.

You’re getting all the pages ready, you’re putting together presentation slides, you’re scrambling to make sure your onboarding emails are working like they need to — and there’s this force of energy in the entire company behind your membership right now. You’re making things happen!

Then you do the launch. You welcome everybody in. You take a long nap. For the first couple of weeks, you’re super connected to the membership. Your team is too.

And then… you fall back into your normal rhythm.

Other parts of the business start taking up your attention again. You’re thinking about the next thing you need to sell — maybe it’s a signature course or group program, a coaching offer, or a digital product you want to get people’s eyes on. So all your effort and your energy is directed elsewhere, or more likely, in a million different places.

The membership keeps on going in the background — and you probably won’t give it a great deal of focus again, outside of delivering on what you promised, until it’s time for you to sell it again.

This creates a problem:

Launches often become accidental “product development” sprints (& everyone loses)

Back to the scenario above: suddenly, a few months have gone by. It’s time to do another membership promo.

You’re back to working on all the pages, your team is scrambling for links and at the same time, you’re trying to figure out — which bonuses are we going to offer this time?

What else can we create to entice people to join? Do we need to update our onboarding? How are we going to move things around inside the membership to fit the new things we’re adding? Wow, we really didn’t get to work on improving churn or engagement since the last launch, but we really don’t have time to do that now.

And then the cycle repeats.

You’re in this pattern of trying to sell your product and doing product development at the same time — usually, in a very condensed time frame, it’s a little bit reactive and rushed, and it feels like you never get the time you need to actually work on improving the membership.

This is frustrating because you want the membership to be a central part of your business, especially given how much it takes for you to deliver on it every month. And if the membership already does make up a substantial part of your revenue, you want to make it more profitable, make it better, grow it intentionally…. but it seems like you never get the chance.

If this is you, then first of all, welcome to the club, and second — keep listening, because this episode is for you.

We’re going to talk about who really owns your membership (and no, it’s not your customers) and how you can borrow a job description from the SaaS world - that is, Software as a Service — to make sure your membership gets the attention it needs to thrive all year round… so that you aren’t stuck in this cycle of only building out your product when you’re getting ready to promote it, which ultimately keeps you stuck.

I think you’re going to love this conversation, so let’s jump in.

Your membership needs more than a community manager

So, a question for you: do you have a community manager on your team? (If you don’t, then congratulations: you are the community manager!)

Most of my clients and almost everyone with a successful membership have someone in the community management role. This is such an important role and, outside of someone who might be on your customer service team, this is likely the only person in your company who is connected to the membership all year round and on a daily basis.

When you think about it, that’s kind of crazy. Here we have this membership offer that provides recurring revenue to us every month, and it’s something that we have to deliver on every month, and yet — most memberships end up on life-support in terms of their ongoing development. The membership is front-of-mind when it’s time for us to sell it, but then it goes right back on the backburner for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, your community manager is in the trenches every single day. They’re answering questions, they’re supporting the community, they might even be the person who’s setting up all the calls and links — and while this work is crucial, there’s so much more that goes into the health of a membership.

Your membership is so much bigger than the support requests you receive or the questions people ask inside your group.

But in terms of where we invest our team and our time throughout the year for the membership — outside of a launch or promotion — it usually just comes down to customer support.

It’s great that you have someone to support your customers, but… who is actually supporting the membership?

How living, breathing memberships end up on life-support

In the first episode of the podcast, I introduced the idea of being a membership-driven business owner — of building a company where your membership is the bedrock, the financial baseline of everything you do.

It’s a mindset where your membership isn’t just something you offer on the side of all your other things, but it’s the essence of who you are, the heart of what you’re known for, and a primary source of revenue in your business.

Personally, I think this is the only way to run a membership because while they’re wonderful, they require a lot from you — so you should be reaping enough of a financial reward for the effort to be worth it.

So if we are membership-driven… if we’re all-in on the idea of making this membership as strong and as profitable as it can be…

Doesn’t it make sense that there should be someone inside your company who is responsible for the ongoing health of your membership?

Your customers need support, and your membership does too

So here’s my vision:

I want your membership to have a champion inside your company — every day, all year round.
I want you to have someone who can take the vision you have for the membership and help you prioritize that into meaningful features, updates, and additions to the membership — and not just in the couple of weeks before your launch.
I want you to have someone who understands the key numbers and metrics that make up the health of your membership — and can keep an eye on how those metrics are tracking.
And yes, I want you to have someone who cares deeply about the results your members are getting, is deeply in touch with the community and their needs, and can be a priceless source of feedback for you while you work on the future of your membership and what it will become.

Well, it turns out I’m not just making this up.

In the SaaS & tech world, Product Managers do a lot of what I just spoke about, and in many cases, they do much more.

From RMIT: a product manager guides a digital product through its life cycle. They are responsible for evolving the product in a manner that balances the customer, commercial and technical needs.
In short, they champion the vision of the company and help the product evolve to meet market demands.

If you ask me, there are few skill sets that membership companies need more than the ability to evolve their product to meet market demands, especially in 2024.

I have a prediction that the most successful memberships of the future will employ people in hybrid roles, at the intersection between community manager and product manager — incorporating the best of both worlds and giving their membership the care and attention it needs, all year round.

What opportunities could “product manager thinking” bring to your membership?

Again, it’s a bit of a mindset shift. In the same way that there’s a difference between having a membership and having a membership-driven business, there’s a difference between seeing your membership as a place where people get all this “stuff” versus a living breathing product that has a roadmap and a plan.

This is the way a product manager thinks about their subscription product, and I think it’s the way we could be thinking about our memberships and subscriptions, too.

Even that perspective shift alone could have some interesting implications for how you operate your membership.

For the rest of the episode, I want to dig into what I see as the 3 main differences between a community manager and a product manager — and how you can begin to bring more “product manager” thinking to your business all year round, even if you don’t have someone in the community manager role right now.

Quick aside: I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting you ask your community manager to “do more” on their current salary or skill set.

Think deeply about whether a person on your team could be supported and if they want to be supported to grow into higher-level responsibilities like the ones I’m describing below, and if so, what kind of ongoing training and support they’ll need in order to get there.

Think of these ideas more as opportunities to support the career growth of your team long term, and as a pathway for future promotion and pay rises that match the increase in value they’ll be bringing to your company.

Alternatively, these might give you ideas for the kinds of competencies to include in a job description for future roles.

Opportunity 1: Community Support vs Voice of Community

There are few people in your company who know more about what your customers are thinking and feeling than your community manager does.

They know what people are complaining about, what they’re trying to achieve, what’s getting in the way — their hopes and dreams and their wins and so much more.

You and I both know this is gold.

It helps you build a better product. It helps you position and sell your product. And helps you make sure customers are getting the result they’re paying you for.

But, I rarely see community managers involved in conversations about the future of the membership. It’s rare for me, when I’m working with clients on a launch or sales campaign, to hear insights from the community manager unless I ask for them.

The exception is if you have a really proactive or vocal community manager, which means they’re likely telling you things in your company slack channel or sprinkling insights during team meetings. (They’ll also be the first to tell you when one of your ideas is going to create a customer service nightmare.)

So they’re giving you feedback, but — none of it is organized, and more importantly, none of it is prioritized, which means often it just ends up as noise that you don’t do anything meaningful with.

But, if you had someone in your company who was the manager of your membership? Well, they’d be doing more than customer support…

They would be the voice of your community.

They’d help you turn all of the insights they get on a daily basis into something that is cataloged and tracked, and helping you sort through the feedback and turn them into insights that you can use to prioritize and make decisions like:

What should we emphasize in our copy, and in our next promotion?

Which parts of the membership are getting people results, and where are people struggling?

What’s the most important change we can make to the membership right now?

Start with Surveys

If you could see your community manager role expanding in this way, one way to get started is to get them involved in the surveys you send out — and if you’re not already surveying every 6 months or so, then start doing it!

This takes them out of a reactive role and puts them in a place where they can source feedback with intention and a goal.

They can work with you on formulating the questions in your survey, defining the goals of your survey, and then, working through the responses to look for trends and what to prioritize.

When I work with my clients, it’s usually my role to help them formulate great surveys because the quality of what they’ve been sending on their own isn’t very strong. I would love it if my clients had someone on their team who knew how to run a survey and interpret the results.

This is a great skill to support your community manager in building, if they want to grow into it.

Opportunity 2: Product Launches vs Product Roadmaps

Like I mentioned earlier, many people only work on their memberships when they’re getting ready for a new promotion cycle, and they realize they need a new “carrot” to entice people to join — so, they add new features based on what they think will sell, which is a short-term play that often creates a big mess and a lack of focus inside the membership.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have people who are really diligent about making changes to their membership during the year. I just spoke with someone recently who has worked really hard on improving their member experience and carving out new features that serve their needs, which is an awesome thing.

But, in both of these cases, what’s missing is a longer-term vision. I see memberships as living, breathing offers: offers that we expect to evolve and iterate and improve over time. Thinking in this way will help you get out of the launch-to-launch mindset and think long-term about your vision for the membership and your business as a whole. It allows you to prioritize the right changes for the right time, instead of adding something off the cuff because you think it will help your launch or because you’ve received some feedback that it’s what a few members wish was included.

Something I’ve noticed is that, most of the time, the founder holds the vision for the membership, but it’s not clear or fully articulated in a way that allows anybody else on your team to champion it. So this means you end up holding some fuzzy vision inside your head, and having to be the person who safeguards what the membership is about. You don’t have a compass or a framework from which to make decisions, or to check your decisions against to make sure the choices you’re making are really in the best interest of the membership (versus creating more work or complexity for you down the line).

So what’s the alternative?

My vision for an elevated community manager is that they are someone who is clear on the vision for the membership and can help you manage it through a long-term roadmap for how the membership will evolve, and when.

What I see happening in reality, though, is that the community manager just has to weather whatever changes the founder has decided to make, for better or for worse. And if they are involved in those decisions, then again, it comes back to not having some kind of shared framework or longer-term vision.

So my question to you is this: have you ever developed a roadmap or a 12-month, a 24-month vision for your membership?

Do you have a sense of which changes you want to make and when? Do you know which changes are going to move the needle for you, both in terms of member satisfaction and in acquiring new members?

If not, you’re likely stuck in a cycle of only working on product development before a promotion (or even during one, which happens all the time, by the way). Your community manager can help you escape this pattern.

Crafting a shared vision (and taking it out of your head)

To get started, look to the surveys you’ve been sending. Look at the feedback you’ve been receiving. What are the themes for what members really need? Is this coming from just a few loud voices, or is there a real trend here, one worth paying to?

And when it comes to sales, what are you noticing, what is your marketing and sales team noticing (if you have one) about where people are paying attention and what they’re craving right now? Have this conversation with your community manager and start thinking about the 3 to 5 key changes or improvements you want to make to the membership in the next 12 months.

Better yet, create a shared vision and mission for the membership. Why does it exist? What are you there to help members experience and achieve? It’s important to codify this, and make it real. Create it with your community manager. Decide together what your guiding principles are going to be. This is going to be the filter you run all of your future decisions through to ensure that what you’re doing is aligned with the vision you have for the membership, so you can be more intentional about the changes you’re making.

I believe the community managers of the future are going to be skilled at developing product roadmaps and working with the founder to ensure that product development happens all year round, with intention and thought — they will be champions for the identity and purpose of the membership, and someone who owns the future of how the membership will evolve.

Even if you don’t have a community manager, it’s worth considering: where does product development fit in our calendar? Are we just doing it before a launch? Are we thinking long-term, or only about the next promotion? If so, it might be time to develop a roadmap and a long-term vision for your offer.

Opportunity 3: Membership Maintenance vs Membership Wellbeing

Carrying on from the point above, a third opportunity I see for an expanded community manager role is that they are someone who doesn’t just champion the vision for the membership — they champion it’s wellbeing, too.

Memberships are dynamic offerings. They are constantly changing. They’re always being updated and added to. Things are being moved around. Maybe it’s your community manager or maybe it’s your tech-team, or maybe it’s you — but there’s someone inside your company who is deeply involved in these changes. They’re adding things to the website, they’re shifting things around inside the member area, they’re creating documents and calendar invitations and scheduling calls… they’re in maintenance mode.

But… who is responsible for the wellbeing of the membership?

Usually, it’s the founder. They’re looking at sales and revenue, or observing things about how many members are attending calls. They have a few metrics in mind about how to tell if their membership is doing well, but often, these are poorly defined or even misunderstood.

I spoke with a founder the other day who was feeling terrible that 40 to 50 members were canceling every month, until we zoomed out and ran the numbers. She had over 1500 subscribers and her retention rate was 96% — this isn’t just above average, it’s truly gold standard. So the numbers can often be deceiving in isolation, or we end up hyperfocusing on one metric when there are way better indicators of how healthy our membership actually is.

I believe an elevated community manager is someone who tends to the health of the membership, not just its maintenance. They know what the metrics are that represent how well the membership is doing and how members are tracking. Crucially, they are also involved in tracking those metrics and reporting them back to the founder and the decision-making team. This helps you as a founder see the full picture and make more informed decisions about what needs to be prioritized in the membership and when.

Know the signs: what makes your membership healthy?

To get started, sit down with your community manager and define together - what are the key metrics we care about for our membership? Are they sales metrics? Are they engagement metrics? Are they specific kinds of wins or results or feedback we want to see regularly? On the sales and revenue side, if you’re not already, it’s essential for you to know what your lifetime customer value is, what your churn or retention rate is, and how many engaged leads you can expect to turn into paying members. If nothing else, start there.

Then, have a conversation about the other metrics you want to be tracking that will tell you that members are engaging and getting results. What are the signs and symptoms that people are succeeding? How will you track it, how often, and how will they feed the information back to you in a meaningful way?

Bringing it all together

Bottom line, what I’m getting at here is the idea that your membership needs someone who truly cares for it, beyond answering customer questions, scheduling posts in a group or adding new content to the member area.

Your membership deserves a champion and someone who can protect the vision and the wellbeing for this offer.

See your membership as a living, breathing offer that needs ongoing care — and decide to create processes and benchmarks around how that will happen and when, so it doesn’t have to live inside your head or happen only when you have a launch around the corner.

I’m curious about what lands for you here. What opportunities do you see? What conversations will you have with your team this week, or what changes are you planning to make to how you go about tending to your membership?

I always love hearing from you. You can find me and reach out at membership-driven business.com and if you loved this episode or found it helpful, please go ahead and leave a review because it really supports me and the show.

That’s it for now. Here’s to giving our memberships the care and attention they deserve. I promise, there’s so much more peace on the other side of this decision, and an even richer and more impactful experience for your members as well.

Take care and I’ll see you in the next episode.