Membership Organizations as Immersive Experiences
I recently read an interesting article about creating successful immersive experiences, and a piece of my brain was thinking about how the same factors could also go into creating successful membership organizations.
Some of the membership organizations I work with become pervasive aspects of members’ lives. Members become contributors whose identities are tied to the organization.
Examining what the authors of the article, Joseph C. Nunes and Wendy Heimann, say about creating effective immersive experiences offers an interesting way to examine the design and function of thriving membership organizations.
Nunes and Heimann found that effective immersive experiences lead participants to answer six key questions in sequence, thereby absorbing them in the experience.
Let’s look at how those six questions could be addressed by membership organizations:
1. Where am I?
Membership organizations often have a specific location for meetings or their events. Even when meetings take place in open/public spaces, membership organizations can clearly delineate a space for their gathering with physical objects or shared visual cues that indicate the location's intentionality. This question provides an anchor for the membership experience.
2. Who am I with?
Knowing your community members is an important feature of membership organizations. Understanding the roles of various members is helpful, and if members function together, it’s equally important for them to know their teammates and collaborators within the organization as people they can trust to share their goals. This question brings out how well you know and trust your fellow members.
3. What can I do?
Surprisingly, this question is sometimes overlooked by membership organizations. There may be expected duties for members, but what about the range of possibilities beyond the basic expectations? Freeing members to offer their creativity or talents in new and unique ways can fuel personal investment and organizational thriving. This question highlights members' agency and opens possibilities for their impact.
4. What is happening?
Within membership organizations, this question often has a static answer as a mission or vision statement. Seeing it as the fourth thing on the list implies that orienting members to the events of the moment (and their impact on those events as uncovered by question 3), is another opportunity missed by membership organizations beyond special occasions or one-off events. What is happening could also be viewed as what is happening under the surface or behind the scenes to support the members or the mission. Orienting members to what is going on helps them see their part in it.
5. Am I making progress?
This question highlights the need for thoughtful goal setting and clear feedback structures. Letting goal setting and feedback be up to chance can create a confusing environment where members lose focus and motivation. Tangibly seeing progress builds resilience and energizes members.
6. Why does this matter?
Why does membership matter? Why does a member having agency within this specific group of people while making progress doing this specific thing matter? While some membership organizations answer this question through external projects in the broader community, others focus on long-term impacts on individual members. Some have a mix of both answers, highlighting external impacts on some occasions and personal impacts on others. Purpose is how energy is focused and sustained.
What I see most often in faltering membership organizations is that they didn’t address these questions in sequence, skipped some as too obvious to mention, or only raised them when it suited the organization.
Membership organizations looking to grow could take a cue from these six questions and ensure that new or potential members intentionally hit all of them in order during the introductory or onboarding phases.
Surveying your members could elucidate holes or skipped steps. Creating a pathway to membership that intentionally answers these questions could support greater buy-in and increased member commitment.
How could your organization create a way to answer these questions (and reinforce the answers consistently) for your members?