Staying Engaged, Active, and Creative during COVID-19
Below is an outline of positive and (mostly free) projects that you and your organization can work on. These tasks will focus on further Engaging your members, keeping you Active on the platform, and outline ways to become more Creative. The best part: You can do it from any location and accomplish it whenever time permits.
Further Engage Your Members
Staying Active With Your Website
- Explore Our Learning Center
- Turn On Search Friendly URLS
- Assist In DNS Cutover
- Review Your Content
- Coordinate Creation Of New Policies
- Obtain a SSL Certificate
Creative Ways to Use Your Time
Stay Engaged!
Create Videos
During this time of social distancing, video is a key component to normalizing our daily activities. Organizations are utilizing tools for video conferencing in an attempt to keep culture strong. While these tools are great, we also recommend inserting videos on your site to keep members engaged. Visit this guide if you want to learn how to embed videos on your site and this guide if you want to include videos on your email.
Great videos to make are:
- Announcements and Club Messages
- Club President and General Manager Statements
- Golf and Tennis Professional
- Fitness Classes or Exercise Tips
- Cooking Classes: Favorite Club & Family Recipes
Work On Growing Your Online Community
Your website and social media outlets are great tools to grow your online community. You already have an established group of members who love your brand. Create ways to capture their attention through online interaction. Try to think outside the box. Some helpful tips to get the ball rolling include:
- Create a Chef’s Corner within your website.
- Post the before mentioned cooking classes here
- Include Recipe of the Week, with photos and cooking tips
- If possible, include a recipe kit for curbside pickup
- Arrange live-stream to cook together with your members
- Encourage members to send photos to follow up with posts
- Use Social Media and/or Message Boards to help keep kids busy. Have kids submit drawings of their favorite thing about the club. Encourage parents to have fun with it, take pictures and share them with the club. The kids will get a kick out of seeing themselves on the website.
- Create online photo galleries from past events. Think of it as a mini “Throwback Series”. Send out communications regarding these prior events to get people excited about future events. Keep them thinking about the club and help them remember the value of membership. You can also leverage Instagram Stories as another way to stay connected with members remotely.
- If you think of other ways, please let us know how we can help you be creative and continue to add to this list!
Now Is The Time To Get Feedback
Have you always wanted to make sure you have the most up-to-date membership information? Have you wanted to start tracking other information and build strong membership files? There is no better time to start this project than now. There are various tools within your MembersFirst platform which will help you achieve this goal.
- Surveys - Create a survey which will allow you to gather important information about members’ likes and dislikes, hobbies, occupations… Really anything you could use in the future to help engagement. Don’t forget to ask club-specific questions such as input regarding prior menu offerings, event ideas, course conditions, club facilities and so on. To freshen up on surveys, we recommend you review this guide for creating new surveys and this guide for reviewing results.
- Create “Areas of Interest” in the member profile, based upon survey results and ask members to update their Activity Codes to further build out your members’ profiles.
- If you don’t want the information to be viewed on the members profile but still want to store the data on the site, use our Tracking Codes. Both Tracking Codes and Activity codes will allow you to target the appropriate audience through our email marketing solution.
Take Time to Help Your Future Self
Within your standard subscription to the MembersFirst Bulk Email Tool lies the power of Automated Recurring Messages, or "ARM" for short. When combining ARM with the customizable, dynamically generated saved lists, in which Distribution Groups offers, you have the ability to automate your member communications!
Click here for some great ways to use these included tools to further enhance your organization’s communications
Staying Active With Your Website
Explore our Learning Center
Our new Learning Center was launched in the fall of 2019. Here you will find great information with step by step detailed articles to master modules you are not familiar with. Explore all our product releases to understand what has changed recently. Take time to look over our extensive list of webinars. Check out how certain products or services work here at MembersFirst.
Activate Search Friendly URLs
This structure provides cleaner and shorter URLs which will streamline navigation, create a better user experience, and ultimately lead more people to your website by adhering to current Search Engine recommendations.
Not sure if your club has taken advantage of Search Friendly URLs? Simply take a look at any page of your website, if the url example below looks familiar, you do NOT have search friendly URLs:
www.yourclub.com/club/scripts/section/section.asp?GRP=8451&NS=PG
When Search Friendly URLs are activated, it will look like this:
www.yourclub.com/public-golf
The first step to working on this project is to fill out this form.
Assist Your Organization With DNS Cutover
We offer complimentary DNS services to our customers; however, not all organizations take us up on this offer. For those organizations who do not, we recently reached out to let you know we have made an investment to further streamline this process. This requires those organizations to make adjustments to the nameservers. While this might be more of a technical task, you might be able to assist in communicating this task to your IT Professional. To see what needs to be completed, click here. If you are not sure if your organization has to change anything please contact your CSM.
Review Your Content
Since members are using the sites more than ever now, take some time to ensure your website content is organized in a clean and efficient manner. A few moments spent will save you from searching through all your data and prevent frustration from your other admins and members using the website. To see some general tips, please review this article.
Coordinate a Privacy and Terms of Service Policy
Play “quarterback” in getting these policies outlined and created by the club advisors. As you may know, many new data privacy and protection guidelines are being created; it’s important to keep up-to-date with the latest regulations so your organization can ensure it’s properly protected. Well-structured Terms of Use and Privacy Policies have become critical documents for providing important information and protection. Whether it be a general privacy statement outlining data processing or highlighting other important points and consent, it's a great way to be transparent with your end users. To learn about these policies click here.
Obtain a SSL Certificate
SSL Certificates are an extra layer of security where sensitive information sent across the internet is encrypted, so that only the intended recipient can access it. Any websites without an SSL certificate will remain “http,” while those with encryption will show “https” in users’ browsers. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers have begun issuing warnings that non “https” sites are insecure. Additionally, Google recently announced SSL is a ranking signal; so unless you have SSL, your site will be harder to find, impacting your traffic. To sign up for this service please click here.
Get Creative!
Use the Power of Social Media
Social Media can be a fun and creative way to communicate with your members. The stigma of clubs and members not wanting to have social media accounts has worn off. You more than likely already have accounts created by outside individuals. Do a simple search and take control of them! This quick presentation will highlight some best practices and tips for using social media for Private Clubs. Also below find some links to a couple of our favorite learning tools.
- Learn how to livestream on YouTube
- Setting up an Instagram account
- Learn how to create a private Facebook group for your members
- Learn how to use Facebook Live
What Else Can I Learn?
Why not take this time to become a marketing ninja! Below is a list of free training resources which will greatly help you with your marketing needs. Depending on your role, all might not be needed, but it never hurts to continue your education. Make sure to check back as we will continue to outline complimentary training materials.
- Google Analytics Academy: Training Classes
- Canva: Design your own brochures and fliers
- HTML Class - Understand your website templates
- LinkedIn Learning Courses: Best Practices
- HubSpot Academy: Inbound Marketing, Social Media, etc.
Explore Design Concepts
One exercise we take our customers through when redesigning their websites or becoming a new customer of MembersFirst is a Design Inspiration Review. Take the time to understand what your design likes and dislikes are. Let your imagination run wild, let us know what you discover, which types of sites grab your attention, and what speaks to you. Have fun with it!