Member Engagement Strategies: A Climb, Not a Calendar
Most member organizations work hard at engagement, and you can see the effort. There's a full calendar of events, a newsletter going out, a member directory, usually a few committees. The programming is good. And it still doesn't quite land: attendance holds steady but flat, the same faces show up, and every year the renewals feel a little less certain.
Here's the thing. The effort usually isn't the problem. What trips most organizations up is a step earlier, in how they understand engagement to begin with. Member engagement is the progression of a person from not knowing you exist, to aware, to committed, to empowered within your community. It's a journey a member takes, not a series of activities you run.
Besides, a lot of times the activities run as separate threads with nothing tying them together. Each one stands on its own, the newsletter recaps what already happened, and members show up, head home, and wait for the next thing. The effort is genuine, but none of it moves anyone along that progression.
So what actually moves them? At every stage, the organization's job is the same: facilitate the climb. And the thing that does the facilitating is content. Used well, it's the connective tissue between your programs, keeping the value alive in the gaps and carrying members from one stage to the next. The rest of this walks through the model: what the three stages are, where organizations stall, and how a single show built to support the organization moves members up the climb. It starts with what engagement actually means.
What does member engagement actually mean? (And why attendance numbers mislead.)
Most organizations measure engagement by activity: logins, attendance, email opens, committee sign-ups. The stuff that's easy to count. Those numbers are useful as symptoms, but they tell you about motion, not relationship. You can pack the calendar all year and still have a room full of members who are strangers to each other and to you.
The better question is where a given member sits on that progression. Picture a line that runs from someone who's never heard of you all the way to a member who's fully empowered within the organization. Everyone is somewhere on it, and the whole job is moving each person one notch toward the empowered end.
For example, consider two organizations have the exact same attendance for an event with completely different energies. In one, people sign up for a free event. 20% of them show. People don't know each other in the room. In the other, the same number attend but they're all paying members. They know most of the room and have attend the event every few months. Same number on the report, opposite health underneath it.
That's also why effort alone rarely changes much. If you don't know where a member sits on that line, you can't know what would move them forward, so the work gets spread thin across everyone at once. And that's the spot most organizations are in: working hard, and still stuck. Before we get to the fix, it's worth understanding why.
Why do most member organizations stall?
When engagement dips, the instinct is to go hunting for the one broken tactic. The events fell flat, so the answer must be better events. The emails aren't getting opened, so it must be the subject lines. It feels productive, and it rarely gets to the bottom of anything.
The disconnection isn't something a better tactic can fix. The deeper issue is that no one is running the climb as a single strategy. Each program gets owned and measured on its own, so even good events and good emails don't add up to a member moving from one stage to the next.
Part of why this happens is that engagement tends to be everybody's job. Marketing touches it, membership touches it, the events team touches it, and because it belongs to everyone, no one really owns the climb. It lives in the gaps between departments, which is exactly where it gets dropped.
The numbers back this up. Marketing General's 2025 benchmarking report found that only 11% of associations rate their own value proposition as very compelling. For most organizations the value is genuinely there. What's missing is anything that carries it across the touchpoints in between, so members never quite feel it.
So what closes the gap is strategy. Tactics and tools help, but they can't replace a deliberate plan to move members through the stages, with content as the connective tissue that carries them. Which is where the model gets specific. What does each stage look like, and how do you move someone up? It starts with awareness.
Stage one: are your members actually aware?
A member is aware when they get what you're about: the value you offer, what to expect when they show up, and who they'll meet in the room. Name recognition alone doesn't clear that bar, because someone can know your logo and still have no idea why you'd matter to them. And awareness reaches further down than your current membership. A prospect who's heard of you but never understood the value sits at the same starting point as a brand-new member still finding their footing.
What builds awareness is content showing up consistently, everywhere your members and prospects already are. Email, social, YouTube, podcast platforms. When the value is visible again and again, in the natural course of someone's feed and inbox, people start to understand it without anyone having to corner them and explain it.
This is where a lot of organizations slip. Announcements aren't the same as communication. "Join us Tuesday at 6" tells someone when and where, but it doesn't say anything about why any of it should matter to them, and a calendar full of promotional posts like those don't stick with the community.
Being deliberate matters here, because members are already swimming in messages. In Higher Logic's 2025-2026 email benchmark, 61% of members said email is their primary channel, and 51% said they already get too many. The win comes from relevance, not frequency: content that shows up consistently and gives someone a reason to care.
Picture a local chamber promoting an event on tax-law changes. The flat version reads, "Join us to learn about the new tax law changes." The version that builds awareness reads, "Don't get caught off guard by a bigger tax bill. Here's how to get ahead of the local changes." The first hopes people will pull themselves in. The second gives them a reason to walk through the door.
This is the job the right content does well. People at Pyramid, the show SBX produces for the Pyramid Club, puts members on camera and surfaces who they are, so the membership becomes visible to itself. New members get invited to watch, and before long, to come on. People see the value of the community by seeing the people in it. Getting them in the room is one thing, though. Keeping them there is another, and that's the next stage.
Stage two: what turns awareness into commitment?
A member is committed when they've decided the organization is worth a regular investment of their time, energy, and money. They show up on purpose, not only when something catches their eye. The clearest tell is mutual recognition: they know other members, and other members know them. They've gone from a face in the crowd to part of the room.
Awareness gets someone in the door, but commitment is built in the stretches between events, and that's where content does its work. Used as connective tissue, it keeps the value alive in the gaps: a clip from last month's panel that lands in someone's feed, or a recap that continues the conversation instead of just reporting what happened. The relationship doesn't cool off between programs, and the member who used to just take in what you put out starts engaging with it.
And commitment deepens through people as much as through content. The more members someone knows, and the more they feel known in return, the more reasons they have to come back. At that point they're coming back for the people as much as for any single event.
"Talk to the actual people that are your members. Spend time with them. Listen to them. Make it easy for them to get the results they're looking for." -Vince Quinn, Co-Founder of SBX
The signal that someone has crossed into commitment is renewal. A member who renews after that first year has clearly told you the value is worth it. Renewal is the moment the decision becomes a habit.
The stakes are high here. In a 2026 ASAE report, 31.9% of associations named retention and engagement as their single biggest challenge, the top answer by a wide margin. And it tracks with how members behave: the ones who feel recognized and personally served tend to be the ones who stay.
We've watched this happen at the Pyramid Club. A member who first came on People at Pyramid as a guest became a regular, and when we asked members to share a testimonial, the opt-in rate came in close to a hundred percent. The show even pulled a dormant LinkedIn channel from around 21 to 65 impressions a day once SBX took it over. That's what commitment looks like in the numbers: people who've decided they belong, and who start to show it. The question from here is what happens when that feeling goes one step further.
Stage three: what does an empowered member do?
A member is empowered when they start driving things themselves. They volunteer, they speak, they help run events, they start their own initiatives inside the community. The organization stops being something they attend and becomes something they help build. By this stage, belonging is ingrained.
Here's the part you can't force. Empowerment is emergent. You build awareness, you build commitment, and then empowerment either shows up on its own or it doesn't. That's what makes it the strongest sign the system is working: it's the part you don't control showing up anyway.
At the Pyramid Club, this looked like one member in particular. He came on People at Pyramid as a newcomer, became a regular at the club, and went on to start his own roundtable inside the community. He's coming back on the show to talk about it. Nobody on staff assigned any of that. He did it because the community had become his.
It shows up in smaller moments too. A member named Bob heard another member, Jon, mention his day-trading hobby on an episode, realized he had a reason to connect, and reached out on his own. Nobody made the introduction. The content gave one member a way to see another, and he acted on it.
Empowered members go further than taking part. They pull other people in. When a member runs an event, they want it full, so they spread the word. When they're featured, they share it. People like being recognized for what they're part of, and that desire quietly does some of the organization's recruiting for it. It runs both ways, too: the leaders who show up to feature members get the face time that shows them who their members are.
The Pyramid Club's general manager, Caleb Gibson, put it plainly: "The show put our engagement strategy on steroids. Members felt ownership of the content." Ownership is the word that matters there. It's empowerment in a member's own language.
There's a useful way to name what's happening here. Adam Teterus, Director of Community at Indy Hall, an organization SBX partners with, draws a sharp line between an audience and a community. An audience, he says, forms around a person or a show. A community is "surrounded around a concept, an idea," and it "will last beyond you." Empowerment is what "beyond you" looks like in practice: members carrying the thing forward without the organization at the center. None of this runs on nothing, though. Something has to power the climb, and that's where the engine comes in.
What actually runs all this? A show built to support the organization.
All of this needs an engine, something that produces the connective tissue regularly instead of in fits and starts. For most organizations, the most leveraged version of that engine is a podcast: a conversation-driven show, usually recorded on video, that brings members and the people around your community on as guests. Done right, it has a job to do for the community rather than existing for its own sake.
What that podcast looks like isn't fixed, though. The angle follows the organization. The Pyramid Club's show puts members in the spotlight. A mastermind's might bring on past and current members to trade what's working. A trade association's might take on the issues its members are up against. What stays constant is the purpose: it's built to move that specific community's members through the stages, whatever shape it takes.
One reason a show carries so much weight is everything a single recording produces at once. You get one-on-one time with a member. You get content for every platform you publish on. You give that member a reason to share, and you create a record of who they are that the rest of the community can see. One conversation, and it feeds awareness, commitment, and the start of empowerment at the same time.
"It's more strategy than production capacity, because the strategy allows for more production." -Vince Quinn, Co-Founder of SBX
This is also where the three stages tie back together, through the content itself. A member starts by taking in what the show puts out. Then they engage with it, sharing and commenting and showing up because of it. Eventually they become it, the subject other members watch. Consume, engage, become. The same show carries a member the whole way up the climb.
The numbers from Pyramid bear this out. People at Pyramid grew from nothing to 36 videos and just under 8,000 organic views on YouTube, every minute of it spent showcasing members. On LinkedIn, the show makes up only about one in ten of the club's posts but drives a third of the reach and nearly half the clicks, and the single best-performing post on the entire account is an episode clip. On Instagram it's the same story: four of the club's top five posts in 2025 came from the show. The content built to serve members turned out to be the content that performs.
The discipline that makes this work comes down to the question you lead with. Most organizations start at "can we sell sponsorships on this?" The better starting question is "what is this content for, and how does it serve our members?" Get that one right and the engine runs on its own. Sponsors can come with it. Which leaves one thing to sort out: where you actually start.
Where to start (and why it compounds).
Start by being honest about where your members actually stall. Is programming struggling, so new prospects and members hard to come by? That's an awareness gap. Or do they show up but never build connections to anyone? That's a commitment gap. The answer points straight at your first move, because the fix for one isn't the fix for the other.
Whatever you do, resist the urge to fix it with volume. Posting for the sake of posting, or sending a newsletter because it's newsletter day, adds motion without intent, and members can feel the difference between content that serves them and content that's filling a slot. What you're after is members moving up the stages, and that rarely comes from simply publishing more.
Here's why getting this right compounds. When a member becomes empowered, they don't just turn into content you repurpose. They start pulling other people in. They promote the event they're running, they share the feature they're in, they bring guests to the thing they started. The empowered member's roundtable becomes the testimonial a stranger sees and the invitation a prospect accepts. Engagement and acquisition stop being separate jobs. They run on the same engine.
That's the goal worth working toward: a community that's alive beyond you. Members advocating for it, connecting each other, and driving things you never orchestrated. You'll know the strategy is working when that starts to happen on its own, because the renewals tend to follow the feeling. The work is building the climb. The community takes it from there.
Knowing where to start is the hard part. That's exactly what a Compass Call is for.