Emotions in Motion

The true membership currency

As consumers we all manage purchasing decisions based on a number of standards:

• Do we need this item?

• Can we afford something?

• Do we feel secure about buying it from this shop or person?

Some of the criteria are empiric, for example “do we hold the cash on hand”, however the majority of the standards are, commonly, emotional (do we “like” what we are buying, do we “feel” comfortable about purchasing it, do we “feel” valued by the person offering it to us, etc). We may buy something one day because we “feel” good about it, but not buy the identical item on a different day because our feelings are different and we don’t feel so positive about it. In the majority of cases, our “feeling good about it” situation has nothing at all to do with the product or service itself but more to do with our general emotional condition.

This emotional aspect of things plays an important part in joining and remaining a member of a membership company. In 1943 Abraham Maslow published his model on the human hierarchy of needs in a paper called “A theory of human motivation”. His fundamental premise was that as humans we have a hierarchy of needs which need to be fulfilled before we can move to the next stage of need.

At the foundation of Maslow’s pyramid of needs are the “physiological needs”. These are the essentials - the need to survive and everything else is secondary to these. After that we've got the “security needs”, these are key for survival but are not as demanding as the physiological needs. Above the security needs, we've got the “social needs”. These are the needs concerning to belonging, love and affection and concern our need for companionship and acceptance. Above social needs, we now have our “esteem needs”. After we've accomplished the initial three levels of need, our feeling of value and worth gets increasingly important, and leads to the fifth level. This being “self actualising” needs where we're concerned with individual growth and fulfilling our overall potential. This very brief outline of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides an outline for analysing why people join membership associations and why they remain members, and achieve emotional value from such membership, going forward. It also gives us a device for reviewing, from an emotional standpoint, why people cease being members and gives us a way of reviewing how our membership offering needs to change to meet a member’s emotional need.

At the basic - physiological needs - level, a member may join a membership organisation as part of their career growth plans, or to follow their preferred leisure activity. Away from the basic need to be a member, our security needs are normally met by membership organisations informational services - advice lines, guidance, etc. The social needs are met by the membership engagement and community aspects of a membership organisation. Being an engaged member meets these social desires. As we engage with fellow members and the membership organisation, and are asked to take part in committees, submit whitepapers, speak at conferences, contribute to forums, etc so we meet our “esteem” needs and are recognised by our peers. At the highest level - the “self -actualising” level - members are actively working with the membership organisation and commonly fulfilling roles within that organisation such as board member, committee chairperson, regional co-ordinator, etc.

For any membership organisation, it is usually possible to chart different membership grades and years of membership to the hierarchy “pyramid” and to plot a member’s progress up the pyramid. It is just as achievable, and actually essential, to recognise those factors of membership that go to address each of the levels of the pyramid. Where there is no alignment connecting a membership organisations overall offering and the lowest level of the pyramid, there is unlikely to be much of a membership base. There are no compelling grounds to join up, and absolutely no long term grounds to continue to remain a member, in terms of meeting basic emotional needs. At the other end of the extreme, where members are seriously engaged and involved with a membership organisation and with each other, and where the value can be clearly experienced, there is little probability of members leaving an organisation and added chance of them recommending it to their peers.

Developing an “emotions” map, and aligning it to their existing and future membership journeys and experiences, is increasingly being used by enlightened membership organisations to ensure that not only do they meet the “procedural” needs of their association base but also their “emotional” needs. It is certainly apparent that addressing the emotional side of membership management is as critical, and arguably is much more important, as any other feature of membership management - such as procedural renewal or financial management - in getting and retaining members on a long term basis. The more a membership organisation can deal with an individual’s emotional desires the more probable they are to hold on to that member, acquire more value from that member, and have that member propose that his peers join the association - all of the necessary elements for building a flourishing membership organisation.

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