Like many associations, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) faced member retention and recruitment challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic hit APIC particularly hard as its current and prospective members serve on the frontlines in the fight against COVID-19, charged with keeping the disease from spreading in hospitals and long-term care facilities.
“Our members continue to work in high-risk environments and are coping with long hours and the ongoing impact of the pandemic,” said Martha Sauchuk, APIC’s senior director of marketing.
“They are not always able to respond to membership renewal communications right away.” To reach its membership goals, APIC needed to get its message in front of as many infection preventionists as possible, but in a cost-effective manner.
To achieve this, APIC used Feathr to give current and prospective members more opportunities to see their messaging in places outside of the organization’s website. “We wanted them to see us in different contexts,” said Sauchuk. “The more touches, the more likely they would be to join or renew.”
APIC’s efforts paid off. With an ad spend of $17,966, the organization garnered 270 members and generated $55,350 in revenue, representing a return on ad spend of 308 percent.
Outreach before using Feathr
Before working with Feathr, APIC promoted its organization using its website, direct mail, and print advertising.
“With the mail delivery delays that were brought about by the pandemic, as well as the fact that we wanted to expand our reach, we knew that our traditional way of marketing wasn’t going to be enough,” said Sauchuk. “We wanted to modernize our efforts and take advantage of some of the digital opportunities that Feathr offered us.”
To better engage its existing audience and cast a wider net, APIC turned to Feathr for an affordable solution to leveraging its website traffic.
“Having the opportunity to use our website to reach new visitors was appealing to us,” said Sauchuk. “Because of the nature of our work, we had a very robust set of COVID-19 resources on our website that was attracting much more website traffic than we had previously seen. So the ability to really capture that audience and serve our message to them, even as they navigated away from our website, was appealing.”
Using a pre-built campaign plan for Membership Registration
To meet its membership growth objectives, APIC used a Flight for Membership Registration designed by Feathr. A Flight is a pre-built campaign plan that groups and reports on campaigns that are tied to a shared end goal.
Feathr provides pre-made Flights plans for many common use cases like growing event attendance, increasing donations, or as in this case, growing membership for an association.
“I particularly liked the fact that the Flight not only arranged multiple campaigns into buckets of goals, but it also showed us the stages that our prospects were in,” said Sauchuk. “That made it easy for us to visualize where certain campaigns were standing and how the process was working. The Flight is a great organizing principle.”
When using a Flight, organizations can implement them in-house or hire Feathr Services to fulfill and manage the Flight on the organization’s behalf.
“We took the Feathr team up on that offer, and it made them an extension of my team,” said Sauchuk. “That was great because each of us has a lot on our plate already.”
Sauchuk feels great about the results APIC has been able to achieve.
“Being able to look at the reports and see exactly how many people we’ve converted into members and watching those numbers grow is awesome,” said Sauchuk.
A look into APIC's Flight for growing membership.
ABOUT
The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) is the leading professional association for infection preventionists with more than 15,000 members. Its mission is to advance the science and practice of infection prevention and control.
HEADQUARTERS
Arlington, VA
USE CASE
Membership Growth
PRODUCTS USED
Flights & Services
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