Book review: Exploring the ‘art’ of membership
Reviewing a short – but vital – book from Annabel Dunstan for Membership leaders.
Following a recommendation on LinkedIn, I picked up a short – but vital – book from Annabel Dunstan for Membership leaders. The Art of Membership provides insights from her work over the last three decades with membership organisations.
Subtitled, “lessons from listening to thousands of members”, the book provides an overview of how to create conditions for success and will be vital reading for anyone leading efforts to grow, retain or lead a membership organisation. This of course includes communication, marketing and engagement leads.
Heavily focused on realistic, practical, and tangible wins, it offers a range of ideas and solutions that could be easily picked up by membership organisations to build trust, deepen connection, and drive long-term engagement.
One of the core arguments of the book is that customer satisfaction should be the foundation of any approach, and Dunstan provides a number of examples of how that can be built, starting with a great member onboarding process. This led me to reflect on my time at a number of membership organisations where siloed approaches simply don’t yield results – you have your engagement experts in your comms teams, use them!
You can find out more about the book online below. Working at a senior level in membership? Then you need to read this today!