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Membership 201
Membership 201
1. Retention
2. Marketing your membership program
3. Adopting a product mindset
4. Improving and deepening the member experience
5. Maintaining membership momentum
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3. Adopting a product mindset

Session Objective

There is no
simple, one-size-fits-all formula for membership
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. Membership takes time, experimentation, and iteration to get right – and even the “right” answer will change over time as your member base changes. Learning the basics of product thinking will make it easier for your organization to experiment and iterate quickly, efficiently, flexibly, and decisively.
A product can be anything a news organization creates to solve a problem or meet a need. An effective product serves a well-defined audience, and is often pegged to a specific way of earning revenue. Your membership program is a product – but that doesn’t mean you need a product manager for your membership program to be successful. Even
some small organizational experience
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with testing and learning from potential members will massively help your nascent membership efforts – and that’s what today’s session seeks to impart.
This session provides a brief overview of each step of the product development process, with membership-specific examples of each stage:
Setting goals
Brainstorming
Prioritization
Building a roadmap
Testing your ideas and designing an MVP
Conducting a retrospective

Video

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Slides

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To view speaker notes, click on the three-dot icon above.

Resources mentioned in this session:

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Adopting a product mindset
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| The Membership Guide
Jump to
section on building a roadmap
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Jump to
a 2019 Membership Puzzle Project webinar on roadmapping
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with real-life examples from Mediacités
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Developing membership objectives
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| The Membership Guide
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“Brainstorm-in-a-box” Toolkit
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| Membership Puzzle Project
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How the Daily Maverick tested its membership assumptions pre-launch
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| The Membership Guide
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How Scalawag made the growth case for events
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| The Membership Guide
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How The Narwhal adopted a test-and-learn mindset
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| The Membership Guide
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How Bridge Michigan tested its way to membership growth
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| The Membership Guide

Next session
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Improving and deepening the member experience
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