The Real First Step to Increasing ERG Engagement

All right, new train of thought. I get the question a lot: “How do we improve our…?” Insert the thing—oftentimes it’s either grow membership or increase engagement. Maybe segment engagement, like increasing engagement for our hourly folks, or for our engineering team—whatever it might be.

But I get this form of the question a lot.

And while I can give some general tips around increasing engagement that I’ve seen work, there is a fundamental truth that needs to be understood in order for you to actually increase any of this:

You have to know where you’re currently standing.

Think about it like this:

If you were to call me right now and say, “Maceo, how do I get to the Detroit River Walk?” The most important thing for me is knowing where you’re currently at to give you instructions.

Now, I can give general tips or use significant landmarks to help guide someone in general. But it just goes so much further when we have clarity on where we are—to get clear directions on how to get where we want to go.

A lot of us don’t have this data.

Now, I talk about data a lot. But this time, I’m coming at it from a different angle. One of the biggest components in increasing your engagement is giving your members what they want. And in order for you to know what they want—you have to ask them.

Yes, I’m talking about a survey.

But just know, a lot of folks do surveys extremely, extremely wrong. From the way that they promote the survey, to the specific questions they ask, we could do a lot better.

That said, I have a two-part series on better ERG surveys on The ERG Movement’s YouTube, and I just released Part One this week.

Part One is me talking about how to actually get survey responses using the DM campaign—something that I like to say I coined, but let’s be honest, it’s a widely known concept in the marketing space (warm outbound).

This is going to drastically increase the percentage of your members who respond to your surveys.

Check out the video to learn how you can conduct a DM campaign for your ERG program, and the specific message that you can send your members to get them to respond. Again—this is actually one of my best tricks that I do with companies through our Fractional ERG Programming Manager service.

You need to know what members want—which means asking them the right questions the right way. Part Two of this video series will explore what questions you need to ask on a DM campaign survey and will be released sometime in July.

In the meantime, enjoy.

The ERG Homegirl ✌🏿

P.S. Can I just say—Surveys should be more that about asking members to rate your ERG program. You need to know specifically why they’re there and what they want. That’s just a little bit of a hint on what we’ll discuss in Part Two.