Successful Membership Site Transition: Ensuring Buy-In from Your Team and Membership

About This Episode

In this episode, we talk about the value of creating a change management plan throughout the process of your association's next big tech transition (eg. membership site, member portal, website, etc.). It will make for a smoother development process and launch, where your stakeholders, staff and members can embrace the change rather than resist or reject it.

About Our Guest

Betsy Bond has been the president and founder of Bonding Change (a change management consulting firm) for the past 18 years and a change management instructor at the prestigious Prosci, the global leader of change management solutions.

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Get your copy of the Member-Centric User Experience Checklist & Worksheet that we put together from recommendations made by Elizabeth during this episode.

Full List of Questions We Asked Betsy

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Change management is about getting people prepared for a change that is to come. It’s not about the technology so much, it’s about all the people who will be involved in the change, the staff, the users, the senior leaders.

We are all more or less familiar with project management, but where does change management come in?

When do we start the change management process, and when does it end?

In a typical project that we take on, there is a technical component and a people component. Our developers take care of the technical. On the people side, there is the marketing team (trying to recruit new members), the membership team (trying to keep members happy), and the financial team (who has to collect financial data), how would you get all teams involved?

How would you go about performing a stakeholder analysis?

At which point in the project would you bring the stakeholders into to the discussion about the project?

If we start with high-level stakeholders, is it possible that relevant information will be missed that the high-level group doesn’t have?

How do change management and agile design work together?

How do we overcome the adage that people are resistant to change?

How do we overcome the hurdle of the people who are most resistant to the change?

Do you have any advice to roll out a membership site to the membership? Which members do you involve in the process?

Let’s talk about improving the user experience for new members: do you have any advice for how to onboard members to new features in the membership site? 

What issues do you see come up with membership sites and member portals?

Let’s talk about training and providing on-demand support in your technology.

Sometimes we see that an association’s membership team will not have control of the membership site, or a marketing team that does not have control of the website — how would you resolve this conflict to get everyone’s voice heard?

What are the best road mapping or change management tools to use for a project?

Would you encourage annual surveys? What is the best way to design a survey?

How long does it take for members to get used to a new portal?

What is your biggest takeaway for our audience?

Can you share a personal habit that has contributed the most to your success?

Get Started

Get a headstart on planning out the phases of the next big change at your association with our downloadable Change Management Planner & Worksheet.

Special acknowledgement to our guests for providing powerful insights into membership management. 

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