Most of what we hear about member retention is about renewals — what happens near the end of a membership year, when someone decides whether to keep paying dues. One of our longtime members has spent the past several years focused on the opposite end of the calendar: the first thirty days, before anyone's asked to renew anything at all.
She's run a small creamery's wholesale accounts for years and volunteers with the Membership & Outreach Committee, and the thing she does that most volunteers don't is simple: she calls new members. Not a welcome email, an actual phone call, usually within the first two weeks after someone joins. "Nobody signs up for a trade association and immediately knows what to do with it," she told us. "If the first thing that happens is silence, a lot of people just quietly never engage again. A five-minute call fixes that more often than people expect."
What the calls are actually for
She's not selling anything on these calls, and she's clear that's the point — she's not a staff member, and she's not trying to upsell a certification or a conference ticket. Mostly she asks what made the person join, whether they've found the committee or course catalog they were actually looking for, and whether anything about the portal or the directory was confusing. That last question turns up something useful more often than you'd think; a new member's confusion is often a sign the resource exists but isn't easy to find, which is feedback the committee can actually act on.
She started doing this after noticing, informally, that members who engaged with anything — a course, a committee, an event — in their first two months tended to stick around, and members who didn't tended to drift. She didn't have data to prove the pattern when she started; she just had a hunch from watching new-member lists for a few years. The calls became her way of nudging that first engagement to happen sooner rather than leaving it to chance.
Industry surveys of trade associations back up her hunch more than she probably realizes. Engagement in the first three months is consistently the strongest predictor of whether a first-year member renews at all, and members who don't find a reason to engage early are considerably more likely to lapse before their first renewal notice even arrives. Associations that run some kind of structured first-90-days outreach report meaningfully higher first-year retention than associations that don't — and a phone call from an actual member, not a staff account, tends to land better than another email ever could. She'd probably tell you she didn't need a survey to know that; she just watched it happen enough times to trust the pattern.
Why this is worth copying, not just admiring
You don't need a committee appointment to do a version of this. If you're active in a regional chapter or you know your area's newer members from a course cohort or a local meetup, a two-minute check-in costs you almost nothing and can be the difference between someone finding their footing in the association or quietly lapsing before their first renewal notice ever arrives.
It also doesn't have to be a phone call. A few members who've tried a version of her approach do it over text, or by introducing a new member to one other person at their first event instead of leaving them to find the room on their own. The mechanism matters less than the timing — early, personal, and not tied to a sales ask of any kind. What she'd tell you is that the specific gesture matters less than making sure somebody notices a new member exists before three months of silence convince that person nobody does.
If you'd like to volunteer for new-member outreach yourself, the Membership & Outreach Committee takes on volunteers a few times a year and will pair you with a short list of recent joiners in your region to start.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.