Leveraging AI & Automation to Improve Member Engagement
Due to the hyperpersonalized, AI-driven platforms people use in their daily lives, the gap between members’ expectations and their actual experiences with associations is widening. Members are looking for tailored communications, quick responses to their requests, and dynamic interfaces that cater to their needs and interests—whether they are navigating your online portal or attending your annual trade show or conference.
As a membership association, this means your challenge is no longer just providing valuable resources and opportunities in a static association website, but delivering them in a seamless digital format that anticipates members’ needs and motivates them to engage with your events or online community.
In this guide, we’ll explore how your organization can use AI and intelligent automation, combined with data from your association management solution, to cultivate a digital presence that exceeds expectations.
Identify pain points and AI-powered solutions.
To get started, audit your current website, member portal, and any other platforms you use to engage your membership base. Pinpoint opportunities to modernize the website’s interface and functionality by incorporating automation or AI tools. The goal is to determine the best way to create a more personalized, user-centered experience, whether that means launching a full website redesign or making small tweaks.
Here are some common pain points that AI or automation can solve:
- Information density that makes it difficult to find high-value resources: Use AI-powered semantic search rather than rigid keyword search functionality to better understand the searcher’s intent and surface relevant resources. For example, during an event, members might rely on these AI-powered tools to find trade show floor plans, speaker bios, or session schedules.
- Disjointed onboarding: Set up automated reminders or updates triggered by specific behaviors (e.g., members who registered for an event receive automated reminders leading up to the event date).
- Slow event check-in: Consider leveraging predictive analytics based on historical attendee data to forecast peak arrival times, helping your event managers optimize staff allocation and minimize wait times at check-in.
- Low event engagement: Provide AI-driven, personalized recommendations within your conference app or member portal to suggest relevant sessions, exhibitors, and networking events based on the member’s interests and past behavior.
- Content bottlenecks: Speed up content creation by using AI to generate blog outlines, summaries, meta descriptions, and social media snippets for promoting content on other platforms.
Reference your organization’s CMS and website performance data to identify pain points that are specific to your members and association. For example, if a report doesn’t garner much engagement despite months of heavy promotion, it may be too difficult to find. Fonteva’s guide to member engagement also recommends reaching out to members via surveys, in-person or virtual meetings, focus groups, or listening tours (best for multi-chapter organizations).
Elevate experiences with web-based personalization.
A member’s web experience should feel like a curated resource hub, not a frustrating scavenger hunt. By tailoring the on-site user experience (UX) to specific member roles, career stages, or interests, your association can ensure that the most relevant resources are always front and center.
Focus on optimizing the following core areas of your member portal to make the biggest impact on member engagement:
- Homepage: Create AI-driven, dynamic content blocks that swap out generic newsfeeds and recent blogs for personalized content based on information about the member. For example, recommend upcoming events in their area or resources to support their new leadership role.
- Member dashboard: Incorporate customized, automated elements to encourage member engagement. For example, new members might see an onboarding progress bar or checklist. Or, you might include reminders to register for a webinar series or an upcoming conference they showed interest in.
- Event microsites or landing pages: Personalize the pre-event journey before attendees register by using dynamic content to alter what they see based on registration history or membership status. For example, show non-members a discounted package deal that includes both membership and event registration, and give returning attendees a fast-track checkout experience with pre-filled details. You can also recommend session tracks, keynote speakers, or exhibitor lists that align with their professional goals or interests to increase event engagement.
- Education hub: Use AI to map out tailored learning pathways that automatically suggest specific courses, recorded sessions from past events, or micro-credentials to support the member’s career goals.
- Community boards: Surface threads with the most interactions or those related to the member’s interests and goals using automatically assigned smart tags.
- Support center: Use a conversational AI agent to respond to member questions and requests instantly. Choose a tool that can be trained on your association’s knowledge base and policies, allowing it to provide 24/7 customer support for common inquiries, like questions about event registration or trade show badge pick-up times, with limited staff intervention.
When making these changes, remember to incorporate user testing (have staff or members test out the site to ensure it is functional and intuitive) and prioritize digital accessibility. Fíonta recommends following the most up-to-date WCAG guidelines and incorporating accessibility basics, such as alternative text for images, video captions, optimized color contrast between text and backgrounds, and layouts that support keyboard navigation and screen readers.
Advance the member journey via automated interventions.
AI and automation are helpful tools that can free up hours of your team’s time, whether you are using AI to streamline event planning or to craft targeted communications. However, it should never feel robotic or impersonal. Instead, it should function as an invisible assistance built directly into your website.
This ensures members continue advancing in their journeys rather than stalling when they get confused, overwhelmed, or generally unsure about what to do next. For example, set up an automated email that is triggered if a member doesn’t return to a certification course in 14 days. Some other ways to promote deeper engagement using automation include:
- Abandoned cart or registration reminders that deploy when a member begins but does not complete conference registration.
- Webinar follow-up emails featuring related resources or discounts on a relevant course that dives deeper into the topic.
- Post-event communications requesting feedback that launch immediately after the event concludes.
- A job board digest summarizing new listings that align with what the member is looking for.
- Nudges to upgrade based on the member’s behaviors (e.g., “We noticed you attended several webinars about using AI in our industry—want to upgrade your membership to access our comprehensive AI course?”).
Future-proof your digital strategy.
Technology, including automation and AI, will continue to evolve. By laying strong foundations and limiting technical debt now, your association will be able to easily scale up and implement future iterations of today’s tools. Plus, proactively incorporating new tech into your operations will help you remain relevant in the competitive professional landscape.
AI and automation help you maintain timely, personalized communications as your organization grows—this is crucial for addressing late-night questions or making a positive first impression as you welcome new members. AI-powered data analysis tools can track changes in preferences and behaviors as your membership base grows, allowing you to adjust your strategies and make data-driven decisions.
You can also use AI to stay ahead of changing member preferences or gaps in your offerings. Leverage tools that will notify you if members are searching for or discussing topics you don’t yet have resources for. For example, as more younger members enter your association, AI tools might flag a sudden uptick in community board searches for early-career mentorship or networking-focused events. Spotting this trend early allows you to proactively develop a targeted new webinar series or a dedicated trade show track tailored to their interests.
Integrating AI and automation isn’t about replacing the personal touch of an association. Instead, your focus should be on amplifying those personal elements by automating time-consuming manual work, giving staff more opportunities for personal interactions, and slowly transitioning generic interfaces into tailored experiences. By removing friction and adding personalized value to digital interactions, your association can focus on its core mission of fostering community and professional excellence.
Jordan Berger, VP, Delivery
Jordan Berger, VP, Delivery at Fíonta, is a 14x Salesforce Certified professional specializing in digital transformation for nonprofits, foundations, and associations. His certifications span Nonprofit Cloud Consultant, Data Architect, and beyond.
At Fíonta, Jordan oversees the delivery of complex Salesforce implementations, from Nonprofit Cloud migrations to large-scale data modeling, integration, and migration strategy, ensuring each project is built for long-term success.
Before moving into consulting, Jordan worked directly in the nonprofit sector, giving him a firsthand understanding of the operational and fundraising challenges these organizations face. He has served on the Salesforce.org Partner Advisory Board, helped author the Nonprofit Cloud Consultant (NPC) certification exam, and participates in multiple Salesforce Nonprofit Partner Design Programs, shaping the tools and standards that the broader ecosystem relies on.