A membership enhancement project which significantly increased membership & revenue
The British Parking Association
The British Parking Association is a not for profit organisation, representing, promoting and influencing the parking and traffic management profession throughout the UK and Europe. Our membership of more than 700 organisations and individuals includes local authorities, car park operators, retail parks, healthcare facilities, universities, railway stations, technology providers, trainers and consultants. We work with our partners to support growth for our communities, improve compliance by those managing and using parking facilities, and encourage fairness to achieve our vision of excellence in parking for all. Any surplus income arising from our work is reinvested back into activities to support our members or put into a reserve fund to ensure we can continue to raise standards and encourage professionalism. Our 5-year strategy outlines our core objectives: • Putting the consumer at the heart of our thinking • Developing our membership and delivering better value • Informing and influencing Government • Building a consensus with all stakeholders • Promoting innovation, technology and sustainability • Making parking a recognised profession
National
West Sussex,
GB
www.britishparking.co.uk
Success achieved
The introduction of Account Managers and the creation of a Membership Enhancement Workplan has resulted in the most significant increases in membership numbers – organisations and individuals – and revenue figures - membership and sponsorship – in the Association’s 48-year history- Website
- https://www.britishparking.co.uk
- Project dates
- September 2017 – October 2018
Project team
- Caron Fassetta Head of Membership and Information Management
- Alison Tooze Membership Development Manager
- Yasmin Jefferies Membership Development Manager
- Sarah Feeley Professional Development Manager
- Rebecca Harper Membership and Events Officer
- Aimee Bates Systems Lead
- Candice Henderson Membership Engagement Officer
- Linda Page Membership Services Co-Ordinator
- Michelle Boshoff Membership Team Co-Ordinator
Tools & Systems
- Account manager direct communications – promoting peer-to-peer collaboration on key issues and sharing intelligence – Click Dimensions and Outlook
- Social media – highlighting news stories, generating conversations, promoting events and new member benefits – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
- Meetings – interest groups supported by Account Managers with Government & stakeholders recognizing their significance and in regular attendance – throughout the UK including Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales with their own dedicated country groups
- Events – more focused program development has resulted in unprecedented attendance at all our major events. Top-class keynote speakers have appeared alongside professional facilitators
- Website – a full website redesign to enhance its value and appearance, with improved events module and webinar capabilities – Senior
- Magazine – a full design refresh for 2018 with additional Account Manager insight has enabled much greater member led content and the launching of largescale feature campaigns such as: Watch this space – How local authorities are tackling Blue Badge abuse; Hiding in plain sight – The pervasive problem of persistent evaders; Time to halt the hate – How do we change people’s attitude towards parking professionals?
- E-news – with input from Account Managers these fortnightly newsletters have gone from strength to strength resulting in an increase in open rates and longer dwell time
- Incentives – we have applied more incentives and offer better value-for-money to prospective membership, this especially engaged the local authorities and our emerging market segments such as car manufacturers and start up tech firms
Introduction
The BPA had seen corporate membership numbers stagnate for some years. Most recently, it had seen a slight decline in the overall number of organisations joining, and a worrying increase in those leaving. Following a large-scale organisational restructure, we were able to more clearly define the roles of those in the membership team, many of which were new to the association.
The first significant initiative launched by the team was the introduction of Account Managers at the start of 2017. Each of the four Account Managers has responsibility for one or more membership sectors, such as local authorities, private parking operators, the technology sector and so on. This initiative has revolutionised engagement with members. Over the course of the first six months of intense membership engagement, we were able to gather rich data about how these organisations work, what they are interested in and the support they needed from us.
This enabled us to embark on a Membership Enhancement Workplan Project that commenced in September 2017.
Discovery
The primary research came from our Account Manager initiative. By directly contacting every one of our corporate members we were able to start a proper conversation about what support they needed from us to improve their delivery of parking management services. They said, and we did.
We asked them to tell us what life was like for them, and they told us. By giving them our full attention, with a dedicated point of contact, we were able to understand how we could translate that into an improved membership organisation that members would relate to and therefore engage with. From that we developed a Membership Enhancement Workplan – closely aligned with our organisational values and strategic objectives - which grew into a campaign, and a philosophy. We needed to review, then do, see what worked, then renew our energies to do it all again but with better results.
This exercise extended to our events management, with the philosophy that we wouldn’t do anything differently until we’d reviewed every one of our 70+ meetings and events across our packed annual calendar. We then worked to ensure that we made improvements across the board, working hard to make these opportunities work for our members, as networking and face-to-face meetings were rated so highly on their list of key membership benefits.
Fashion' show: uniforms worn by parking officers through the ages
We set out to shake off any hint of a stuffy image replacing it with a more accessible, even playful image, like swapping business dress at major events for branded polo shirts, which made the team more easily identifiable, visible and approachable. We also organised a ‘fashion show' at our flagship exhibition, showing uniforms worn by parking officers through the ages, which staff enthusiastically took part in. This was hailed as one of the highlights of the show and really did convey our sense of fun and enthusiasm.
To get buy in from our Council of Representatives, who also have an Account Manager, we reached out to them to be extended members of the membership team. This has worked exceptionally well, as they have embraced the chance to attend more meetings and events as Association Ambassadors. We have influenced their three annual meetings by developing strong agendas, encouraging the Council of 40 people to work more as a team, with professional facilitators and inspiring venues.
Objectives
The Membership Enhancement Project focuses on two main objectives:
- Proactive membership recruitment
- Improved membership retention
Several key workstreams sit under these main objectives.
1. Proactive membership recruitment:
- Profile raising
- Campaigning and lobbying
- Increased visibility
- Promotion of key benefits
- Simplified joining process
- Affiliated sector relationship building
- Sustained improvements in event attendance
2. Improved membership retention:
- Increased member satisfaction
- Community building and sense of belonging
- Continual improvements in member services
- Parking management tool kit/guidance
- Creation of professional development framework
- Increased networking opportunities
- Knowledge sharing
- Careers hub and jobs board
- Elections
- Mentoring programme
Timeline
We set a 12-month timeline on the Membership Enhancement Workplan from September 2017. Key dates across that period included five additional GDPR seminars, the first Parking Wales Conference and the inaugural Approved Operator Scheme Conference. All seven of these major events ran across an eight-week period.
We also introduced the enhanced benefits package for individual membership, which was the first time this arm of membership had been given any real attention.
Every workstream identified for the Membership Enhancement Project was reviewed and reported on at our Professional Development and Standards Board meetings at three times across the year. This service board is the one responsible for the operations and remit of the membership team.
Activities
We’ve seen an accelerated rate of change across the entire transport infrastructure. Parking has become the cornerstone service within that shifting landscape as government targets get tighter in bringing about a wholesale change in how we use energy for transport.
The BPA has responded. We have capitalised on this opportunity and our fast-growing community is testimony to how we have dramatically enhanced our membership offering.
Making engagement our focus, holding regular conversations with members and keeping them involved is now second nature. Members have responded extremely positively, with a huge upsurge in unsolicited contact and two- way dialogue.
The rate of technological change poses huge challenges for our 300 public sector members and through our engagement initiative the Association has further created platforms and opportunities to enable the public and private sectors to find partnership solutions in a more collaborative environment.
We’ve built relationships with more national and local authorities, engaging with them to explain what membership of the BPA can do to help them deliver improved public services. It’s worked, and while we’ve seen a phenomenal increase in our individual membership and a huge jump in corporate numbers, we’ve also seen the biggest rise in those joining from the public sector this last year as a result if our efforts.
More than ever, we are enabling better and more member-to-member interactions and proactively sharing knowledge and support. Member meetings have seen a marked increase in attendance. Social media corporate channels are reaching a much wider audience with c24,000 people in one team member’s following. We’ve seen extraordinary improvements in sponsorship and our new webinar program. Our flagship events attracted the highest levels of participation ever seen. A record number of candidates put themselves forward for Council positions and elected members are adopting a much more ambassadorial role.
Flyers at the BPA Annual Conference
It was essential we understood how we were perceived if we wanted to better engage with our members. Internally we set up a team of people, from the public affairs and membership teams with representatives from all key departments. A review of the language we use to describe ourselves showed that we were projecting an [inaccurate] image; that we were somewhat behind the times, possibly seen as stuffy and aloof: the opposite of who we really are - a modern, vibrant, innovative and inclusive membership association. It was within our power to change this, so we set about work to redefine our image.
For the membership team, we made the above work our day-to-day. We used spread sheets to capture the unique and distinct touch points with each and every member as this was the only way we could get a single view of our membership. Weekly huddles, extended team meetings and the occasional away day has meant each person within the team, with specialist and distinct skills and experiences, was kept up to speed with all work-streams and projects within our membership services.
Innovation
We turned the introduction of GDPR into a hugely important member benefit. No one knew at the very start of the year how the new regulations would affect the parking sector as we prepared to have an onslaught of motorists disputing the legality of the issuing of a parking ticket.
Through better engagement with members we were in tune with these challenges and picked up on their concerns. In response, we commissioned our legal team at BPA Lawline to further develop the relationship with the ICO so that they understood why the parking sector had some unique issues with the new regulations and the potential it had to cause our members problems. The ICO now has a specialist who can support the parking sector.
We organised five large-scale membership workshops around the UK. Free to attend events were fully booked within days. Information packs were created to support the content of the workshops, as was a film to allow ongoing access to these educational workshops via our website. This was all delivered in the same six-week period that we’d introduced two more specialized conferences to the calendar in response to member feedback.
Specifically, around Individual Membership, we made it very easy to see what great value for money they were getting for a limited investment. With the introduction of 100s of e-learning animated films as part of the membership package, we decided to focus on promoting the benefits of having access to these fantastic professional development tools bundling a year’s membership into the deal.
This initiative has seen our corporate members take up the offer and opportunity to allow their staff access to these Continued Professional Development learning resources, cheaper than they could provide themselves, with Individual Membership to the BPA being an additional bonus.
Marketing
We started with the basics, producing marketing collateral setting out what our membership benefits are. We drilled down further to segment those benefits so that each of our diverse membership groups could clearly understand, and therefore better identify with, and access, the benefits most relevant to them. Such a fundamental exercise was crucial to ensuring we were able to clearly articulate our offering.
As part of this enhancement project work, we reviewed every piece of collateral, every communication, every touch point and customer journey, the joining process, website content, fortnightly e-newsletter, monthly magazine, bulk emails as well as individual emails being sent during the membership renewal process. We reviewed every way that we communicate with our members and rewrote or refreshed where it was deemed necessary or appropriate.
Challenges
The main challenge we faced as a team was that most of us were still relatively new to the parking sector, which is so much more complex than anyone outside the industry could ever imagine. Additionally, we were bringing about so much organisational change in the way that we did things and the processes that underpinned all of our activities. The way we overcame this was through careful and detailed planning, strong creative drive and a fearless attitude to change, if it brought about an improved outcome. The Membership Enhancement Workplan gave us clarity, focus and direction, confident in the knowledge that we were doing what our members had asked us to do.
Achievements
We have achieved almost all the key workstreams under our objectives to a large extent:
- Overall membership number increase – corporate and individual membership bands
- Members from new segments – energy and automotive
- We have driven or influenced reviews of several key legislative and policy changes
- Increased interaction with members
- Greatly improved communication and reach to different audiences
- Majority of applications coming in online
- Significant new members from affiliated sectors
- Event attendance figures up & continuing to rise for most meetings and events
- Improved retention rates - 25% less leavers in 17/18 compared to 16/17
- Increase in member to member interaction and participation – highest numbers at our meetings and events
- New membership initiatives coming on board regularly – for instance, mentoring
- Creation of professional development framework
- Increased networking opportunities
- Increased member to member knowledge sharing
- Great increase in candidates for council and new governance video to demonstrate the value of participation
- The only work-streams not achieved so far are
- Mentoring program, pilot ready to launch in Jan 2019
- Jobs board, coming in 2019 post CRM go live
Targets & Statistics
Despite sector mergers and continuing budgetary pressures we’ve seen a 7% increase in our corporate membership numbers. This is a huge increase compared to last year which was a 1% increase. We believe this demonstrates how much more valued BPA membership is following our engagement work.
Our Account Management activities have also enabled us to identify and increase the number of touch points with our corporate membership organisations. In August 2017 we made 157 unique/distinct contacts by email, phone or face-to-face. In September 2017 it was 412. In August this year we made 832 unique/distinct contacts with September reaching 1119.
We’ve seen the emergence of new market segments too e.g. the energy and automotive sectors. Uber and E.ON are two of the big household names who’ve most recently joined membership and others, such as Gatwick Airport, now see the value of joining our community.
Significant Membership Stats:
- 33% more organisations joined in 17/18 compared to 16/17
- 25% fewer organisations left in 17/18 compared to 16/17
- 575% increase in Individual Membership in this calendar year alone
- 17/18 saw us double our number of new local authority members from that of 16/17
Website Visitors:
- Sept 2016 18,335 rising to Aug 2017 19,475
- Sept 2017 19,588 rising to Aug 2018 22,478
Membership Team LinkedIn:
- Sept 2017 0 Followers
- Aug 2018 c24,000 and growing
Financials
Prudent management of budgets has meant we’ve been able to deliver incrementally better membership services and events as part of the Membership Enhancement Project without any additional funding over and above the previously agreed budgets for Membership and Information Management.
The only work-stream that has required additional funding is the new CRM project. Work started last year and is currently in the early part of the implementation phase, due to go live next May.
We’ve been able to deliver so much more by making significant changes to our business processes, allowing us more time to review our offering and develop more innovation and creative solutions that further improve membership services.
The top line results speak for themselves as both sponsorship and membership revenue variances have increased significantly from 2015/16 to 2017/18.
As a not for profit organisation, all surplus revenue received is reinvested in member events and other benefits, further enhancing the experience of our members and providing them with best value for money.
What would we do differently?
I’m not sure that there is anything that we would do particularly differently. We have seen the most incredible results from the work that we have done, having established at the outset that we had accurately identified what we needed to do differently and how our work would bring additional value to members.
Every step of this 12-month journey as been a learning curve. While we might make tweaks for the coming year, the work-plan will essentially evolve into version 2 of the campaign work as we face a new set of challenges, and the launch of our new CRM system.
Advice
I would start any project of this nature, and magnitude, by ensuring you have a strong team dynamic. Every member of the team was made to feel empowered to make suggestions and be creative in their approach to problem solving. If you can clear the path to creativity by making sure your processes are robust and fit for purpose, no one can then say they don’t have the capacity to think differently about a challenge or develop ideas for bringing about a change for the better.
With space to breath, you will then find more time to be creative and generate innovative ways to improve your member experience. You will also be in a much stronger position to cope when you have the unexpected thrown at you, which will always happen.
You also need to have fun. If you don’t enjoy working in a membership association, helping organisations and people do what they do but better, then you won’t be doing as good a job as the person or team who do enjoy it.
Feedback & Testimonials
“The events they organise simply cannot be missed. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the quality of thought and engagement with policy makers improve markedly. The most recent focus on “positive parking” is one we very much applaud and support.”
“Past months have shown that there’s a feeling of ‘belonging’ to an excellent organisation that is outward looking and forward thinking amongst what is now an enthused membership. Retention rate is always an issue for any membership organisation especially with pressures faced by significant fiscal challenges. However, the BPA has met this challenge head on and delivered positive results. The members are engaged and are interacting with their account managers which benefits the sector.”
“Well done to the BPA for putting together this FREE workshop for members. It was an excellent workshop delivered by professionals who clearly knew what they were talking about.”
“We are also kept up to date with all news and potential legislative changes through the informative and succinct monthly Parking News and the autumn Annual Conference is always scripted towards both current issues on those on the horizon for the Parking Industry. We would recommend the BPA to any new Parking enterprise as the right organisation to work with.”
“Another excellent training workshop from the BPA. Straight to the point, packed full of great advice and FREE. That's what a membership organisation should be all about. Keep them coming.”
“We will be renewing our membership and it’s always good to know we have you on hand to help when we need it.”
“Of course, we will stay with the BPA for the foreseeable future, your help with some of my problems has been invaluable and I really appreciate.”
“Yes, we are very much looking forward to continuing our membership with the BPA for 2018/19.”
“The free waiting bays in an off-street car park had a great response, I was extremely pleased with the feedback. Very helpful.”
“Thanks for sending the question around for me, I have had some good responses so far which is great.” “Thanks for helping me out with this. I have had a few really useful responses.”
“We have received some interesting feedback with regards to the questions posted to members.”
Wider impact
The impact has been two-fold. Internally we are working smarter, more efficiently, with improved focus and direction. Externally, we are now more visible to our members than at any other time in recent history. We are taking responsibility for the delivery of improved member benefits which has resulted in our members feeling heard, valued and involved.
The Membership Enhancement Project gave us clarity around each element of what members said was of most importance to them. Improved communication, support in developing better services, increased knowledge sharing and networking opportunities, the provision of best practice guidance and news of innovations in their specific sectors and industry has all come about because of our targeted campaign.
By continuing to reinvest all surplus from these considerable successes, we can demonstrate continual improvement in everything we do, while helping our members better understand and maximise (across their internal operations) the value membership brings.