25 Mar Case Study: Building a Membership within a Local Club or Organization
ABOUT
Toastmasters is an international educational organization with clubs worldwide. Their purpose is to help its members improve their public speaking, communication, and leadership skills. Internationally the club boasts over 352,000 memberships in their 16,400 clubs across 141 countries. Though the organization has been in business for decades, they are now seemingly new to the online community.
GOALS
The primary goal was to increase overall local awareness and membership. Their international Instagram has about 16,100 followers and is slowly growing. Design Moves LLC recently got the opportunity to create an Instagram for the Greater 2004 Fort Lauderdale Club sector to increase awareness for this portion of the club.
Starting Instagram account: 0 Followers
Other groups and their Instagram followers include:
- Toastmasters Weston: 112
- Toastmasters FAU: 105
- Toastmasters FIU: 1,487
- Toastmasters Bilingual: 1,790
- Toastmasters Sanabis: 1,600
- Toastmasters Pembroke Pines: 107
- Toastmasters Columbia: 562
** This may or may not be an organic following from these particular pages
ACTION PLAN
The overall goal of the Social Media Efforts is to maintain the Facebook, Meetup account and grow the Instagram account. Taking a step back, clarity of messaging was the priority, meeting updates and then building a following was a latter portion of the effort.
Step 1 – Clarity
Making sure that all of the accounts have clear contact information when meetings are taking place, and what is the group all about.
Step 2 – Post + Remind
With the daily changes in everyone’s life, we need to make sure there are meeting reminders and any additional things happening such as contests, etc.
Content Curation
Post daily on updates to a club. Post frequently when and where meetings are being held.
Social Media Posting on Facebook and Instagram
Types of posts:
- Welcoming guests to visit and learn about what is Toastmasters
- Benefits of learning how to communicate
- Group Members and their accomplishments
- Inspirational Speeches
- Group general updates
- Meeting Reminders
- Post on occasion some from the official Toastmasters International page
With this content organization, we had quite a bit to post about throughout the week. Planning is crucial to every social media posting.
Step 3 – Explore, Discover, Acquire
By interacting with other pages, and locals we were able to build an online community that follows the organization’s pages as well as likes and comments on frequent posts.
Acquisition Goals
Additional Interactions
During meetings, we would conduct Instagram Lives as well as Facebook Lives to make the following know that we are an active group and interact more often.
OUTCOME
Instagram has grown about 1,300 organic Fort Lauderdale / Broward County Followers.
Facebook has grown 10% in following and %37 in interaction based on the video growth and spillover from the active Instagram acct.
Leads to members conversion.
Please note the objective is to bring people to the door. Whether membership can handle following up, that was not our job. Nurturing leads can lead to a whole other article.
- 3 Leads from Instagram
- 4 Leads from Meetup
- 3 Leads from Facebook / Facebook Events
Duration: est. 7 months
We have gotten about three new official members from these leads (non-word of mouth). One of them from which had won first place in the Area table topics contest.
Indirect Outcomes
Throughout these efforts in social media, it supports former members to rejoin as well as remind the ongoing members about the benefits of the group. At times we all need reminders as to why we do what we do.
This is a just the beginning, and we look forward to seeing the progress as this commences further, and the Toastmaster Page becomes a leader within the Toastmasters as well as the keyword “Fort Lauderdale” when many can stumble across what the page represents within its posts.
ONGOING
The future goal of this Instagram is to surpass all the other branches following. Eventually, the goal is to organically grow an audience that will catch up to the international account with a following of about 16,100.
The group will continue its growth through word-of-mouth, however, adding a digital component referral channel will undoubtedly contribute to its growth.