Rebuilding Member Trust and Engagement with Higher Logic Thrive

This case study is a summary of the customer story ASQ shared at Super Forum 2024.

ASQ’s Component Relations Specialist, Monica Rynders, shared some of the lessons learned from their previous community on Small Worlds Lab community platform:

1. The initial community design wasn’t vetted by members or user experience (UX) professionals and was confusing to navigate and maintain.

2. There wasn’t a coordinated engagement or moderation strategy, nor were there dedicated staff owning those efforts or training for volunteers or community leaders.

3. Members and the staff who worked closely with members weren’t involved with planning and implementing the community. Because they weren’t looped in on the first community effort, there wasn’t enough understanding of who the members were and how to meet their needs.

4. The launch of the community wasn’t adequately marketed. It was announced one month before launch and members didn’t understand why it was happening. Without that “why,” members didn’t recognize the value of logging in and exploring the community.

5. In the initial community, users were not validated which unfortunately lead to spam accounts and non-member consultants promoting their businesses, which lead to members losing trust in the community.

ASQ worked with Higher Logic Design Services to create a better community design and user experience (UX) for members. They wanted the new community platform, myASQ, to clearly convey everything available to members while remaining simple and easy to navigate.

The Design Services team incorporated attractive, interactive elements and space for strong messaging above the fold. They created a ‘one-stop-shop’ user dashboard featuring important and commonly accessed links. They also helped ASQ created a custom experience for member leaders to access the resources, training, and information they need.

ASQ is so happy with how the community turned out, they’re now featured in our Higher Logic Thrive Community Lookbook!

As they planned their new community, ASQ committed to prioritizing member involvement in community planning through membership services surveys and a task force that vetted the community plan and design.

In preparing to launch, and since launching their new community, ASQ made sure to spread the word about the new community by sharing launch announcements and updates on social media, in notifications, and at events. They also selected a group of members to act as platform champions, and they educate and empower their member leaders through the community using an easy-to-edit FAQ and maintaining orientation videos in the community library.

Now that it’s live, the community has also helped ASQ improve staff efficiency for ongoing engagement strategies. They use Higher Logic Thrive’s built-in automation rule functionality to help encourage members to participate and highlight relevant content for each specific member segment. They can easily evaluate the performance of these automation rules by reviewing conversion rates to see if they’re working – and improving them if they’re not.

While ASQ previously had trouble getting members to buy into the community enough to complete their profile information, thus limiting insights the organization could gain about member interest, they can now easily run a report that helps them encourage profile completion. “I love the profile-completeness reporting in Higher Logic Thrive,” said Taylor Lovas, ASQ’s Community Engagement Specialist. “There’s a report where I can see exactly who filled out their profile and what they filled out – their picture, their bio, everything! It makes it really easy to pull that information and we ran a successful program completion challenge to encourage members to fill out their profile information.”

“In the last platform, members and staff were having a hard time finding our content. In Higher Logic Thrive, we’ve set up tags for commonly searched keywords and phrases. For example, we tag our Tip Tuesday content, which we learned from Higher Logic’s community engagement best practices, and that members love,” said Taylor.

“And the search functionality in the community is amazing. It’s really helpful for both members and staff. Like our marketing team, who are looking for content to highlight on our other channels, can now easily find things in the platform, including quotes from members about why they love joining ASQ. And we have links to relevant or commonly clicked content now visible in the sidebar.”

The Small World Labs community platform ASQ was using previously had very limited reporting – for example, two key data points (unique logins and digest open rate) weren’t measurable. In contrast, Higher Logic Thrive Platform now allows them to track a variety of engagement metrics, which gives them way to measure the success of their community engagement strategies and share robust performance data with their Board of Directors.

Their community dashboard also tells ASQ, on average, how many communities someone belongs to – data they wanted to track before that was hard, if not impossible, for them to pull in the past.

Another challenge ASQ addresses with their community is highlighting members who are subject matter experts. Every month, ASQ uses the community slideshow widget to do a member spotlight, showcasing a member who goes above-and-beyond. They share a blog post about them, mention them in the e-newsletter, apply a special ribbon to their community profile, and highlight them in their app. Members love the recognition and this helps ASQ not only celebrate dedicated members, but also and raise awareness of experts within the community.

ASQ also uses badges and ribbons in the community to highlight and celebrate members’ status within the community. “When members see those Senior member and Fellow member status ribbons on a member’s account who’s replying to a discussion or something, they’re going ‘oh, this person really knows what they’re talking about.’ And they know they’ve been vetted by ASQ. That helps reinforce trust in the community platform and value-added for members,” said Taylor.

Additionally, ASQ is planning to set up an expert directory, which will allow members to self-serve when it comes to identifying and connecting with subject matter experts and speakers.

Higher Logic Thrive’s features and add-ons make it easy for associations to build out their initiatives and add valuable capabilities at any time. ASQ is starting to use some of these to  make the member experience even better:

Volunteer Management

“We’re really excited for the Volunteer Manager module because we’ve always relied on our sections in their peer-to-peer meetings to get new volunteers and members, and that means sometimes we’re just recycling volunteers, and using the same people over and over. The volunteer module will help us open up a volunteer pool and get new ideas and fresh perspectives,” said Taylor.

Mentor Matching

Taylor shared: “We had a very manual mentor matching committee prior to getting Higher Logic Thrive. The Mentor Match module is going to help us give mentors and mentees a lot more independence. Connections are going to be more organic and the committee won’t have to do as much work.”

Jobs

ASQ is moving their Career Center to Higher Logic Thrive Jobs (included in Higher Logic Thrive Community), which will allow them to have job opportunities flow into their community news feeds and further boost the curated content members can access in the community.

With over 40,000 members that include quality engineers, auditors, inspectors, and statisticians, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) provides enhanced expertise, professional networks, tools, and solutions to help members advance their products, services, and industries. They provide professional training, certifications, and knowledge to members from more than 130 countries. Member-led communities help members connect with other quality professionals and practitioners, advance their knowledge and careers, and grow as thought leaders.