Revenue-boosting ideas that go beyond membership dues.

Don’t wait for your association’s revenue to go flat. Diversify your revenue streams now.

When you need to grow your association’s revenue, you can’t always simply raise the cost of membership dues. That can turn off members, leading to a drop in member recruitment and retention. 

So what can you do to maintain budgets and continue to provide members with great service – even throughout ups and downs in the economic cycle? Diversify! 

Here are four ways NetForum Enterprise association management software by Community Brands can help you add new revenue streams beyond membership dues: 

1. Fundraising
Many associations are turning to fundraising as part of their non-dues revenue-generating plan. NetForum Enterprise includes fundraising functionality to help you manage and engage your members as donors, analyze and score relationships, and increase development effectiveness. 

For example, using NetForum, you can do the following:

    • Manage donor data – You can manage donor data with a clear 360-degree view of campaigns, donors, and fundraising events
    • Monitor donor health – Industry-leading A-Score™ functionality within NetForum Enterprise offers engagement scoring capabilities that allows you to simplify the lifecycle of prospects to donors and lifetime donors with your own modeling. It also includes built-in analytics and the ability to easily create custom queries so you can build and view the reports you need for insights into your donor members
    • Target donor communications with precision – NetForum includes the ability to specify suggested donation ask amounts that are calculated based on a donor’s historical giving patterns.
    • Deliver a modern giving experience – NetForum allows you to process gifts like a modern fundraiser. For example: 
      • Allow members to set up monthly donations.  
      • Split recurring gifts across funds.  
      • Soft credit a member of a household so you can have combined family/couple giving totals on the household. 
      • Link a matching gift to the gift that generated the match. 
      • Personalize gift acknowledgement emails

    2. Certification and credentialing
    Your members look to your association for learning opportunities that allow them to fulfill industry continuing education requirements. At the same time, your members want to advance their careers, and they need the certifications and credentials to do so. Creating a certification and credentialing program can help you bring in revenue through certification and exam fees. 

    Keeping track of continuing education credits, credentials, and certifications can be a handful if you try to tackle it manually. NetForum Enterprise can help you streamline and automate your certifications processes and manage your credentialing program. NetForum Enterprise’s credentialing software, powered by Agilutions, is an essential part of any certification program, enabling staff to streamline processes and empower learners with greater visibility and participation in the certification process.

    NetForum Enterprise also integrates with Community Brands’ award-winning learning management systems, Crowd Wisdom and Freestone, to manage all aspects of a robust continuing education program.

    3.E-commerce
    Creating a familiar online store experience is a great way to drive revenue for your association. For example, by building an online store, you can offer members a convenient way to join, renew, register for events, and buy products. You can also sell products, including merchandise and publications, online

    With NetForum Enterprise e-commerce capabilities, your association can create a convenient and easy-to-manage online store experience. You can easily connect it with your inventory management and accounting tools to simplify all aspects of online sales. Plus, you can charge credit cards in real-time through a third-party payment processor, and automatically send batch transactions to your accounting software.

    4.Online career center
    Offering an online job board helps you increase non-dues revenue while attracting more members and improving member retention. Transforming your organization into “the” career resource for your industry or profession is invaluable for your members and prospects who are looking for their next great job. Plus, your member base represents a pool of valuable, skilled candidates for recruiters. Employers will pay to advertise job openings on your association’s job board. And, your job board can help your association make connections with companies that might be good prospects for sponsorships and advertising packages.

    YM Careers and NetForum Enterprise association management system (AMS) are both part of Community Brands’ integrated software suite for associations, and that means they work better together. YM Careers ensures associations have visibility and recruitment access to non-members who are using the board – tracking their activity and writing it back to their record within the AMS, all to drive membership and increase revenue. YM Careers now offers visibility and recruitment access to non-members directly through NetForum Enterprise AMS to increase member enrollment and, ultimately, revenue.  

    Learn more
    Ready to drive new revenue for your association? With the right technology, you can. Explore NetForum Enterprise