What two years of managing communications for a membership network taught me about engagement, onboarding, and measuring what matters.
For nearly two years, I worked on communications for a member-led network of organisations in the social impact space.
My work covered everything from newsletters and event campaigns to onboarding journeys, member resources, research launches, and email automation.
There was always something happening.
A new programme to announce. An event to promote. A report to launch. A member story to share. An opportunity that needed to reach the right people.
And like most communications professionals, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get people to open, click, register, and participate.
Over time, though, another question started coming up.
Were we getting better at communicating, or were we actually helping people experience the value of being part of a community?
It’s a distinction I’ve been thinking about ever since.
First, some numbers
Here’s a snapshot of the communications work and programme activity during my time with the network.
| The numbers | What they represent |
|---|---|
| 165 | Sent-email records in the communications archive spanning September 2024–September 2026 |
| 7 | Emails developed for the redesigned member onboarding journey |
| 2 | Separate newsletter approaches for public subscribers and members |
| 69% | Increase in registrations for one event, from 13 to 22, following a targeted promotional push |
| 3-5 | Additional event attendees reported through WhatsApp reminders |
| 2 per week | Our planned maximum email frequency |
These numbers tell different parts of the story. Some measure work delivered, while others capture participation. The seven-email onboarding journey, for example, was designed and documented, with rollout pending approval. It wasn’t a completed engagement experiment.
And that matters because activity and impact aren’t interchangeable.
1. We had plenty to communicate. That was part of the challenge.
The network brought together organisations working across different countries, with access to mentoring, peer learning, research, convenings, and practical resources.
There was a lot of value in the membership offering.
Communicating it was another matter.
Each programme had its own timeline. Events needed registrations. Reports needed visibility. Members needed reminders about opportunities available to them.
At one point, our communications calendar included regular event announcements, research updates, funding opportunities, blog content, and newsletters.
We worked with a guideline of no more than two emails per week.
That sounds like a small operational decision.
In practice, it meant making editorial choices every week.
Did this deserve a dedicated email? Could it be included in the newsletter? Was this relevant to everyone, or only a particular audience?
I began thinking of the communications calendar as something more than a publishing schedule.
It was a way of managing the attention we were asking members to give us.
And attention is particularly valuable when your audience is made up of people running organisations, managing programmes, and juggling multiple responsibilities.
What I learned: More emails weren’t necessarily the answer. Making each communication more useful was a better place to start.
2. We redesigned onboarding around what members needed to do
One of the more substantial projects I worked on was redesigning the member welcome journey.
The result was a seven-email sequence introducing members to the network, its programmes, resources, and opportunities to connect.
The original challenge was familiar.
When someone joins a membership organisation, there’s a lot you want them to know.
You want them to attend orientation, join the community channel, discover the resource library, explore programmes, and start meeting other members.
It’s tempting to put all of that in the first email.
Instead, we worked towards a more gradual introduction.
What should someone do first? What information could wait? How could each email give them a clear reason to take another step?
We also had to consider how different contacts entered the network.
A primary member representative receiving their first welcome email wasn’t in the same position as a colleague added to an existing member organisation.
That distinction shaped how we designed the automation.
The work involved copy, sequencing, audience segmentation, and decisions about timing. It also required thinking through what happened behind the scenes when a contact was added manually.
The journey was designed and documented, although its rollout was still awaiting approval during the handover.
So I can’t claim it improved activation or participation.
What I can say is that it changed how I approached onboarding.
What I learned: A welcome journey needs to help people find their way into a community. Knowing that a benefit exists isn’t the same as knowing how to use it.
3. One event campaign saw registrations rise by 69%
This was one of the more tangible examples of communications contributing to participation.
For one event, registrations increased from 13 to 22 following a targeted promotional push.
That’s approximately a 69% increase.
The number was encouraging, although it doesn’t establish how many registrations were directly attributable to the campaign.
What interested me just as much was what we observed about different communication channels.
Email was proving useful for generating registrations.
WhatsApp reminders played another role. In some cases, they were associated with an additional three to five attendees joining sessions, including people who hadn’t registered beforehand.
LinkedIn helped with visibility and awareness, although it wasn’t producing registrations in the same way.
These observations challenged the idea that every channel should be measured against the same outcome.
An email might convince someone to register.
A WhatsApp message might remind them to show up.
A LinkedIn post might introduce the network to someone who would engage months later.
Each had a different job.
What I learned: Channel performance makes more sense when you understand what you’re asking each channel to achieve.
And registrations, while useful, are only one part of the participation story.
4. We started treating members differently from subscribers
Another significant piece of work involved developing a separate member-only newsletter.
Previously, much of the communication centred on sharing updates, opportunities, and activities.
That worked well enough for a public audience.
Members, however, had a different relationship with the network.
They already belonged.
The communication needed to reflect that.
We developed a newsletter structure with space for member stories, resources, upcoming opportunities, research, and requests for peer support.
I was particularly interested in the peer-request element.
A member asking for advice, a connection, or a resource could potentially create a more meaningful exchange than another announcement from the central team.
It also changed the editorial question.
Rather than asking only, “What do we need to tell members this month?”, we could begin asking, “What would help members engage with one another?”
The public newsletter and member newsletter now had distinct editorial purposes.
One helped a wider audience understand the network’s work.
The other was designed to help members participate in it.
What I learned: Membership communication should reflect the relationship someone already has with the organisation, rather than treating everyone as a prospective participant.
5. The most important communications work was sometimes invisible
Some of the work I’m most glad I did wouldn’t make for an exciting social media post.
Contact form workflows.
Subscriber segmentation.
Email automation delays.
UTM tracking.
Website content updates.
Analytics events for forms and resource downloads.
None of these sound particularly glamorous.
Yet they determine how people actually experience an organisation’s communications.
Take a simple example.
Someone submits a contact form expressing interest in the network.
Should that automatically make them a newsletter subscriber?
We treated contacts and subscribers differently, with a clearer process for inviting people to opt in.
Similarly, we worked on tracking actions such as programme applications and report downloads.
Because if a resource is being promoted through multiple channels, knowing how many people opened the announcement tells only part of the story.
You also want to understand whether they accessed the resource.
Or whether someone who visited a programme page went on to apply.
These were small pieces of a much larger communications system.
What I learned: Good communications operations should make things easier for the audience, even if the audience never notices the systems doing the work.
What I’d measure differently now
Looking back, this is where I would push the work further.
We had email records, campaign calendars, registration data, and website analytics. Those gave us useful indicators of activity and interest.
I would have liked to connect them more consistently to the actual member journey.
For example:
- From welcome email to first action: What percentage of new members attended an orientation or accessed their first resource?
- From registration to participation: How many people who registered for an event actually attended, and how many returned?
- From content to usefulness: Which resources were downloaded, revisited, or shared?
- From membership to community: Were members initiating conversations, asking for help, or connecting with one another?
These aren’t all questions that a dashboard can answer.
Some would require feedback from members. Others would need better coordination between communications and membership teams.
And I think that’s an important part of the learning.
Communications metrics tell us whether people are responding to what we send.
They don’t always tell us whether we’re making their experience better.
What I’d do differently if I were starting again
I’d begin by mapping the membership journey before building the communications calendar.
Not just when someone joins, but what happens over their first 30, 60, or 90 days.
I’d also establish a small set of shared measures with the membership team so that we were looking at participation alongside email performance.
And I’d invest more consistently in stories showing what membership looked like in practice.
Not polished testimonials alone.
I’d look for the smaller moments.
A member who found the right person to speak to.
Someone who applied an idea from a peer-learning session.
An organisation that used a resource to work through a challenge.
Those are the stories that can help other members recognise the value of the network.
They’re also the stories that make membership communications feel less like marketing.
Two years later, here’s what has stayed with me
When I began working on the network’s communications, much of my attention went into campaigns, content, deadlines, and deliverables.
Those things never stopped mattering.
But towards the end, I found myself paying closer attention to what happened after we pressed send.
Did someone find the information they needed?
Did they know where to go next?
Did our communication make participating in the network any easier?
The 165 email records represent a substantial amount of communications work.
The registration increases and participation observations offered useful evidence that some approaches were working.
The onboarding and newsletter redesigns reflected an effort to make the overall experience more intentional.
I wouldn’t present any of those numbers as proof that we had solved member engagement.
For me, they represent the work involved in getting closer to understanding it.
And that’s probably the biggest thing I took away from those two years: the purpose of membership communications isn’t simply to keep members informed. It’s to help them make use of the community they’ve joined.
I’m curious how other communications and community professionals approach this.
Beyond opens, clicks, and registrations, how do you know whether your communications are helping people feel connected to a community?