I Used to Wonder if Our Membership Was Worth It
When I worked for an association as a marketing specialist, my job was to bring in new members and keep the current ones engaged so they would renew and actually use what we offered. Standard membership marketing stuff: highlight the benefits, tell the story, prove the value.
But to be honest? For a while, I wasn’t sure I totally believed in it myself.
Yes, being a member got the person a discount to our annual conference. The discount was enough to make membership make sense for the conference alone. Luckily, our conference was great. We had strong subject matter experts, relevant topics, and people always left with something they could take back and apply to their work immediately.
We recorded the sessions and made them available virtually. So really, members had access to all of it, all year round. But here’s the problem: when you’re working in your business, you rarely have time to work on your business. Nobody had 90 minutes to watch a webinar replay or dig through a PDF for the one slide they needed.
When you're at a conference, that's time you specifically set aside from your day to day to work on your business, rather than in it. That's what makes events so great. Virtual events or recorded sessions can be good, but you have to be the type of person who can shut out your teams/slack messages and email... I most certainly am not... I have shifted to answering 3 emails even while writing this blog - haha.
Our members wanted the content from our conference. They needed it to do their jobs better. But we weren’t giving it to them in a way that fit how they actually work. And that made it really hard to prove the value of membership beyond the event discount. 300+ recorded sessions sounds awesome... but if you have the self awareness to know you're not going to watch them, then it doesn't sound that great.
That’s when I met the Betty team.
This was around the time I was starting to use ChatGPT and Claude for myself. I’d use it to write quick social captions, newsletter blurbs, or when I needed help figuring out how to say something “professionally, but not condescending” (lolll, tell me I’m not alone in this).
When I saw Betty working for the first time, I think I said something like, “Wait, this is basically a mini ChatGPT for all our content?” I’m sure the developers winced (sorry, Dray), but he just said something like: “Essentially, yeah.”
Immediately, I started thinking about how it could work for our members. Who would use it. Why they’d use it. How we could make it a membership benefit, but still show a limited version to the public so they could try it out.
I became one of Betty’s early clients, which meant lots of Zoom calls that went something like:
“Can it do this?” “Maybe. Let’s try it.”
“What about sponsored content?” “Let’s test it out.”
“Okay, cool—but could it also…?” And on and on.
We built a knowledge assistant just for our association. It was and still is the ChatGPT for that industry with insights and content that no public AI could know, because it wasn’t public. It was ours - our standards, our best practices, our market intelligence, our certifications, our data.
For the first time, I saw real, tangible value in the membership beyond the event discount.
Now, members had a study buddy for certification. A smart helper they could ask about running their business. A fast, easy way to learn what their peers were facing. A tool that helped them get answers quickly, instead of setting aside time for a webinar or scrolling through a white paper.
It was so sweet. And honestly? I wish this had existed sooner. I could’ve done so much more to get leads, retain members, and WOW our members.
So, if you’ve made it this far, here’s my main point:
Every association is different. Some focus on certifications. Some on standards. Some on events. Some bring different sides of an industry together. But they all have one thing in common: Associations are the go-to source of credible knowledge for their industries.
For us, we brought on Betty to make that knowledge more accessible. To connect it to the people who needed it - members, non-members, future members.
If that’s not your biggest pain point, maybe Betty isn’t what you need right now.
But if your members can’t find or use your knowledge easily? If you're constantly thinking about membership engagement and feel like you've done everything to get people to see your value, then I promise you Betty is worth a shot!