Website Redesign & Membership Offer
Challenge
Project Type: Website redesign, membership offer redesign
Technology and integrations: WordPress, Joomla
Leadership at the Endourological Society came to us about a website redesign. A few conversations in, the real problem surfaced, and one of them said it out loud: members saw the organization as a journal with a society attached.
That was a painful thing to admit, because it was not true of the work. The Society’s members had changed the practice of medicine and improved millions of lives. The caliber of the membership and the quality of what circulated inside it were exceptional. None of that was reaching anyone who had not already experienced it.
Recruitment made the problem worse. New members came primarily through the annual event, which put a hard ceiling on growth: most prospective members were never going to pay to travel to an international conference on the chance that membership might be worth it. Everyone who did not attend was effectively unreachable.
They came to us with three things to fix. Communicate what the Endourological Society was actually worth to someone who had not already been in the room. Recruit members who would never travel to the annual event. And give a urologist anywhere in the world a reason to join that did not depend on being sold in person.
What We Did
The obvious project was the one they asked for, a website redesign, and we did that work. But a redesign alone would have made a poorly aimed pitch look better. The pitch was the problem, and specifically that there was one of it.
We started with their analytics, then talked with members and committees. That surfaced three distinct groups inside a membership that had been treated as one: academic urologists, community urologists in practice, and urologists in training. They lived differently, worked differently, and wanted different things. A single membership page had been trying to persuade all of them at once, which meant it was aimed at nobody.
Society leadership also felt like they had little to work with. Two mechanisms of value, the journals and the annual event, and not everyone attended the event. The instinct in that position is to go build more benefits. We took the opposite view: one thing produces many different kinds of value depending on who is using it. The same journal keeps a community urologist current on techniques they use rarely, and gives an academic a way to find collaborators and research questions. The value was already there. It had never been named for anyone in particular.
So we built the offer around self-identification. Prospective members land on a benefits page, choose the kind of urologist they are, and get an offer written for that person: a headline speaking to their main driving desire, three points of value beneath it, and the features of membership demoted to supporting evidence rather than the pitch itself. Not “three journals and 25% off the annual event,” but what having those things does for someone in their situation. Each segment’s page carries a testimonial from a member who looks like them, pricing, and repeated calls to join.
Beyond improving their member benefits pages to better communicate their value, we updated the design of the entire website to a more attractive and modern version, simplified the navigation, improved user experience, and highlighted the unique things that the society does for its members and its mission.
Result
The Endourological Society has a beautiful new website which supports their authority and the contribution of their members to the urological field.
Their gaining new members online, year round, and independent of the annual event. Someone who will never fly to the conference can now find out what membership is worth to a person in their position and act on it by joining.
Live site: https://endourology.org
Metrics:
- 380% Increase in online registrations
- 4.5 Months to ROI after launching the redesign
I was asked to oversee the development of a new website for a medical organization I am affiliated with (Endourological Society). We awarded the contract to Steward after an RFP. I could not have been happier. They were exceptionally thorough and never missed a deadline. The end product exceeded our expectations. I can’t recommend them highly enough. – Dr. Duty, Website Committee chair of the Endourological Society
Let’s Talk About Your Project
If your members undervalue what you do, the problem is usually the offer rather than the website. We help associations find out what different kinds of members actually value and build a membership pitch around it. Get in touch.
