Who Are Your Members?
Updated: Apr. 15, 2026 | Categories: Member Communications, Surveys, Membership, Board Productivity
Have you ever delved into really knowing who your members are? Sure, they belong to a specific profession, they attend your events and meetings, and even read your weekly newsletters. But do you really know what makes them tick, what they are thinking, and what would determine their decisions?
Knowing your members isn’t really a tough task; it just takes time, based on asking the right questions and using an easy tool to collect, analyze, and present the answers. Industry-designed research is a good start, but if you focus too much on the overall industry, you might miss the local point of view of your members.
The 5 steps to learn all about your members:
1. Set up the objective of your research. What do you want to learn from this survey? Do you want to know more about how your members make decisions? Do you need to uncover trends? Best practices? Setting up the right objective will help you determine the questions and, later, will make it easier to analyze the data.
2. Design the right questions. Based on your objective, focus on different types of questions that will help you collect the best data. For example, if you are interested in learning more about general practices utilized by your members, ask behavioral questions such as “how do you normally do x?” or “what is the most popular industry resource you read?” If your goal is to predict the next trend, try to gauge what your members know/do and how it relates to the overall industry performance
3. Use a survey tool to collect the data. Figure out how to best engage your members and non-members. There are many tools you can use to set up your survey, through the website or as an email, so tailor the platform to your target responders. StarChapter, for example, gives you the Survey Manager that helps you in setting up, sending, and calculating the percentages of certain responses. All surveys are accessible through the built-in surveys page. Watch our walk-through video tutorials and read the how-to article to learn more about how to set up your surveys.
4. Analyze and make decisions. Using the Survey Manager and the percentage calculator, board leaders can easily present responses and learn about changing trends. You can also export the results of all the survey submissions and filter based on Individual survey responses.
5. Share the results! Your conclusions are important to your members and non-members. Use emails, your website, and your next event to distribute your conclusion around and get feedback.
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