Providing Valuable Information to Members Using Curated Content

Updated: Aug. 31, 2017  

Are you communicating regularly with your members and prospective members through your email newsletter, website, and social media accounts? (HINT: You should be.)

Upcoming meetings, membership dues, and changes in leadership are obvious items to share with others, but if you are not sharing a variety of content you should be, you’ll start to sound like a broken record if you keep posting the same meeting invitation over and over.

So, what additional content should you share with your membership? Try curated content.

Curated content is passing along articles and resources created by others that will benefit your association members. The key here is to be sure the information is relevant and valuable.

4 Specific Tips for Content Creation

1. Always credit your source. For social media, typically providing the link to the original article is sufficient. If you want to print an entire article on your website or in your newsletter, be sure to contact the author for permission first.
2. Use content written by others as a supplement to the original content you should be creating. Curated content isn’t a way to get out of creating your own valuable articles.
3. Try not to post links or articles from the same resource all the time. For example, if you always share from the same website, members may be tempted to go directly to that website regularly rather than paying attention to what you share.
4. Find the right frequency. For example, on your social media you may want to share every day. But, your email newsletter may be once a month. You certainly wouldn’t want to email your members every day.

How to Find Content for Curation

Rather than doing a Google search every day, take advantage of website aggregators or feed readers such as Alltop.com, or Feedly.com.

These websites comb the web for articles in your topic and provide the links in one place. Very convenient! Think of it as your one stop shop for content.

Extra Benefits of Content Curation

Searching for valuable content to share with your members has some aspects that will benefit you, as well.

• You will stay up to date with industry news.

• By reading other websites you will become familiar with other writing styles and means of information sharing, like video. This exercise will hone your own writing skills.

• You will be building relationships with others. If you contact the authors to ask for permission to reprint, or simply mention their user handle in Twitter, you gain their attention.

Curating content is a terrific way to keep your members in the know.  

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