3 Reasons to Replace Your Association Chapter Listserv with an Online Forum
Updated: Apr. 4, 2022 | Categories: Decreasing Membership
A person gets, on average, 126 emails a day! Sure, in that bunch there are emails they want and need, but with that many, they often delete them instead of seeing what might be useful. If you’re still using a listserv to send content, your chapter members may never see or engage with what you’re sending.
Listservs can work for small groups of people to discuss a single topic, but once you’re working with a larger group and covering multiple topics, the benefits often end. Here are the top three reasons a listserv is most likely not the best communication option for your association chapter.
Spam filters hate listservs. With the overabundance of junk mail, email providers have tightened their definition of spam. There’s a much greater chance that anything sent as bulk mail (email sent to a large distribution list at the same time from a single email address) will go to the recipient’s junk mail folder. And occasionally, these regulations even cause the sending email address to be blacklisted. When that happens, your audience doesn’t hear about all the important things you’re doing and why they should participate.
Poor engagement. Your chapter members just want to receive the information relevant to them. Since you can’t separate listservs to send different things to different people or easily have back and forth discussions without annoying everyone on the listserv, there’s a good chance you’re sending a lot more information than they need. When that happens, the recipient will just delete your email without reading it. Or worse, they may decide to unsubscribe altogether.
Lost knowledge. Listserv topics aren’t searchable, so if a recipient does open and read your message and wants to go back to find something they read, it’s difficult to find the email. They’ll have to go back through and read each listserv message, which most won’t take the time to do.
Online forums do a much better job with engagement
You agree it’s time to replace your outdated listserv, but you’re concerned about what to replace it with. An online forum is a great replacement for the antiquated listserv. Your audience gets a curated content experience they set up themselves, and when they manage their notifications, they decide how much or how little email they get from your association chapter and what is in those emails.
How does an online forum work?
Someone – like a chapter volunteer – creates a post. You can create a post for any topic, like the outcomes of your last educational session, a summary and link to the video from your last monthly meeting or a question you need members to weigh in on, like changing the time of that monthly meeting. Readers subscribe to the kinds of posts they want to receive.
They post their responses, creating a two-way dialogue where everyone participates on their own schedule. That dialogue is called a thread, and each post has a different thread. Your audience gets notified by email when there are new posts on those threads they’ve commented on and topics they’ve subscribed to.
The benefits of association chapter forums
Every time someone responds to a thread, that post adds value. Readers can easily learn and hear from others and begin to see your online forums as something they should search when they want to find specific information on a topic. At the same time, your association chapter website gets an SEO boost through the frequent updates that include the words and phrases members would search online.
You may still have emails that need to go to your entire association chapter, for things like urgent communications, reminders of monthly chapter meetings and volunteer events. Even so, you’ll decrease your chapter email volume significantly and have a great way to make communication, collaboration, and engagement quick and easy.
If you’re still using listservs to manage your chapter group emails, it’s way past time to replace them. An online association chapter forum can be what everyone needs.
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