Marketing and communications support & Member Value Proposition

Society of Occupational Medicine

Requirement: The Society of Occupational Medicine is a professional membership organisation for everyone interested in health and work.

Having revisited their business plan and strategy and developed a membership growth plan, the team wanted to ensure they utilised the considerable expertise of their Board, Council and staff to determine a new member value proposition.

It was also felt that there may be opportunity to expand the SOM membership offer to additional target markets.

 

Methodology: To assist the SOM in moving ahead with the business strategy, we provided support in three areas:

• Hands-on practical advice to help the internal team develop a marketing and communications plan
• Qualitative interviews with representatives of two potential target markets – individuals in particular roles, and corporates. For the individuals, we investigated their views on the current membership offer, and established what changes would be needed to make it more appealing. For corporates, our interviews discussed the need, expectation, price elasticity, perceived value and competitive advantages of an offer.
• The research report with recommendations provided some context to our next piece of work: a facilitated ‘away-day’ for the Board, Council and staff.  During the morning sessions, we led the through the process of developing compelling statements to build their value proposition.  An afternoon session then focused on identifying and prioritising new, practical opportunities for recruiting the previously identified individual and corporate membership groups.

 

Ashridge Communications have been great to work with – they combine extensive knowledge and experience of the membership sector with effective skills working with people at staff and board level. They responded to our brief swiftly, offering useful guidance through a research and away day process and helped produce very useful intelligence for our future plans.

Nick Pahl, CEO, SOM