Increase Non-Dues Revenue With Your Directory

Posted on September 20, 2017 in Associations, Chambers, Feature Updates, Membership, Nonprofit

Looking for more ways to boost your organization’s revenue? Check out this week’s Latest Buzz blog to see how Membee’s Directory can help get more cash rolling in!

Membee’s Directory widget is full of features specifically designed to increase the visibility of your members! Whether your members are:

Searching for fellow members with certain skills
Searching for fellow members with certain services
Backgrounds in a private member directory or a public directory
Promoting your industry members or your supplier/associate members,

Promoting members is what it is all about!

If your members see value in your promotion of their products and services then Membee’s directory provides three straightforward ways to cash in on that perceived value and increase your organization’s non-dues income by:

Selling additional listings within your directory to a member
Selling the ability to standout in search results with a “featured listing”
Selling the ability for a member's listing to “pop to the top” of the search results when certain keywords are used in a directory search

Sell Additional Listings

The structure of Membee’s directories allows you to create unlimited directories and within those directories, a member can have unlimited listings.

A best practice here is to provide a “free” listing in your member directory as a benefit of membership and to sell an additional listing to any member who wants one. The member obviously benefits from the increased presence in your directory and you directory is much more useful to site visitors thanks to the increase in specific content.

Add a listing for an organization:

Click on the Activities tab
Scroll down to bottom of the page and click on the "Add Listing" link.
Select the directory you want to add the listing to

Sell the “Featured Listing” Designation

This feature is advantageous to members when there are a large number of members in the same category or where a common search term returns a large group of members on your directory’s Search Results page.

When you activate this feature in a member’s directory listing, their listing will stand out on the Search Results page with a gold star and “featured” text just like the screenshot below:

In your directory’s widget, you can customize three things related to Featured Listings:

designate the text displayed beside the member’s name (the default is “Featured”)
designate the icon image that is displayed
designate the map pin color for featured listings

The best practice here is to treat this feature with a greater degree of exclusivity when compared to selling additional listings. After all, if every member returned on the Search Results page is “feature”, it defeats the purpose of some members standing out from their competitors.

Sell Popular Search Keywords to the Highest Bidder

The Sponsored Listing feature is very appealing to members who are looking to truly separate themselves (literally) from their competition inside your member directory.

This feature allows a member to “pop to the top” on the Search Results page, separating and highlighting their listing from all other members who met the terms of the site visitor’s search.

It’s extremely easy to find out what keywords are the most searched, follow steps below:

Select “Directories” on Membee’s right hand side
Type in your Directories name, Ex. “Online Listings”
Scroll down to the “Keywords And Categories” section
Select date range, select refresh, and results will appear similar to the below screenshot:

In this example “Bank” is the most searched keyword, now you can go ahead and sell that keyword to the highest bidder and set that bidder up as a “Sponsored” listing in the directory.

Sponsored listings appear with a red star beside their name in the directory, and appear right at the top when the keyword is searched. In the screenshot example below the keyword “Hotel” was used, and The Cedars Resort bought that keyword.

You can see how the sponsored pin appears in green so it stands out on the map. You can select and change pin colours in the Directory Widget in Membee.

[Click image to enlarge]

Resources to Make All This Happen

Let’s get to work and get those new non-dues dollars rolling in! The links below will provide everything you need to implement these Membee features (Make sure to have your Membee username and password handy).

For the features contained in the Directory Widget itself:

http://membee.zendesk.com/entries/20182188-Adding-Editing-Deleting-Directories-and-Directory-Listings#feeds

To setup a recurring event in Membee to handle the billing for you, here’s the details for setting up a Recurring Event:

http://membee.zendesk.com/entries/20395617-Setting-up-and-Managing-Events-and-Event-Registrations#RecurringEvent

To make it easy for members to pay for their “enhanced directory presence” subscriptions, use eBilling so they can pay form your website. Here’s the details:

http://membee.zendesk.com/entries/20198242-Setting-up-and-Maintaining-ebilling