Boosting engagement and retention with early, mid, and late career members

The need to offer new value to young professional members

Declining membership and engagement has been a cause for concern for many professional associations. Young professionals are increasingly turning away from specific career and growth benefits offered by professional associations, instead ‘hacking’ together a personalized toolkit by leveraging broadly available digital platforms.

In this context, it is becoming increasingly important for professional associations like the College of American Pathologists (CAP) to uncover new motivations and behaviors they should be designing for, and offer new value to their existing and future member base. We worked across the digital, product, and marketing teams to identify contextual needs and boost member engagement.

Defining compelling digital experiences for early-career pathologists

For the early career segment, we focused on the app experience through a series of exploratory research and design sprints. We uncovered previously unknown realities of the way members interacted with the app, most notably that pathologists don’t use their mobile devices during their work hours. This key insight helped us pivot to serve pathologists in their ‘off-hours’, responding to needs relating to gamified bite-sized learning and networking opportunities with pathologists around the country.

Codifying the learnings into a set of guiding principles, we then ideated, designed, and tested three features: daily challenges, member connections, and personalized content. These features were further refined and led to a v2 app launch.

Clarifying content management based on member needs

Following the success of the v2 app release, the CAP team wanted to collaborate with us in a broader content management scope. With the end goal of identifying opportunities for an improved member experience across desktop and mobile, we embarked on another round of research and design sprints. 

A key learning from the research was that content-related needs and behaviors had a strong correlation to the type of role pathologists played in their day-to-day work. Trainees, attendings, educators, and directors each had distinct content-related expectations, flows, and pain points. Responding to these needs, we prototyped and tested a content hub concept that ultimately guided the org-wide content management structure.

Uncovering motivations for mid- and late-career pathologists

Building on the understanding and success with early-career members, CAP wanted to uncover the context, needs, and struggles of mid- and late-career member segments. We collaborated with the marketing team as they looked to define new member initiatives, experiences, and offers.

We began with qualitative research with members outside CAP’s highly engaged base, mapping mid- and late-career experiences. A surprising learning surfaced: a key priority of these highly educated and competent doctors was work-life balance and attention to family. As their career progressed, members felt the periodic need to reassess, reflect, and reimagine what success meant in their evolving context of family and life. 

This learning was further validated by a quantitative study, cementing the ideation direction. Efforts to define new member benefits and offers are in progress.

Delivering artifacts that prove effective and enable impact

Across our work with the digital, product, and marketing teams, we employed key artifacts to align stakeholders and drive impact throughout the organization. Member insights, Journey maps, Jobs to be Done, Guiding Principles, and Digital Concept Prototypes connected the dots across the work.

Doubling the app downloads and returning users

The v2 mobile app for early-career professionals resulted in a nearly 2x increase in the number of new installs and a nearly 2x increase in the average number of returning users. For mid-late career segments, new marketing and communications initiatives are in progress.