British Veterinary Association: Group Membership Recruitment

Membership to BVA is voluntary and around 50% of all practising UK vets and 80% of UK veterinary students are members. BVA’s mission is to be the leading body representing, supporting and championing the whole UK veterinary profession.

Group membership of BVA was introduced in 2009, initially as a proposition for veterinary practices employing more than 10 people.

Following the success of this launch, a new offer was developed for those with fewer than 10 employees.

Growing the number of group memberships through the effective communication of the significant benefits of group membership to smaller practices was the primary objective of the campaign.

Initially Chord sourced a high quality prospect list of 2,353 UK-based veterinary practices and worked with BVA to develop a telemarketing campaign brief to deliver effective communication of group membership benefits to smaller practices.

The brief focussed on the cost savings over individual membership, but also the wide range of professionally focused benefits on offer, including Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and BVA guides and resources.

An initial pilot of 15 days telemarketing was delivered by Chord, targeting just 750 practices as a proof of concept. This was then rolled out for a further 60 days over three phases with continual enhancements being made to the approach, targeting both hot and warm leads from previous phases as well as new prospects.

Daily contact between Chord and BVA regarding queries arising from the calls, ensured that Chord were able to reply to queries in a timely manner and continuously build on knowledge to enable the delivery of more effective calls.

Group memberships resulting from the campaign are still coming in, but on completion of phase 4 calling, Chord has secured a total of 60 new group memberships and a further 10 practices stating their intention to join. In addition to these, a further 80 potential memberships have been qualified as a pipeline for future phases.

The lead nurturing approach delivered by Chord clearly demonstrated an improvement in results as the campaign progressed, with the daily yield of completed group registration forms increasing from 0.3 per day during the pilot, to 1.7 per day during Phase 4. This will increase further to nearly 2.7 per day if all those stating their intention to join, actually do.

Veterinary practices were very receptive to Chord’s telemarketers who had in-depth and meaningful conversations with around 8 Practice Managers every day of calling.