The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is a membership organisation of more than 435,000 registered nurses, midwives, health care assistants and nursing students. They are both a professional body, carrying out work on nursing standards, education and practice, and a trade union.
The Challenge
The RCN has three main membership categories Nurses, Students and Health Practitioners. The Health Practitioner (HP) category includes Health Care Assistants and Assistant Practitioners. Since membership to RCN was made available to Health Practitioners in 2001, this audience has shown the highest rate of growth.
Research was undertaken by the RCN to gain a better understanding of the reasons why some HPs were not renewing after the first year of membership. The results indicated:
- A clear need to maintain engagement with HPs. They wanted more dialogue, to feel part of a team and to enjoy the credibility of being part of a prestigious body.
- HPs did not fully appreciate the wide range of member benefits available to them at the point of signing up, as word of mouth was the main way by which members had heard about the RCN.
- That regular, mixed and consistent communication during the first year of membership would improve member retention and therefore reduce the rate of attrition at the point of renewal.
To reduce membership attrition and increase engagement, RCN decided to integrate more outbound calling with existing RCN marketing activity during the first 12 months of HP membership. Initially, Chord would make welcome and engagement calls to 50% of new members. The in-house RCN team would deal with the other 50% of new members, so that retention rates could be compared.
The Solution
Chord developed a telephone-led, series communication campaign to contact 1,950 new members in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England (East Midlands, Northern and South East regions). A detailed schedule ensured that calls were made at the right time to:
- Engage with new members – at specified points throughout their first year of membership.
- Gain actionable member feedback – including the reasons for joining, member benefits and service usage, likes/dislikes about membership and the biggest current issues faced in their role.
- Reinforce member benefits – and answer questions, referring members quickly to the best source of help at the RCN.
- Enhance quality of member data – by verifying and adding member contact details, including email address, home address and alternative phone numbers and establishing preferred communication channels.
Members received a welcome call the month after joining, followed by three additional ‘re-engagement’ calls to reinforce the membership benefits at month four, month six and month twelve at the point of renewal.
Seamless integration with the RCN membership team was achieved by Chord daily using:
- Direct call transfer for member enquiries to the correct RCN membership team e.g. membership, indemnity cover, advice, journals etc .
- Emailing enquiries to the correct advice team e.g. welfare, careers, immigration, counselling, membership etc.
- Tailored voicemails for members, offering specific signposting and a clear call to action for those not reachable by phone.
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Calls
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Member engagements
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Members spoken to in month 12 intending to renew
The Outcomes
Chord made in excess of 9,000 call attempts over the initial 12 month period:
- Chord engaged with members 2,509 times directly delivering personal and high quality conversations
- Clear reasons for joining were established
- The main ways in which members had heard about the RCN prior to joining were clarified
- Clear feedback was established from each member about their preferred incentive for renewal and preferred communication channel(s).
- Service and member benefit usage intelligence was gathered to help with future decision-making
- More than 70 members were directed to the best RCN point of contact for immediate help.
- At the end of the last month of the campaign 100% of members engaged during the month intended to renew; compared to just 21.7% in the first month of calling.
Key recommendations from the campaign included:
- Changing the scheduling of the calls to enable members to provide more and better quality feedback having used services more fully.
- Increasing the number of call attempts to increase reach rates, as voicemail or unanswered lines are often encountered due to members’ work schedules.
- Reducing the length of calls, by reducing question areas for time-strapped members and to gain the most vital intelligence.
- Enabling members to opt-in to specific areas of information based on their reasons for joining, to ensure the relevance of the content.
Significant Impact - One Year On
RCN analysis clearly shows a significant uplift in the number of HP members renewing from the group Chord called throughout their first year of membership, in comparison to those that weren’t.
As a direct result of the success of the campaign, the RCN has commissioned Chord to call all HP first year members, across all 12 regions for the next 12 months.
