The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers: Member Renewal Campaign

CIBSE promotes the career of building services engineers by accrediting courses of study in further and higher education, by approving work-based training programmes and providing routes to full professional Registration and Membership, including Chartered Engineer, Incorporated Engineer and Engineering Technician. Once qualified, CIBSE offers a range of services, all focused on maintaining and enhancing professional excellence throughout a career.

The CIBSE membership year runs from January to December.  Renewal reminders are sent via post and email to those members who have not renewed or resigned. CIBSE fully understood that the Coronavirus pandemic would be adversely affecting a significant proportion of members. So it was vital to ensure that as much as possible was done to make personal contact with members around renewal time.

CIBSE commissioned Chord to deliver a campaign with the following objectives to:

• Engage with members to encourage them to renew by effectively communicating and reinforcing membership benefits and help answer questions.
• Gain insight by capturing and reporting on valuable information about why members had decided not to renew.
• Enhance data quality by updating member contact details, including email address, work or home address and alternative phone numbers (particularly mobiles).

Building on a reviewed and improved previous campaign brief detailing CIBSE’s membership benefits and also taking into account the impact the Covid-19 pandemic may have had on members. Chord set to work.

Chord complemented the work of the CIBSE membership team, by mirroring several processes during the campaign to:

• Optimise telephone reach to members via first and second calls up to 7.00 pm on weekdays and 10am to 4pm on Saturdays, to reinforce member benefits, including that support was still available during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Leave tailored voicemails for those members to whom we were unable to speak, with specific signposting and call to action.
• Email links to campaign-specific landing pages to emphasise specific benefits, resources, content, events etc. and how to renew membership. Chord blind copied all member emails to a CIBSE CRM mailbox to ensure that all communications were linked to members’ records.
• Process payments of renewals by credit/debit card directly via the CIBSE CRM.
• Update member contact information in the CIBSE CRM.
• Transfer calls to the CIBSE membership team if questions asked were outside the scope of the campaign.
• Establish reasons for non-renewal for members who still did not want to renew, using a list of more than 10 common reasons and recording new ones.
• Suppress member records from calling as and when instructed by CIBSE.
• Provide monthly reporting on key performance indicators and statistics.
• Ensure GDPR Compliance throughout the campaign.

• The campaign generated 557 renewals against the target of 450
• 279 members expressed their intention to renew and were referred back to the CIBSE membership team to follow-up
• Overall, members were pleased to receive the reminder. In comparison with previous CIBSE renewal campaigns, this resulted in a 60% year-on-year increase in the number of members renewing
• 8% of member contact data records were updated by Chord directly in the CIBSE CRM, to save the client time and improve future communications

To achieve this, Chord:

• completed 24.5 telemarketing days
• made 3,012 calls
• had 1,034 direct conversations with members
• left 807 voicemails
• sent 2,394 emails