people need multiple "touches" before they remember you

I mentioned in my last post that I walked the floor of the ASAE 2019 Annual Meeting looking for products that helped engage the membership. Often these were found in aspects of various AMS platforms but I found two interesting exceptions: PropFuel and EventBot (which may no longer be in business). By the way, I have not been nor will I be compensated by any organization I highlight in this blog; I just find them interesting.

Engagement means meeting members and prospective members where they are, and where they are is generally email. PropFuel simplifies the process and organizes the results of reaching out to your membership by . Broadly, PropFuel drips a single-question into your member’s email inbox. Experience shows direct questions work well in getting member responses. You can then open a web page speaking to their answer or just to thank them. Meanwhile, PropFuel captures the response for you to analyze and segment your members into different groups for follow-up.

get started quickly secure that PropFuel’s suggestions have been tested and worked befor

The idea behind PropFuel’s singular question approach is that people need multiple "touches" before they will remember you, let alone become your customers. In my opinion, a big part of PropFuel’s value is their knowledge-base of questions that others before them have asked their members.

PropFuel is part of the ‘componentization’ of association software solutions.

Instead of learning what makes for non-irritating and engaging questions and thus, potentially burn a few prospective members along the way, you can get started quickly secure that PropFuel’s suggestions have been tested and worked before. More important than sophisticated technology, being able to quickly build a good campaign is a serious win. PropFuel has eliminated all of the creative writing component from the process, freeing associations to focus on collecting actionable feedback about what their members truly want. Of course, if you want to write your own content you can and it won’t be a roadblock. And even that gets easier because you can use the suggested questions for inspiration.

PropFuel is part of the ‘componentization’ of association software solutions. Instead of requiring the adoption of a full rip-and-replace of a preexisting system, the new approach is to work with and use data from your existing Association Management System. The advantage is less risk and cost to the members and the product focuses on delivering the best solution in its niche. Accordingly, getting data into PropFuel with their pre-built integration connectors is eased by their many available AMS integrations. Using these integrations significantly reduces the cost and errors common to custom data import.

What I like about PropFuel’s service is that it does a few things reliably and well.

Once your contacts are in PropFuel, you are ready to plan your campaign. Your members can be segmented any number of ways: new members, event attendees and, of course, how they answered the question in your email. The professional version allows sophisticated chains of conditional and timed messages each with their own questions. All are tuned to elicit a suitable interaction to a primed prospect. For example, association memberships that do not renew within 2 months very often never renew. It doesn’t take a genius to see the value in a tool that automatically asks “Would you like to renew your association membership?” within days of lapsing. One could even follow up with a stop-loss discount offer after 30 or 60 days of a lapsed membership. In PropFuel this is easy to setup without an expensive consultant and should quickly more than pay for the service.

We are all busy and even the most useful tool is a problem if its sophistication interferes with returning to it rarely and getting things done quickly. What I like about PropFuel’s service is that it does a few things reliably and well. You benefit from the experience of others and can get a useful job done easily and quickly with a fast start and it remains accessible and usable on your return; even if that return is after a month or more. Meanwhile it just keeps doing what you asked it to do.

I want to thank Dave Will for walking me through PropFuel’s product. This article leaves out some added features of PropFuel like email integration; contact PropFuel for those details.

So what do you think? Have you used PropFuel or a similar product? Please share your opinions with me at PropFuelBlog_20191117@freytag.org.