NPS Campaign Guide

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most common metrics used by organizations and a majority of Fortune 1000 companies to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is a structured approach to measuring customer loyalty with a simple recommendation question and an answer on a scale of 0-10. You can use this to gauge satisfaction for the association or society as a whole or even events or webinars.

The question is always some variation of: "Would you recommend {fill in the blank} to a colleague or friend?" followed by an open ended question to gather feedback and suggested improvements.

Since each person can select a value between 0-10, we have the ability to segment those groups by the following:

• "Promoters" answer a 9 or 10.

• "Passives" answer 7 or 8.

• "Detractors" answer 0 - 6.

When to ask the NPS

The NPS can be asked of your full membership at the same time each year, or even twice a year. We see some clients ask new members the NPS question at the end of a New Member Onboarding campaign. Another option is to ask members a few months before their anniversary dues renewal. This will help you gauge their likelihood of renewing and make you aware of detractors who may need personal outreach ahead of the renewal.

You can also ask the NPS question of event attendees after they have attended an event, such as your annual conference. This could even be done in lieu of a full post-conference survey for a quick snapshot. You receive an overall score and attendees have the space to rant or rave.

The NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage of customers that are Detractors from the percentage of customers that are Promoters. While Passives are not considered in the score, they are often times seen as the greatest opportunity to improve the score as it's easier to turn a Passive into a Promoter than a Detractor. 

The potential score ranges from -100 to +100. A “good” NPS score is one that’s better than your previous NPS. The goal is to see continuous improvement. Many people, however, are always looking for a point of comparison.

NPS is easy to set up in PropFuel since we have an entire question type dedicated to it. The question, along with a 0-10 scale, displays directly in the email, so contacts can simply click a number to submit their response. And the most important part is that you can create workflows that perform a number of actions based on how the respondent answered.

For example, you can branch a promoter to another question asking for a testimonial or simply thank them for their response and provide them with more resources related to the topic (membership, events, etc). A detractor, on the other hand, would receive a branch question asking what your association can do better.

A few things PropFuel can do better than traditional surveys include:

• Cutting down on unnecessary questions that contribute to drop-off, such as name and email address.

• Triggering other questions based on the answer to capture further insight around their score.

• Automating further actions based on the member's answer, such as: alert the right person to follow-up with a phone call or email, ask for a testimonial, and write member data back to your AMS.

• And most importantly, PropFuel NPS campaigns can be designed and deployed with minimal time and effort. And if you have new staff, your PropFuel Client Success Manager will help you build the campaign.

For an NPS check-in, you will want to decide how to interact with the promoters, passives, and detractors to help you set up your action workflows. You can choose to have the follow-up question and responses be exactly the same for all ratings, but we usually recommend a more conversational approach that responds to the individual based on how positively or negatively they’ve rated.

Here is a sample framework for your action workflows.

• Branch question asking for a testimonial about the association or event, or

• Branch question asking for a referral

• Branch question asking if they have feedback for the association, if anything can be done to improve their experience, or why the association/event earned that score, or

• Show text on a landing page thanking them for their feedback and providing some member resources or information about a particular member benefit.

• Branch question asking if they have feedback for the association, if anything can be done to improve their experience, or why the association/event earned that score, or

• Show text on a landing page thanking them for their feedback and providing some member resources or information about a particular member benefit.

• How likely would you be to recommend membership with [association] to a colleague?

• How likely are you to refer a friend or colleague to attend [event]?

• How likely would you be to recommend membership in our association to a friend or colleague?

• How likely would you be to refer a colleague to [association]?

• What could we do better?

• What do you like best about your membership?

• What would drive you to be more likely to recommend us?

• Will you leave a testimonial we can use publicly?

• Do you have someone in mind that you think would value membership with {Association}?

We recommend having the check-in come from a person on your team and use personalization tokens to pull in the first name of your contact. This puts a nice touch on the conversation.

Your team will want to decide what to do once you have the data back from your NPS check-in. Should someone reach out to detractors? Are changes going to be implemented if a concern is brought up repetitively? By being clear of how and when you’ll follow-up in your response, you’ll properly set your contacts’ expectations and ensure they feel that their voice was heard.

Remember: the goal with NPS is to beat your last NPS score. Don't be afraid to talk to members in PropFuel's Conversational Inbox to learn more about how you can better serve them. Turning the negative into a positive is hard, but can be rewarding!

Association for Women in Science sent an NPS check-in to their membership in March 2022.

How likely would you be to recommend an AWIS membership to your friends, colleagues, and/or students? (with 10 being the most likely)

Rating >= 9: Redirected to another question asking for a testimonial and tagged the contact as a Promoter.

Rating < 9 and > 6: Redirected to another question asking what the association could do differently to change their score to a 9 or 10 in the future and tagged the contact as Passive.

Rating <= 6: Redirected to another question asking what are the primary reasons the contact gave that score and tagged the contact as Detractor. An internal alter was also sent to a staff member.

Out of the 4,825 members, 177 (4%) engaged with this campaign. The check-in had an NPS score of 49.

They received 123 testimonials and nearly 70 responses providing constructive feedback.

National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners sent an NPS check-in to their membership in 2021.

Based on your experience as a NAPNAP member, how likely are you to recommend membership to your APRN colleagues?

Rating >= 8: Redirected to another question asking for a testimonial and referral.

Rating = 7: Show text on landing page thanking them for their feedback.

Rating <= 6: Show text on landing page apologizing that they've had a less than stellar membership experience and explaining that their feedback will be reviewed with a possible follow-up. An internal alert was also sent to a staff member.

Out of the 6,999 members, 617 (9%) engaged with this campaign. The check-in had an NPS score of 71.

They received 223 testimonials and nearly 121 referrals.

Florida Society of Association Executives used the NPS question to their 2022 annual conference attendees a few days after the event ended.

How likely are you to recommend attending an FSAE Conference to a colleague?

Rating >= 6: Redirected to another question asking their key takeaway from the event.

Rating < 6: Redirected to another question asking suggestions for future events.

Out of the 441 attendees, 178 (40%) engaged with this campaign. The event had an NPS score of 85.

They received 114 key takeaways.