March 2024 Roundtable on Student Member Engagement
The presentation slides are available as an attachment at the end of this article.
This roundtable focused on engaging student members across their lifecycle—from onboarding and profile hygiene to programming, events, renewals, and win-back. The session opened with Dave Will welcoming many new faces and emphasizing conversational, discussion-style participation. The core challenge surfaced early: students move quickly, change emails and timelines, and often disengage at graduation. Participants highlighted goals such as gathering new ideas, improving response rates, demonstrating value, and converting students to full members. A recurring theme was reducing friction and personalizing communication, shifting from broadcast emails to short, conversational prompts that ask one question, capture intent, and take immediate action.
A significant portion of the discussion examined keeping student data fresh, particularly graduation dates, university changes, and post-graduation contact emails. Examples included evergreen campaigns that annually confirm graduation dates, update universities, and collect personal email addresses for post-graduation communication. Organizations reported strong response rates by framing questions as helpful, “what’s in it for you” moments and automatically writing back updates to their AMS. The group repeatedly returned to automation as a lever for overextended teams: embed links that capture answers without forcing logins, test conversational prompts versus “update your profile” emails, and use PropFuel’s write-backs and list features to streamline follow-up.
On onboarding and engagement, participants discussed whether to segment students from general member journeys. Several noted that student needs differ meaningfully from professionals, so tailoring questions, timing, and benefits increases relevance and retention. Strategies included starting with a core onboarding flow and cloning it for student-specific tweaks, focusing early on “where are you in your journey?” and “what’s your primary goal?”, and using monthly touchpoints over the first six to eight months to reinforce benefits, invite to programs (e.g., student ambassador roles), and ensure students don’t “forget” about a free membership. Engagement rates for student campaigns were notably high when communications were concise, conversational, and immediately useful. New features like campaign activity-based list building were highlighted for measuring multi-step campaign engagement.
Programming and events featured practical, low-friction signups. Teams asked students if they wanted to “save a spot” with a one-click “yes, register me” option, with staff handling the backend registration. This approach reduced drop-off and boosted attendance for career fairs and workshops. Other popular engagement topics included internships, scholarships, exam prep, and volunteer roles—especially when “maybe, I need more info” paths clarified expectations before commitment. The conversation also explored pulse checks for growth ideas, like using student feedback to greenlight channels such as TikTok and inviting willing participants to get involved in content.
The renewal and conversion segment emphasized timing and empathy. Proactive student renewal campaigns asked intent to renew and why/why not; post-lapse campaigns began with helpful context—“where are you now?”—and then mapped benefits to the student’s stage before presenting renewal actions. Many lapsed students simply “hadn’t gotten to it,” underscoring the value of short, targeted nudges over generic reminders. Win-back tactics combined PropFuel “hot lead” signals with personal outreach for those indicating intent, leading to double-digit rejoin rates over a year. Collecting “no” responses also served list hygiene, excluding those who had changed careers or moved out of state, and reducing noise.
Throughout, attendees stressed a conversational mindset: write as if speaking face-to-face, ask one clear question, explain why you’re asking, and act immediately on the answer. Blueprints for student onboarding and renewals were recommended for speed, with teams encouraged to start small, measure, and iterate. SMS was noted as an emerging complement, using short links to embedded check-ins for data capture and automated follow-up. The session closed by inviting future roundtable topics and reinforcing the advantage of evergreen campaigns, automation, and student-centered messaging to drive engagement and long-term conversion.