How SAE International Unified Member and Volunteer Engagement

When member and volunteer engagement are treated as separate experiences, the value of belonging gets lost in the gap. Here's how we fixed that at SAE International — and what it did for acquisition and retention.

The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

When an organization struggles with member acquisition or renewal, the instinct is usually to look at the marketing. Are we reaching the right people? Is the messaging landing? Do we need a better offer?

Those are legitimate questions. But at SAE International — the world's largest technical mobility organization, with more than 200,000 members — the issue wasn't the marketing. It was the structure underneath it.

Member engagement and volunteer engagement were being managed as two separate experiences. Someone who joined as a member and later became a volunteer was navigating two disconnected journeys with inconsistent messaging, different touchpoints, and no unified sense of what their long-term relationship with SAE could look like.

The result was predictable: members who were active in one dimension of the organization didn't necessarily feel connected to the whole. And for people who were considering joining — or deciding whether to renew — it was hard to see the full picture of what belonging actually offered.

Diagnosing Before Designing

Before we could fix the journey, we needed to understand it clearly. Working with an external marketing partner, I led an internal effort to map how members and volunteers were actually experiencing the organization — not how we assumed they were.

That process surfaced the structural gap quickly. The two audiences were being communicated to in silos, which meant the natural progression from member to engaged volunteer to long-term advocate was never made explicit. People weren't being shown where they fit or what was possible. They were left to figure it out on their own — and many didn't.

The diagnosis pointed directly at what needed to change: we didn't need more campaigns. We needed a connected engagement framework that reflected the full arc of what membership at SAE could become.

Building a Unified Engagement Framework

The work that followed centered on two things: reframing how we visualized and communicated the member journey, and updating the digital experience to reflect that reframing.

On the strategic side, we developed a unified engagement matrix that connected membership benefits, volunteer opportunities, and professional development into a single, coherent picture. This wasn't just a visual asset — it was a strategic tool. It gave internal teams a shared way of talking about member value, and it gave prospective and current members a clear sense of how their relationship with SAE could grow over time.

On the digital side, we updated the membership page on SAE's website to mirror that framework. The goal was to make sure that someone landing on the page for the first time — or returning to consider renewal — encountered a digital experience that matched the full depth of what the organization offered, not just a list of benefits and a join button.

Both pieces of work were developed collaboratively. My role was to drive the internal strategic direction, align stakeholders across the organization, and ensure that what we built reflected what members and volunteers actually needed — not just what was easiest to execute.

The Results

The changes weren't cosmetic, and the outcomes reflected that.

• 30% increase in new member sign-ups

• 25% reduction in member attrition

• A more consistent internal narrative around member value — one that teams across the organization could actually use

  
  

The attrition number is the one I think about most. Reducing churn by a quarter isn't something you achieve by sending better emails. It happens when people understand the value of what they have — and feel like the organization sees them as more than a renewal transaction.

What Transferred

The structural lesson from this work applies well beyond associations. Any organization where different customer segments, product lines, or lifecycle stages are managed in silos is likely creating the same kind of invisible friction — a gap between what's being offered and what customers are able to perceive and act on.

The fix is rarely a new campaign. It's usually a clearer map.

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Dealing with engagement drop-off or a member and customer experience that feels disconnected? [Get in touch] — this is exactly the kind of structural problem I help organizations work through.

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Related posts:

• [Engagement Design & Journey Mapping] (pillar page)

• [Turning Customer Research Into Ideas Worth Building]

• [Designing Engagement Journeys That Reduce Churn and Build Loyalty] (coming soon)