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Medical Association Faces Membership Challenges
The Situation:
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Ohio State Medical Association
 Challenge: how to best build & maintain membership in the face of competition
 Solution: redesign sales & media to pull instead of push communications and membership
Outcome: slow attrition, enhance image, create media buzz |
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OSMA is a volunteer (not mandatory) physician association. For decades OSMA enjoyed a virtual monopoly. However, membership began to erode significantly as membership fees increased, and as specialty medical associations began to become more popular with physicians.
Many physicians perceived OSMA to be a “general” association devoted to lobbying and thought OSMA had become less effective in lobbying and in providing other meaningful services. (Malpractice insurance fees were the main pain point and “hot button” complaint point with physicians.)
Implications:OSMA's membership base would continue to erode, negatively affecting the cost of service to existing members. This would in turn cause OSMA to have to raise membership fees further, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Solution:We conducted research throughout Ohio with physicians (in person, by mail, and by telephone). We included members and non-members alike.
We discovered, for example, that very few physicians read emails, e-newsletters, and printed materials from OSMA, so were not hearing the OSMA messages about effective lobbying “wins.”
We made several recommendations, including:
- Recruit influential physicians to tell the OSMA story
- Reconfigure the OSMA membership sales and communications group so that OSMAs efforts would be “pulled by” physicians (rather than having so much emphasis on "push" communications)
- Train sales rep in pharmaceutical sales techniques
- Single issue communications for hard-hitting impact (instead of: “here are the 100 things we do for you”)
- Create a media campaign about malpractice efforts and results
Outcome: OSMA was able to slow the attrition of membership, enhance its image with non-members, and create a media buzz which augmented its lobbying success. The AMA (national association) lauded OSMA as the leader among all states in creative and effective response to what had been a national trend of downward membership.
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