With overall membership stuck at 40,000 for several years and a new strategic goal to grow that number by 25 percent by 2020, the Emergency Nurses Association decided to take a close look at its membership materials across the board.

ENA found that its existing materials, which had not been redesigned in more than five years, did not reflect the organization’s mission statement—or the actual work that its members performed. So, it set out to redo its application, onboarding, renewal, and recruitment materials.

“It was clear that our members, and prospective members, did not see themselves or their profession in those older materials,” says Bridget Krause, ENA’s director of member relations. “We wanted them to see themselves in what we sent to them, make it as easy as possible for them to join or renew, and make sure that the materials accurately reflected the field of emergency nursing.”

New Materials Reflect Changing Profession

An ER nurse must deal with a wide range of situations on any given day, from ankle sprains and cases of the flu to extreme trauma and even mass casualty events. According to Krause, the emergency nursing profession has changed significantly over the last several years. Nurses used to have to work in other departments before transferring to the emergency room.

It was clear that our members, and prospective members, did not see themselves or their profession in those older materials.
—Bridget Krause, Emergency Nurses Association

“But now, because of nursing shortages, hospitals are more open to allowing new college graduates to choose to go straight into emergency nursing,” says Krause. So ENA’s materials also needed to speak to a broader spectrum of members and potential members, from recent graduates to senior career professionals.

ENA began by tossing old imagery that featured a red brick path road—what Krause describes as a “road to nowhere”—in favor of a more modern look that incorporated less of ENA’s primary purple color and emphasized secondary colors to catch the eye. ENA also changed the content in several ways:

• Images now feature actual members at work rather than stock photos.
• Text was streamlined for a membership base who has very little time to absorb information unrelated to its daily (or nightly) responsibilities.
• The membership application is now simpler and easier to fill out, with a pre-populated suggested donation amount.

“We also worked with an outside printer to create a shell that limits content edits but allows flexibility in modifying our messages throughout the year,” says Krause.

Immediate Impact Across the Board

After ENA debuted the new materials in 2016, the organization saw immediate results. After just one year, membership hit a record high of 42,395—and ENA achieved 4 percent overall growth in new members. Plus, the number of members renewing on or before their expiration date went from an average of 28 percent to an average of 38 percent, and retention rates grew from 77 percent to 81 percent. Even better: In the first two months of implementation, donations to the ENA Foundation through the join-and-renewal process surpassed total giving from the previous year.

Those results also earned ENA a 2017 Gold Circle Award from ASAE in the rebranding category.

“From the very beginning, we kept our members front of mind, not from a ‘this looks cool’ perspective, but from a ‘what will our members respond to’ perspective,” says Krause.  “That’s why we saw such improvements so quickly.”