2020: Engaging with our members
We achieved one of our key aims of engaging more members with our content in 2020 – increasing the number of visitors to our website by more than half.
Online content
We continued to produce high quality content for our members, delivered via our website and shared with them directly on email and social media. This included more feature content we have provided before.
Wellbeing, diversity and inclusion were important themes for the year and we provided features and top tips throughout the year, particularly in the context of Coronavirus.
Up-to-date information on Brexit was also vital for our members and we continued to deliver the latest information via website, social media and email.
We have been keen to offer more content geared towards different cohorts of our membership. This year we launched a new hub for Student members with digital content, including videos, aimed directly at them on topics that include career development and mental wellbeing.
CITMA Review
With most members normally having their CITMA Review delivered to their work addresses, and international deliveries delayed and stopped to many countries – once we were in a lockdown we acted quickly to bring CITMA Review online.
From May onwards we replicated the content of CITMA Review onto our website as accessible web pages and sent each member an email version of the magazine.
This ensured members could still access the content in a new and engaging way.
It also gave us valuable data and for the first time we were able to build up a clear picture of the articles and topics which are of most interest to our members. The six issues we sent via email in 2020 resulted in more than 6,000 article views.
Email communications
Engagement remained strong with our monthly members’ newsletter continuing to provide an excellent outlet to our content.
This year we aimed to have at least one strong feature or article in each edition of the newsletter, to pique members’ interest and ensure they were receiving new information from it.
We also published and promoted feature content that was written specifically for email for the first time.
Growing LinkedIn
Towards the end of the previous year we identified LinkedIn as a growing area in which to engage with our members, who were using the platform in great numbers and more often.
We grew our LinkedIn following by nearly 1,000 during 2020 from 695 at the end of 2019 to 1,625 in 2020.
This is now a key part of our member engagement mix.
We also segmented our social media audience more, focusing our activity on Twitter towards businesses and showcasing the value of intellectual property. We in-turn focused our LinkedIn posts on content that would interest our members and IP professionals. This allows us to build a more engaged following on each platform.
