Member engagement is the sector's biggest challenge

For years, new member acquisition has dominated the conversation. Growth, growth, growth. And it still tops the priority list — the MemberWise Digital Excellence 2026 report confirms new member acquisition as the sector's number one priority, with 44% of membership bodies reporting an increase.

But dig into the same report and a quieter, more urgent story emerges. Measuring member engagement has climbed to become the sector's single biggest challenge, overtaking the long-standing problem of integrating websites and databases.

It's a telling shift. We've spent years getting people through the door, but now the harder question is whether they stay, take part, and feel the membership was worth it.

The engagement gap, in numbers

The 2026 report paints a clear picture:

🔹 Measuring member engagement is now the number one challenge across the sector.

🔹 Just 30% of membership bodies have a formal member engagement strategy in place.

🔹 61% measure engagement in some form, but only 43% personalise the online member experience.

🔹 While acquisition is rising, engagement, participation, and advocacy have stayed roughly the same since the last report.

That last point is what matters most. You can pour effort into acquisition, but if engagement and advocacy stand still, you'll be filling a bucket with a hole in it. And as the report puts it, sustainable growth needs a balance of acquisition and engagement. If you lean too far either way, the other suffers.

Most teams are still measuring engagement the hard way

This is where it gets practical. Of the organisations that do measure engagement, the report shows that they rely heavily on manual or fragmented methods: online surveys (75%), email marketing tools (72%), and social media interaction (52%). Only 43% track engagement through member portal activity, the place where a connected platform can show you what members actually do, not just what they say in a survey.

And more sophisticated approaches barely register. Fewer than 10% of membership bodies use automation tied to engagement scores, content engagement, or signs of potential disengagement. The tools exist; adoption hasn't caught up.

What "doing it properly" looks like

Closing the engagement gap doesn't mean buying another point solution, it means bringing all of your signals together. When your database, website, emails, events, and member portal share one system, engagement stops being something you guess at and instead becomes something you can really see.

That's the difference a connected platform makes. ToucanTech brings these tools into one place, so member activity like event sign-ups, email opens, portal logins, content downloads, and community posts are tracked against the member record automatically. From there, you can segment, personalise, and automate based on real behaviour rather than your best guess.

The General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) saw the impact of getting this right. After moving 60,000+ members across 2,300+ affiliated clubs onto ToucanTech, membership director Melanie Gisler reported:

"We've had more sign-ons in three months than we did in the entire first year with our previous platform." — Melanie Gisler, membership director, GFWC

Three things you can do next

🔹 Write an engagement strategy if you don't have one. A simple, agreed plan is the fastest way to move from reactive to intentional. MemberWise offers free templates.

🔹 Bring your engagement signals into one view. If member behaviour lives in five disconnected tools, you'll never be able to easily act on it. 

🔹 Start small with automation. A single automated journey, a welcome series, a renewal nudge, a re-engagement flow for quiet members, will always beat a perfect strategy you never launch.

The sector has spent years cracking acquisition. The data says engagement is the nut still to crack. The organisations that close that gap first will be the ones that grow sustainably.

See member engagement in one place with ToucanTech

ToucanTech brings your database, website, emails, events, and member portal into one connected platform — so engagement becomes something you can measure, segment, and act on, not guess at.

Read the full MemberWise Digital Excellence 2026 report, or book a demo to see how membership teams use ToucanTech to close the engagement gap.