Even if you’re comfortable outsourcing certain aspects of your business, you may hesitate to hire a virtual assistant to help with your membership program.
Your subscribers and members are your superfans, and in many cases you want interactions with them to feel personal and high-touch. Entrusting membership management work to a VA can feel … risky. Even dishonest, if you promise your members they’ll get more access to YOU.
The flip side, of course, is that you want member access to be valuable, energizing, and memorable for your customers. If you’re tapped-out and exhausted when you interact with them, the membership becomes less appealing. If the content you share with members is sub-par, they’re unlikely to renew.
If, instead, you choose to share the workload with a VA to create more balance, you can ensure that when you participate or share ideas, you’re fully engaged and working at 100%!
Of course, memberships take many forms. Yours may be more about tapping a library of existing resources or connecting your customers to each other. But regardless of the format, when you hire a virtual assistant to help you manage your membership program, you position yourself to make current members happier and new members more excited to join.
Here’s how to make sure your membership-centric collaboration works seamlessly:
Before you hire a virtual assistant, decide what kind of help you need
Don’t dive in too soon!
You need to know exactly which aspects of your membership program you want your VA to support. Get super clear on what you need help with.
- Do you want to hire a virtual assistant to write content for your members?
- Is community management something you’re ready to hand off?
- Need a VA to help with the technology or administrative aspects of your membership?
- More than one of these?
To make the right hire, you must first have your ducks in a row. Define your priorities before you reach out to potential VAs.
Decide if you’ll hire a virtual assistant who’s a specialist or a generalist
Speaking of finding the perfect VA for your needs, you’ll also want to consider the skill sets and qualifications you need to get this work done right.
Community management is something that a generalist VA could handle, but if you need help with tricky tech issues you’re safer seeking a specialist. Bear in mind that specialists can often handle more complex projects faster, but they’re more expensive.
Generalist VAs are frequently cheaper and can do a little bit of everything … but might not be capable of troubleshooting complex membership issues.
You don’t want to hire a virtual assistant who lacks the experience and expertise you require. That’s setting you BOTH up for disappointment!
Consider hiring a virtual assistant from within your membership
My last and most important tip?
Since you’re looking for someone to help keep your membership program lively, active, and engaging, scout for the perfect VA among your existing members!
Most people in this group already know the ins and outs of your membership, and members are your best evangelists
If you can hire a virtual assistant who is also a member, you’ll get baked-in expertise and loyalty right off the bat. Not only that, members are your best resource for additions and improvements to the program itself.
Your new VA can help with the current workload, and also give insights into how to make the membership even better.
Any time you hire a virtual assistant, you’re taking a leap of faith. Outsourcing work to a freelancer means entrusting elements of your business to someone new, and that can be uncomfortable at first.
But when it comes to getting support with your membership program, these three tips will make the process about 1,000 times easier. They’ll position you to find the perfect VA to both maintain and improve the offering you’ve worked so hard to build!
