PWN Membership During CoVid-19

I had a Zoom chat recently with Carina Furlong, co-President of PWN Global and she suggested I write a short article for the newsletter on the “PWN Membership Experience and how it has been impacted by Covid-19”.  Hmmmm!! – my mind started racing and I had to go away to a quiet place to try to weave all those random thoughts in my head into a coherent thread.

As PWN Global Head of Membership Experience, I exchange with members and our City Network Membership Managers regularly, and I still felt unable to speak for all in this article. Yet, I realised that as a member of PWN, I could speak for myself. 

So how did my membership experience change because of Covid-19?

Covid-19 really showed up on my radar when my husband and I had to make a mad drive back home from Nice to Zurich, where we live and work, before the border between France and Switzerland closed. We slipped over the border the night before, and breathed a collective sigh of relief at our desks. The following morning, we woke to the news that those European countries that had not already done so, also went into lockdown. And so, this things started to get real.....

Studies of happiness tell us that on the whole, there are three things that really matter to us :

• personal growth
• connecting to people, and
• contributing to the community. 

Our City Networks make sure these elements are the core building blocks of their activities. As a result, many non-members that attend an event and experience our networks in person, sign-up then and there to join their respective PWN city network. 

So, not wanting to be alone and scared in front of the nightly news, it was reassuring to me to see city network events continue to populate the PWN Global calendar.  Granted, the events were no longer "in person",  but I knew that I could still “learn, connect and share” with fellow members online, and that personally was very moving to me. 

In my PWN Global role, a real added bonus to the whole crisis has been witnessing the uplift of members from around the world, dialling in to join city network events that previously they had not been able to access, because of their lack of physical proximity. All of a sudden, the global networking element, listed as a 'member benefit' when joining PWN became something very possible and real.

Membership is not a new concept (think tribes, clans, guilds etc) and our need for community is more acute than ever, particularly as the socio-economic impact of the virus is affecting women the most.  Our shared purpose of advancing women in their careers, with the goal to achieving gender balanced leadership in business and society, is more relevant than ever.  

In the last six months membership organisations like ourselves have proved that we can adapt to a rapidly changing landscape.  As this landscape becomes the "new-normal" for the foreseeable future (and beyond) we will need our membership experience to reflect that. We are already seeing networks such as PWN Zagreb starting to experiment with hybrid event delivery, where half of the audience is online and the other half in person. Through a savvy mix of technology, empathy, creativity and fun we know we can move our network into the future of associations!  Our volunteers, members, partners and supporters make up the community that will build it!

I'm fascinated to hear how it has been for you. If you are interested in sharing your personal stories and your experience of being a PWN member, I'd love to hear your suggestions. Please do get in contact with me, so we can continue to grow the experience to suit your new normal. 

Date: Oct 2020

Author: Karin Trivière, Head of Membership Experience, PWN Global

Copy Editor: Rebecca Fountain, Head of Marketing and Communications, PWN Global