Inside the engagement score behind the 2026 renewal cycle

Membership Engagement Manager Declan Moorfield spent early 2026 building a model that scores how engaged each of NANA's more than 750 member organizations is, based on what they actually do rather than what they say when they renew. By the time the 2026 renewal cycle opened, the score was driving which members got a call first.

Moorfield's model pulls together signals NANA already collects but had never combined: event attendance, learning-catalog logins, chapter roundtable participation, and how recently a member organization updated its named contacts. Each signal is weighted and rolled into a single score per member organization, refreshed monthly.

"A member who hasn't logged into anything in eight months isn't lapsed yet, but they're not engaged either," Moorfield said. "The renewal notice was the first time we'd talk to them about it, and by then it was often too late to do anything but ask them to sign the check."

The score reorganized how the membership team spent the 120-day renewal cycle. Instead of contacting every member in the same order, staff worked down the list from lowest engagement score first, while the highest-scoring members received a lighter-touch renewal notice.

• Member organizations with a low engagement score were roughly three times as likely to require more than one renewal follow-up call

• Chapter roundtable attendance was the single strongest predictor of renewal, ahead of learning-catalog use

• A stale contact list — no update to a member's named staff contact in over a year — was itself a warning sign, independent of engagement activity

Director of Data and Analytics Mei-Lin Harbaugh, who teaches NANA's engagement-scoring course, reviewed Moorfield's model before the 2026 cycle launched. "The mistake most associations make is scoring engagement the same way for every member," she said. "A 3,300-member council and a 260-member coalition don't generate the same volume of activity, so the score has to be relative to what's normal for an organization that size."

Moorfield said the hardest part of building the model wasn't the scoring logic itself but deciding what to do with a low score once the team had it. Early drafts flagged at-risk members without any recommended next step, which staff found more discouraging than useful. The version that shipped for the 2026 cycle pairs every low score with a specific suggested outreach instead: a call about an unused benefit, an invitation to a chapter event the member hasn't attended, or a check-in with a contact who hasn't logged in recently, rather than a generic renewal reminder.

Moorfield said the biggest surprise wasn't which signal predicted renewal best, but how much a low score could be reversed once staff had a reason to reach out that wasn't just "please renew." A member organization flagged as low-engagement in March, then invited to a chapter roundtable it had never attended, was noticeably more likely to renew without a second follow-up call than one that received only a standard notice.

Moorfield's team is refining the model for the next renewal cycle and has published its methodology as the Member Engagement Scoring Workbook, so member associations can build a similar score for their own members. Harbaugh's course, Member Engagement Scoring, covers the same approach for association staff who want to build it themselves.