Plan Your Farm Communications with the CSA Membership Cycle

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The CSA Membership Cycle is a tool we built with our 50+ CSA farm community using HarvestHand CSA software to help us all think about how we are building our CSA membership and maintain the overview of our various membership activities. It's adapted for CSA's from one of the most successful marketing strategies of the 21st century called Inbound Marketing. Instead of pushy advertising and selling, Inbound Marketing focuses on providing quality, educational content that pulls customers to where they want to be naturally- with your farm community. Every year, the CSA Membership Cycle helps us to determine what worked and what we could improve in order to save time, grow sales, retain members, and strengthen our community. We hope that you will find it helpful your community also. Feel free to print it and put it on the office wall (here's a printable pdf file) or use it to review your membership communications with your team.
As you you review your year and look to the next, have a look at the membership cycle above and ask yourself these questions:
 
  1. Is there one area in the membership cycle that works really well for our community? How can we make it easier to do more of what works?
  2. Which areas could we improve?
  3. How can we communicate better with our membership?
  4. How can we get more of our team onboard to share the responsibility of growing and supporting members?
  5. When it comes to growing and supporting my membership, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

We find it's good to make a list of possibilities in a table under each heading (Attract, Education etc.) and sub-heading (Blog & website, Social Media etc.) then review it with our team or mentor. It's different for every community. Since it's our mission to support farms in becoming more profitable, help people eat better, and strengthen food communities, feel free to reach out 1-866-542-4305 or email duncan@harvesthand.com to review your ideas list and we can share what works for farms in our community and here at Taproot Farms (Fun fact: Taproot has grown from 50-500 members and sells all shares within a few weeks every year). You're welcome to just call, or if you would like to share your ideas list first, you can schedule a meeting here:

Schedule a Free Call to Discuss Your Membership Communications   

 


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