7 Ideas to Engage Your ERG Membership

This week I had several conversations with employee resource group (ERG) leaders, and they got me thinking...

Firstly, ERG leaders are amazing. Aren’t they?

Those of you out there reading this. Thank you. Truly, thank you.

In addition to doing your day job, you are taking that extra time to create an environment where you and your fellow peers can feel seen and supported and part of a larger community. You deserve sincere recognition for all that you do.

Here’s the other thing speaking to those ERG leaders got me thinking:

It’s so clear that doing it all alone is not sustainable. Yet, whether it’s due to a lack of leadership support or due to difficulties growing the membership, many ERG leaders are making magic happen with very few resources.

You know, one of my most formative experiences growing up took place in high school when I became very active in student government.

I went to a high school with heavy security and gang violence, little student engagement, and chronic absenteeism. In fact, it was that experience in high school that first inspired me to pursue teaching out of college, which has given me many skills I still use to this day.

My high school days were principally defined by my involvement in student government.

A handful of us would come together every week to plan events and try to make our school more enjoyable for everyone. Looking back, it seems many of the strategies we used to become a force in our high school community are also some of the strategies I see some of the most successful ERG leaders using to garner more support from leadership and to grow their memberships.

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I’ve listed seven of them below, just in case you’d find them helpful.

• Involving cross-functional and influential colleagues.

  • Make it a point to pull together a cross-functional group of planners. You get bonus points if those planners are also quite active within their corner of the business. Even if they play a small role, if you get them to help in the planning of relevant events, programs, and initiatives, they will be more likely to share that event or initiative with their internal network, broadening the reach of your work and membership.

• Make information about your upcoming events and initiatives easy for everyone (even leaders) to share.

  • Consider creating a “promotion package” for each of your initiatives. Include digital flyers, talking points, email blurbs, and PowerPoint slides that can be easily picked and plopped into team meetings, team email blasts, or team presentations.

• Giving attendees to your event “homework.”

  • Just before you wrap up your event, program or initiative, have attendees document 1-2 learnings they will be taking with them into their daily personal or professional lives. Then suggest that they share these takeaways with at least one person and invite that person to the next event.

• Administer surveys after each event/initiative.

  • Gather data after every event. Make it quick and easy but also informative by asking folks to share what they liked most and what they think can be improved about the experience they had with your ERG. This quick feedback can go a long way to helping you narrow your focus and cater especially to your members and their needs.

• Launch an attendee raffle and give away.

  • Consider promoting a give away to attendees of specific events. These raffles can be as easy as a random selection in an excel spreadsheet, but they can encourage attendance as folks recognize that they might win a fun item of swag or a gift card.

• Incorporate attendance & volunteer shoutouts.

  • When people attend multiple events for your ERG or when people who are not named leaders of your ERG volunteer to help, consider doing shoutouts at the beginning of an event or at the initiative’s launch meeting, highlighting the attendance streak or participation of your members. Shoutouts can also be made in your ERG newsletter or in your membership-wide meetings. Make it special by accompanying shoutouts with exclusive SWAG.

• Incorporate metric-driven outcomes into your membership meetings.

  • Many ERGs host meetings with their general membership. Many of these meetings feature images to celebrate recent events and activities. Consider also including metrics of impact. For example, perhaps at a recent community service event you were able to take pictures of the great work you did, but what was your group’s quantifiable impact? How many people did your members help feed? How many gifts for children did your membership collect and deliver? Incorporating this language can be motivating for some of your members and help them stay or become more involved.

Yes, believe it or not, in high school, we were using variations of these strategies to get our otherwise disengaged peers involved and excited. We would invite students from different social circles to help plan. We would get the popular kids in the school to “give us advice.” And we would share info with everyone in every format we could think of to help us promote everything we did.

Okay... I know we’re not in high school. And I would never proport to minimize the work or the challenges facing your ERGs.

That said, I’ve seen the above strategies work for ERG leaders at a variety of companies, so if anything jumps out at you as being an area of opportunity, I hope you’re able to run with it.

Again, to all the ERG leaders out there, keep up the amazing work.

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