LRV

How LRV saved costs and increased member retention with a digital platform.

LRV is the leading riding association in Flanders. It unites horse-riding aficionados and affiliated riding clubs on all levels in the shared experience of their common passion. The LRV’s full-time operations and admin department provides additional support to member clubs and individual riders.

The Case

Challenge

Increasing member lifetime value and cost-effectively seizing digital opportunities for long-term value.

Solution

A strategic workshop for a long-term strategy and member journey with four central themes: automation, personalization, community-building, and digital presence.

Result

Overarching strategy for the positioning of the LRV as a modern member association, the phased implementation for immediate impact, and future plans for the further development of a member association 3.0.

2 major questions

LRV found itself facing a number of business challenges that are typical of membership organizations on their path towards digitalization:

Member acquisition and retention

Membership organizations can only exist by virtue of their members. LRV is a typical umbrella organization in the sense that close contact with its local riding clubs and practical support for their respective events and member activities are key. Direct interaction with riders on an individual level, on the other hand, is far more limited. Over time, this had led to a decrease in the membership base, in particular amongst younger members. Increasing membership levels and member lifetime value - the membership organizations’ equivalent of CLV - would prove to be key.

Cost management

High levels of automation make for easy administration and LRV was fully aware of this potential. Executing on this idea in practice, however, proved to be rather complex: the organization wanted to capitalize on digital opportunities in a way that would be cost-efficient and provide long-term value.

Strategic workshops

Together with the LRV stakeholders, the Dropsolid Strategy Team set to work on devising a sustainable long-term strategy. The subsequent strategy workshops led to an improved business case and clear mission: LRV would work towards being regarded as indispensable for anyone in the horseback riding community. Members would have to feel more welcome than ever before and be presented with added value throughout every step of their riding journey, which would lead to an increase in new memberships. Lowering acquisition costs and increasing member lifetime value would prove key.

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Member Journey as guide

The member journey as outlined above played an important role throughout the workshop series. This framework helps membership organizations to convert potential members into true advocates. The digital strategy that we devised during the workshops relies on a scalable, Dropsolid Experience Cloud-based website that enables step-by-step execution of a long-term digital roadmap.

Strategic discussions revolved around four key topics:

Automation. This minimizes internal overhead costs for LRV and provides a smoother user experience for visitors.
Personalization. A tailor-made, individual experience increases visitor satisfaction and improves overall member lifetime value.
Community building. A close-knit community feeling boosts member retention.
Digital presence. Different online channels serve specific target groups.

The extensive strategic thinking and reflection during the initial workshop stage resulted in much more than just an excellent digital strategy, architecture set-up and web design. LRV is now fully prepared to execute on its high-level business strategy and long-term goals. This will include specific campaigns that add instant value to the organization. Gamification campaigns, data centralization and improved community building will be part of the next steps. The Dropsolid Platform is the scalable driving force that powers these campaigns.

Arthur Tanghe - Technical Director

In practice

Using the agile development methodology, the Dropsolid team wasted no time in implemented the following steps:

A website built on the foundations of the Dropsolid Experience Cloud. This digital environment went live only a few weeks after the strategy workshops had been finished.
Implementation of a club search module, including landing pages for each affiliated riding club.
A flexibele technical set-up. This allows for easy integration of new functions into the existing technology, including schedules for competitions, club rankings and member management by affiliated clubs.

Agile-first

Our step-by-step and agile-first approach helped to prioritize and focus on implementing solutions with the highest ROI first, while keeping the budget in check. This ensures a maximum Return on Experience or ROX.

Stakeholder meetings, focused on performance metrics,

Addressing urgent problems with practical digital solutions,

Without losing focus on the end goal of a digital membership experience with maximum ROX.

The Result

The digital track provided added value on a number of different levels:

Overall strategy for LRV’s positioning as a modern, digital-first membership organization,

Step-by-step execution for immediate impact,

Plans for the further development of a membership organization 3.0, depending on the available budget at every stage.

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