Peter Griffin
Membership director joins board
by Kate Tilley
IPEd has appointed a board director responsible for membership.
Pete Griffin, General Manager and deputy CEO of the Real Estate Institute of NSW (REINSW), brings to IPEd a depth of knowledge about membership recruitment and retention, plus skills across business operational areas including marketing and communications, training and events, online retail, finance, HR and IT.
His experience includes attending all REINSW Board meetings over the past 13 years and participating in board sub-committees on strategic planning, professionalism, diversity and office renovations. He has served on the Board of the Australian Marketing Institute and is a director of Quicontracts Pty Ltd.
At REINSW, Pete has direct responsibility for membership, working closely with the Membership Manager. Pete told Gatherings: ‘We have achieved some great things, including the strongest membership growth in 10 years, current retention rates of 90 per cent, and innovative work in measuring and driving member engagement using a CRM, dashboards of agreed engagement measures and targeted communications to disengaged segments of the membership’.
IPEd Chair Ruth Davies says Pete is a welcome addition to the Board. ‘His appointment is part of the strategic plan to support a thriving membership, so, as our Membership Director, he will develop a strategy to attract and retain members by considering specific areas, such as government, education and industry, and further developing the benefits program for members.’
Pete, who is a Certified Practising Marketer and a Chartered Accountant, also has industry experience that is relevant to our membership.
In 2004 and 2005, he was general manager of a publishing company that specialised in designing and producing newsletters for mortgage brokers.
In early 2006, Pete founded his own publishing business, Your Newsletters, that produced email and print newsletters for mortgage brokers to distribute to their contacts. After joining REINSW in 2007, he developed Your Newsletters into a profitable part-time business that he continued operating until March 2012.
Pete told Gatherings the IPEd role piqued his interest because he really enjoys the membership and marketing aspects of his REINSW job. He drills down into all aspects of the lifecycle of a member, from recruitment to onboarding, engagement and retention.
He is keen to work on answering a host of questions about how IPEd currently recruits and retains members.
‘What does IPEd offer that appeals to members, and what else could be important? What are the differences between membership segments? What is important to them now? What was perhaps appealing a few years ago but may not be relevant now?’
Pete plans a few straw polls to pick up themes about how the membership thinks, and says effective communication with the membership can be significant in retention rates.
Pete and his wife Elaine met at university and have been married for 35 years. They emigrated to Australia from the United Kingdom in 1994.
They have three daughters, one of whom, Alice, is an editor. Pete says IPEd must ensure it appeals to the younger generation and Alice will be ‘crash testing’ some of his ideas about how to expand membership among her age group.
Elaine and Pete enjoy bushwalking and Pete plays soccer in an over-45s side. He’s been playing with the same team for more than 20 years, after it was established to give the dads at his daughters’ school an opportunity to socialise together.
The girls have long left school, but Pete is still kicking goals for his team and he plans to do that for IPEd, too.
