Associations and society publishers spend a lot of energy getting people to show up.

They publish useful content, promote events, send emails, and invest in campaigns designed to bring people back to their websites. But getting someone to show up is only part of the job. The harder question is what happens once they are there. 

For IFT, the global professional home for food science and technology experts, saw that some of its best growth opportunities were already walking through the digital front door. Food science professionals regularly visited the site for editorial content, industry resources, and information about IFT FIRST, its annual gathering for the food science and innovation community. 

IFT saw an opportunity to make those visits work harder.

Instead of treating the website as the end point of a campaign, the team began thinking about it as the start of the next interaction.

The Opportunity: Turn Interest Into a Next Step  

IFT had two important growth goals: drive registrations for IFT FIRST and strengthen membership growth and retention.

In both cases, timing was everything.

Someone reading about IFT FIRST was already closer to registration than someone seeing a generic promotion elsewhere. A member nearing expiration was in a very different moment from a lapsed member, a student preparing to move into a new membership tier, or an event attendee who had never joined at all.

IFT’s existing channels could reach all of those people. What the team wanted was a better way to respond while interest was already high.

Email and paid media could bring someone to the site. The website itself could help move them forward from there.

The Strategy: Turn Audience Signals Into Relevant Next Steps

IFT used Alchemist Engage to deliver targeted calls to action based on real-time audience signals, including:

  • Content interests
  • Event interest
  • Membership status
  • Membership expiration timeline
  • Professional segment or career stage

This allowed IFT to treat website visitors as distinct audiences with distinct needs, rather than one broad group. 

A student approaching graduation and a lapsed professional member might land on the same page, but they don’t need the same message. Someone reading about IFT FIRST doesn’t need another generic awareness campaign. They needed a useful next step while the event was already on their mind.

The team also built always-on membership campaigns using rolling audiences. As members entered their renewal window, they automatically became eligible for the appropriate message.

That meant less repeated campaign setup for the IFT team and better timing for the audience.

The Results

The clearest proof came through IFT FIRST 2026.

Rather than relying only on external channels to bring prospective attendees back to a registration page, IFT could convert interest while people were already engaging with the organization online.

Across the campaign, Alchemist Engage generated approximately 1,500 clicks from 44,558 impressions and contributed to 282 attributed event registrations.

That meant hundreds of people didn’t just notice a campaign. They went from browsing IFT content to registering for its flagship annual event.

And the targeting mattered. 138 of those attributed registrations came from regular non-member campaigns alone, giving IFT a way to turn engagement from people outside its existing membership base into measurable event participation. Additional registrations came from flash sales, member campaigns, geographic targeting, and other audience-specific efforts.

The same approach supported IFT’s ongoing membership work.

Always-on renewal campaigns achieved 22.8% and 25.6% click-through rates, giving the team a reliable way to reach members at the point when renewal was actually relevant, without rebuilding the campaign over and over again.

The result wasn’t just stronger campaign performance. It was a more useful role for the website itself: helping IFT turn existing audience attention into registration, renewal, and growth.

 

Why It Worked

  • IFT reached people while interest was already high. Campaigns appeared in the context of what visitors were already doing, making the next step feel relevant rather than interruptive.
  • The targeting reflected real audience differences. IFT could tailor the ask to the person, rather than forcing every visitor into the same campaign journey.
  • Always-on campaigns made good timing repeatable. Rolling audiences meant the team did not have to manually catch every membership milestone for the strategy to work.

Associations and publishers will always need to grow their audiences. But IFT’s experience points to an equally important question: Once you have someone’s attention, are you making the most of it?

With Alchemist Engage, IFT made sure more of those moments led somewhere.

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