Erik Schonher

Erik is an experienced strategic planner and a seasoned tactician who mixes direct marketing, media placement, branding, creative design, and web marketing into multi-channel campaigns. He has held corporate leadership positions in publishing and consumer products and founded and managed his own highly successful direct marketing agency.

As vice president at Marketing General Inc, Erik has multiple responsibilities and oversees MGI Research as well as provides strategic and tactical marketing services for a number of associations that includes:

• American Health Information Management Association
• Marketing Research Association
• CoreNet
• American Society of Clinical Oncology
• American Association of Orthopedic Executives

Additionally, he manages and authors production of the annual Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report,, the only annual, in-depth review of its kind to examine the practices associations commonly use to recruit new members, retain current ones, and reinstate those who have lapsed to identify best practices for individual membership and trade membership organizations.

Mr. Schonher regularly presents at meetings and conferences including the ASAE’s Annual Conference & Exposition, Marketing, Membership and Communications Conference and GreatIdeas!., Keynote Speaker for the 2015 NCSAE Annual Conference, Chicago Forum’s Annual Conference and Holiday Conference. He is the author of many professional articles and MGI white papers and hosts a blog that examines membership marketing best practices, research and analysis, communication theories, and sales techniques.

Erik earned his Bachelor of Science from SUNY Fredonia and a Masters of Business Administration in Managerial Marketing and Management Information Systems from the Lubin Graduate School of Business at Pace University.