Association Recommendations and Insights for 2022

 Associations Evolve: 2022 and Beyond was just released under the editorial leadership of Belinda Moore. The publication includes articles from  50 leaders in the global association community. I was honored to be included in the group. With over 100 pages of content, I thought it might be helpful to share some selected quotes from the publication. Of course, I recommend downloading the entire document with this link. 

Here are some highlights from Associations Evolve.

"Associations who embraced the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to innovate are already seeing benefits. Many are reporting increased engagement, higher retention rates, and overall membership growth. The [COVID] crisis proved associations can adapt...  When provided with the impetus for change – and the freedom to act - associations were very capable of making the changes needed to advance themselves and their members." Belinda Moore. 

“All member markets are dynamic, and over time most have undergone significant change—without corresponding changes at the association.” Mary Byers, CAE, and Harrison Coerver

“If you want to manage change and avoid disruption, think like a futurist. That means avoiding the trap of relying too heavily on your past experience when making decisions for the future.” Gihan Perera

“Being forced to quickly learn how to run a virtual conference was not just about doing demos with virtual meeting platforms—it was an acceleration of an irreversible trend that has been happening for a long time that we call digital transformation.” Maddie Grant

“People don’t quit jobs; they quit people. If your culture supports people bringing their whole selves to work and your culture is one of belonging, your employee retention will reflect that value.” Sharon Newport, CAE

“Virtual workplaces are here to stay, whether employers like it or not. . .This is going to have a huge impact on how we work. Getting the hybrid model – that combination of at-home and in-office work – right is going to be hard. Impacts will be felt when it comes to all aspects of your association, including productivity, culture, employee engagement, collaboration, innovation, and of course, the bottom line.” Mel Kettle

“The membership economy is booming with more and more businesses enjoying the benefits of more predictable cash flow and opportunity to build strong, ongoing relationships with their customers. . . While many association leaders don’t take these trends as seriously as they should, traditional membership models are losing to the disruptors of the membership economy.” Olena Lima

“We are now living in a time where data is the basis of competitive advantage and strategic decision making. And access to accurate, up-to-date data is key to making the right decisions about how to respond to change. . . Increasingly, organisations will need to use data to support decision-making, to advocate for funding, and to remain competitive.” Joanne Jacobs.

These highlights offer just a glimpse of some very insightful articles. Please feel free to take a look at the entire publication.  

Budgeting for Membership Marketing in Challenging Times

Right now, every line of an association’s budget is under scrutiny.  So how do you make a case for sustaining and even increasing your membership marketing budget?

Here are the four essential values that members bring to an association that make a fully funded membership marketing budget a priority.

·       Lifetime Value – Membership stands out as producing an outstanding return on investment compared to many of the products that an association offers. At the typical renewal rate of 80%, an average member will stay with an association for five years.  So, a $150 annual dues rate represents an income stream of $750 in lifetime value. On the other hand, customers come and go. Some of our data analysis shows that customers renew year over year at a rate as low as 7%. Having to replace most of your customers each year is a less efficient use of marketing dollars than getting and keeping members. 

·       Customer Value – Besides offering a dues revenue stream, a member also represents a significant value as a customer for an association. Almost any association will find that members pay to attend meetings at a higher rate than non-members and are the top buyers of all of an association’s offerings. Effectively a member is paying you to become a customer. So by producing both a dues revenue stream and non-dues revenue, members represent an economic multiplier for an association.

·       Stability Value – Member dues bring financial stability to an association. Many associations are challenged now with face to face training and conference cancellations.  It has been a shock to many budgets—however, members signup for a year at a time.  So, associations with a strong membership dues base maintain a predictable income stream. Of course, membership counts might decline for some during an economic disturbance, but the decline is typically incremental compared to the loss from a significant event cancellation.

·       Mission Value – Members are the cornerstone for accomplishing the mission of an association through their volunteering, content creation, networking, and support of advocacy. And they typically provide these vital services at no cost to the association. An association without members becomes a publisher or meeting company.

One other important consideration for budgeting is the enormous need in the world now.  People are looking for guidance, community, and solutions. This challenging time offers associations the opportunity to meet needs through the value provided by their membership. You will never know if your association can be the source of that help unless you reach out and invite members to continue with you and to join. Now might be the ideal time to invest in your efforts to get and keep members.

Membership: For Such a Time as This

For all of us, our lives are in a state of disruption.  This is no less true for our members and prospective members.  That’s why there is no more important time for associations to boldly communicate with members about the practical assistance that they can provide to them.  It is a time for associations to empathetically and proactively demonstrate the value of membership.  As the saying goes, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”

This help can come in multiple forms.  Here are some ways that you can reach out and engage members right now.

Provide Community – Many associations have the opportunity to help members connect electronically like never before through private social networks and social media.  This may be particularly important in our current situation.  During the 9/11 crisis years ago, people had the opportunity to congregate in their neighborhoods, places of worship, offices, and public places to share and process their thoughts and anxieties.  Today with social distancing these outlets are not readily available.  However, association online community platforms allow members to post questions and share challenges.  As I have monitored these platforms for some of my clients this week, I see enormous amounts of activity and much helpful guidance being shared.

Drive Advocacy – Whether your members and their companies are in the airline industry, restaurants, or the service industry their jobs and the survival of their companies are threatened.  Additionally, those in healthcare need a voice to support them in the enormous challenges they are facing.  Professional and trade associations are perhaps the members' best hope of getting the message of their needs and struggles in front of government officials and others that may be able to provide help.  Ideally, associations can also get a seat at the table as decisions impacting their professions and businesses are being made.

Offer Online Training – Conferences and in-person training are no longer available for the immediate future. However, members have an immediate need for specific presentations that speak to the questions that they are facing right now.  Additionally, members continue to have the desire and often the budget to grow their expertise and knowledge. Many who are working from home may also have time to pursue training and certification.  An association can offer its learning platforms or commercially available conferencing tools to present online classes and webinars to fill these needs.

Encourage Networking – Many associations have chapters, sections, and divisions that can provide immediate connections to members.  Longer-term your members who were employed at the start of this year may be looking for work by the end of the year depending on the economic impact of the current situation.  I remember an association colleague sharing with me during the previous recession that many members that he knows who lost a position found the network that they had built through the association the most productive source for finding their next job.  An associations career center can further support members looking for a new position.

Share Critical Information – The internet is filled with fake news or simply inaccurate data. So members have a critical need for a trusted source of specialized and current information about what is going on in their profession and industry.  Associations are best positioned to provide this timely information through regular updates and links on the website through newsletters and with breaking news via email.

Disruption causes people to look for solutions to help them manage change.  Whether the focus is on engaging and retaining members or recruiting new members associations now have the important role of presenting the valuable resources and tools that they have to help meet today's very present challenges.

In our most recent edition of the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, respondents highlighted the top reasons why prospects join an association and why members stay.  The main reasons were networking, learning best practices, accessing current information, advocating for the industry or profession, and advancing their career.  With our current challenges, all of these are heightened needs for members. By speaking to these needs associations have the opportunity to build longterm, committed relationships with their members and prospects. 

The Pathway to being a Remarkable Association

Next week, I have the opportunity to do a presentation taking a look at the future of associations. I will start the talk by reviewing the past. Specifically, I am going over the findings of ASAE and The Center in 7 Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do that Other Don’t.

As you may recall, this book resulted from a thorough study under the guidance of Jim Collins (Good to Great) comparing 18 matched associations. “The project’s value lies in discerning the often subtle differences between two well-matched organizations – what one association did or didn’t do to give it a performance or financial edge on its counterpart” (page 8).

I think the findings of this study are as valid today as they were in 2006 when the book was published. Here is a short review of the Measures of Success.

1. A Customer Service Culture -- “Remarkable associations build their structures, processes, and interactions – their entire culture – around assessing and fulfilling members’ needs and expectations” (page 24).

Customer service goes beyond customer satisfaction. In fact, we do not even ask customer satisfaction questions on surveys because we find that lapsed member report virtually the same level of satisfaction as current members.

2. Alignment of Products and Services with Mission -- “Remarkable associations speak passionately about fulfilling their mission and constantly test their ideas for products against that mission, using it as a touchstone for everything they do. . . To find the right mix of products . . . remarkable associations engage in experimentation” (page 28).

The goal for an association is to become an indispensible resource for a member. I think this comes from focusing on the three drivers of engagement, vision, reward, and relationship.

3. Data-Driven Strategies -- “If there is one phrase that sets remarkable associations apart from their counterparts, it’s ‘data, data, data.’ They gather information, analyze it, and then use it to become even better” (page 38).

As an example, just in the area of membership recruitment, testing and then analyzing data can commonly improve performance as follows:

• List tests – Can impact response by 500 percent.
• Offer tests – Can impact response by 200 percent.
• Creative tests – Can impact response by 100 percent.

4. Dialogue and Engagement -- “Many with the study group would no doubt echo the employee at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) who said, ‘We all discuss decisions openly with each other. We have a desire to collaborate with each other, and we do it in mission-driven ways” (page 44).

SHRM membership is reported to have grown by from 36,000 in 1992 to over 250,000 today. Need I say more?

5. CEO as a Broker of Ideas -- “While CEOs may be visionary leaders, what’s more important is their ability to facilitate visionary thinking throughout the organization” (page 49).

We are in a knowledge economy. The organizations and clients that I have seen thrive have a culture of ideas. Ideas are the currency in the organization.

6. Organizational Adaptability -- “Our data confirmed that no organization – regardless of how remarkable it is – can predict change with full accuracy and therefore be on target with its response . . . Our data indicate that remarkable organizations do not panic . . . They maintain a clear understanding of their core purpose” (page 58-59).

Remarkably through this recession, we have seen a consistent trend that organizations that stayed in the market and continued to reach out to prospective members came through the past year in good shape.

7. Alliance Building -- “[Remarkable associations are] secure in who they are and what they bring to the table, these associations communicate clear expectations for each specific partnership and do not hesitate to walk away if a win-win situation does not materialize. But they’re also willing to admit what they can’t do on their own.”

Everyone wants to partner with successful organizations. Be sure to look in the mirror before you propose an alliance.

My Take on a Controversial Blog Post

Controversy is a foundation of blogs. So I was not too surprised when a long time association professional and the writer of the Certified Association Executive blog, Ben Martin, made these revolutionary statements about the usefulness of associations.

To put his comments in context, Ben is a big supporter of social networking and the use of these tools to create self forming groups around issues and professions. Ben wrote:

“I am questioning whether or not the citizens of our world are well-served by associations given the radical improvements in the way that people can find like-minded folks and get stuff done. . . Here comes the bald-faced blasphemy: I believe that the trades, causes and professions would, in many cases, be better off without their associations.”

I do not agree with Ben. Here is what I wrote on his blog in response to his comment.

“Let me add one other point that I think supports the association structure, the concept of division of labor. As my son's economics professor noted recently, you can buy a pencil for a couple of cents today. But an individual would be very hard pressed to make a pencil from scratch on his own. The same applies to associations. To quote Wikipedia, ‘Historically the growth of a more and more complex division of labor is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialization processes.’So basically, those of us who have learned, for example, how to do effective membership marketing have a specialized skill that just anyone does not have. Taking advantage of those skills leads to a much more efficient and productive enterprise.”

The importance of specialization is highlighted by a friend of mine, Don Metznik on his blog. In an unrelated post to whether or not associations should continue to exist, Don writes about the marketing profession and the interplay between intuitiveness and counter intuition.

Here is the issue. People see marketing, so they believe that they can do marketing. But much of the success of marketing is opposed to an individual’s personal experience. Through the specialization of labor, some people study and experiment with marketing and get pretty good at it.

When all of these specializations come together in an association in the areas of marketing, advocacy, training, meeting management, finance, etc. you have a very functional and strong entity that can accomplish more together than the parts can do alone.

Well, that is my take on the topic. What do you think?

Meaning, Mission, or Money

I find it very interesting how for profits and non-profits seem to adopting each others best practices.

On my post on August 20, for example, I wrote about how corporations are creating membership programs to build customer loyalty. The post was titled: Corporations Coop Membership Marketing.

On the other hand, many associations that I interact with seem to be increasingly concerned with the bottom line. They want to justify programs with ROI.

The post from a friend of mine on his blog provided another example of this merging of world views. My friend’s blog, Every Square Inch, is focused on integrating faith and business.

His post highlighted Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, business author, and former Apple marketing whiz, who talks about how to successfully launch a start up in his book, The Art of the Start.

According to Kawasaki, the most important part of a start up business isn't your business plan; it's the desire to "make meaning"; or for those of us in the non-profit world it’s the desire to accomplish the MISSION.

Here's part of what Kawasaki says:

The core, the essence of entrepreneurship is to make meaning...

Many, many people start companies to make money. I have found the companies that are fundamentally founded...to make the world a better place, that make meaning...they are the companies that succeed.

If you make meaning, you'll probably make money but if you set out to make money, you won't make meaning and you probably won't make money either.

Kawasaki goes on to say that there are three ways to make meaning:

1. Improve quality of life


2. Right a wrong


3. Prevent the end of something good

If you're interested, you check out the entire video clip. It's only a couple of minutes long.

What do you think of businesses focusing on meaning and mission and associations focusing on profits?