Why do people associate in the first place?
We come together because we have a goal we want to achieve or a problem we want to solve that has proved resistant to individual fixes.
I was reminded of this yesterday, as I joined the first Prometheus First Tuesday conversation of 2025.
I joined the breakout room on the topic of membership marketing. One of the participants shared that his members, classroom teachers, are stressed for time and money (and other resources), so they tend to request bite-sized learning and content they can easily implement in the classroom immediately.
Sounds (relatively) easy, right?
Well, not if your customary approach to creating professional development has been to focus on traditional multi-week courses.
So we brainstormed some of ways to chop up the association’s existing PD offerings into just-in-time, highly digestible, immediately applicable chunks.
The main one? Put together a member task force to address it. They’re the experts in what pieces are most useful, what delivery formats will work, and what classroom teachers need to take away from the modules, both in terms of what they’ll learn and in terms of specific tools and techniques.
This led to a larger discussion of what it means for associations to be solution providers for members.
As Anna Caravelli and I discussed in our 2015 whitepaper, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In, what we should be after is “level four” engagement, where:
Organization is product-agnostic. It seeks a network of partners to serve customers’ needs.
Taking this perspective is both liberating – the association doesn’t have to create all the solutions for members and other audiences, but can also point people to solutions provided by other organizations – and a little scary, as the association gives up control over those solutions and invites other players into the relationship.
This is perhaps even more important in 2025 than it was in 2015, as the volume of AI-generated “slop” proliferates online.
Information has never been easier to come by, which is a serious potential problem for associations that have long positioned ourselves as primary sources for the professions and industries we serve. However, good, valid, useful, accurate information is becoming increasingly hard to find, which represents an opportunity for associations to curate solutions and information for our members and other audiences, regardless of who created those solutions and that information in the first place.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash