Category: membership

Try Before You Buy

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | Leave a Comment on Try Before You Buy
White woman in a brown shirt and cream apron standing behind a bakery counter with various baked goods on display

Free samples are a time-honored tradition at bakeries. You walk in and there, on the counter, are bite-sized samples of some of the wares available for sale. You might have come in for a loaf of bread or a cup of coffee, but that taste of a croissant or a bear claw or a palmier prompts you to add a few treats to your order.

Associations can do the same thing.

I was recently talking to a membership director of a trade association for a highly regulated industry. His association has a very defined universe, where all the players (members or not) know about the association, and fairly high dues. In other words, there aren’t 100,000 potential nonmember individuals out there who just need to be informed that the association exists to fork over a small amount of personal cash to join.

This association has a VERY high retention rate – nearly 100% most years – and has already captured about 70% of their potential universe.

But what about that other 30%?

So far, their recruitment plan has mostly been for the membership director to call CEOs of nonmember organizations and ask them to join. And it does work, for some of them (they do recruit at least a few new members every year). But he was looking for some ideas to juice things up a bit.

I asked him: “What would members (not staff) say your main member value proposition is? Do you know?”

He did. There are two main groups: People who come for the professional network, and people who come for one particular tangible benefit they provide.

Next question: “Is there a way to let prospective members have a taste of your association before they buy?”

For the prospects who are looking for community, we talked about their events. Nonmembers are allowed to attend nearly all of them, for a fee. But they also have regular “pocket” meetings, informal in-person gatherings of CEOs in various locations around the area their association serves.

One idea: Ask attending CEOs to bring a nonmember colleague for free, as a guest. The CEOs won’t be tasked with making the membership sale – that’s on the membership director, for follow up to pitch membership after the gathering. Member CEOs are just the ones making the introduction, and then when that prospect does come, she already knows someone in the room.

For the prospects who are looking for that “stuff” style tangible benefit, we brainstormed ways the association might be able to offer limited, metered access to prospects, i.e., you get one freebie to try it out, after which the membership director can follow up and pitch membership.

What can you do to allow your prospects to get a taste of what your association provides to entice them to join?

Photo by Ekaterina Tyapkina on Unsplash

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | Leave a Comment on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Two dolphins in turquoise water

The title of the fourth book in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “So long, and thanks for all the fish” is the message the intellectually-superior-to-humans dolphins leave as they depart Earth just before the Vogons show up to demolish it to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Don’t worry – the dolphins save the day by constructing a duplicate Earth and transporting everything from the original Earth onto it before the Vogons destroy the original Earth, thus saving the human race.

So what does this have to do with associations?

What happens to your members when they retire from the industry your association serves?

Do you offer them nothing more than active professional benefits at an active professional price? Do you kick them out because they no longer meet the standards of membership?

Or do you provide ways for them to move to an emerita/us status and stay engaged in different ways that make sense to people who’ve stepped back from active day to day involvement in the profession?

What might that look like?

  • Has your association been trying to launch a mentoring program? Most mentoring programs suffer from too many prospective padawans and not enough Jedi masters (to mix my sci-fi metaphors for a moment). Retired members and young members are a match made in heaven (or at least on Tatooine) for cross-mentoring.
  • Are you short volunteers who can help with the doing, not just the planning and issuing of orders? Your emerita/us members have time and expertise.
  • Do you need people who can help orient new members? Trust me, your staff doesn’t know what members need to know, but other members do.
  • Are you trying to run a fundraising campaign and need people to make initial contacts? Your retired members can give, use the networks they developed over the course of their entire careers to help you identify prospects, and use their career’s worth of contacts to open doors.

Don’t leave your retirees with no option but to say, “So long, and thanks for all the fish!” Find ways to engage their expertise in and passion for your industry or profession in ways that make sense for them.

Photo by Ranae Smith on Unsplash

Do Your Incentives Make Sense?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Do Your Incentives Make Sense?
Blue question mark on pink background

I was recently chatting with a newly hired membership director. Their association offers both individual and group membership, and they were looking for ideas on ways to increase individual recruitment and retention.

We had a great conversation and shared lots of potential ideas they could pursue.

But one thing jumped out to me immediately. Their group memberships (80% of their members) are paid by companies. Their individual memberships are almost universally paid by the individuals. And the individual memberships cost more and offer fewer benefits.

Spot the problem?

The association has good reasons to nudge people towards join as groups. Having the entire team as members is better for the member organizations, and administering group memberships is easier for the association. So just flipping that equation – dropping the price for individuals and offering them more in the way of benefits – would be counter-productive.

So what we discussed as a solution was to find what’s common among the individual members that’s not among the members that join as a group.

  • Are their companies smaller?
  • Are they from different industry segments?
  • Are they in a different career stage?

Once the association can figure out what makes those individual members different, i.e., answering why they are joining as individuals rather than a group in the first place, they can develop offerings that address those different needs. If they’re able to do this carefully and well, charging more, less, or the same as the group memberships won’t matter – the members will segment themselves appropriately based on their needs.

Do the incentives you offer your audiences make sense to them? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Be the Solution

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Be the Solution
Rubik's cube on a white background

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

“My Members Don’t Read!”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on “My Members Don’t Read!”
Bronze statue of a woman reading a tablet she's holding in her right hand

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this.

Now raise your hand if you’ve SAID this.

(Everyone’s hands should be up by now.)

And we can all also relate to hearing, “I didn’t know you did X! I really need that!” from our members. ALL THE TIME.

OK, so we’ve all been complaining about this for years. Our members have no idea what we offer them. What we’re doing to educate them isn’t working.

What do we do to fix it?

I don’t claim to have the answer, but I do have some ideas about where to look:

K.I.S.S. Many of our organizations, in an attempt to be all things to all people (or due to the temptation of all that tasty, tasty non-dues revenue), have larded up our membership “benefits” with so much tangential crap that our members can’t focus on the stuff that will actually help them achieve their goals and fix their problems. Not to single out a particular industry, but while royalty revenue from your credit card program is nice, is it worth losing your members’ attention over the things that really matter to them?

Inside Voice. How much do your members need to know about the internal workings and arrangement of your association to find stuff? If the answer isn’t “zero,” you need to rethink how you present information. Your members don’t care that the professional liability insurance you offer them lives in your financial services department, which they have to access under Member Services –> Other Services –> Affinity Programs. What does “affinity program” mean anyway, if you’re, say, an instrumentation engineer, as opposed to an association membership professional? View the world from their perspective and represent your programs, products, and services accordingly.

Broadcast. Are you targeting the particular needs of particular members, or are you still broadcasting everything to everyone? Have a conference that’s for marketing directors? Why are you sending a thousand marketing messages to CEOs? They’re tuning you out, and the next time you launch your CEO salary survey, they aren’t going to be listening. “But our AMS…” “But our bulk mail client…” No buts. Learn what your members are interested in AS INDIVIDUALS, track it, and target your messaging appropriately.

How do you think we can we do a better job of educating our members about the things we offer that we know they need (because they told us) but that they don’t know we have?

Photo by ian borg on Unsplash

What Do You Reward?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
White West Highland terrier wearing a blue neckerchief

Novelty or loyalty?

We’ve all heard the come-ons: Switch your cable/cell/Internet/long distance provider and we’ll give you gifts, or better pricing, or premium services for free, or whatever.

Everybody’s always looking for new customers, right?

Association professionals should know better. But we don’t. We know that a retained member is more valuable than a new member. We know how much more expensive it is to get a new member. We know how important member satisfaction is.

But who gets the goodies?

New members – join now and you get free months, a free book, a free webinar, a free conference attendance, etc.

What if we rewarded loyalty instead?

What if you said: “As a thank you for your committee service last year, please choose any book in our bookstore.”?

What if you offered buy 5 get the sixth for free on your conference attendance?

What if you sent out a letter that read: “Congratulations on ten years of continuous membership! Next year’s on us!”?

How can you show the love to your most loyal supporters?

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

(Yes, that’s a picture of a dog. What’s the first thing you think of when I say “loyalty”?)

Engaging Today’s Members

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Engaging Today’s Members
Hand holding a smart phone against a sparkly purple background

In one of the breakout rooms in yesterday’s monthly Prometheus Consortium First Tuesday Zoom, we focused on member engagement.

Some of the usual topics came up – member-centric (versus association-centric) engagement, the unassailable math of online community success, specific issues and trends in the particular professions and industries participants’ association serve – but there were a few fresh takes, too.

Make way!

Older members need to make way for younger members, and that’s not always comfortable.

There may be a generational issue here. One participant noted that there used to be a relatively even distribution between age groups, but that seems to have changed. She called out a “missing middle” of people in their 50s, and we talked about the fact that there are just fewer of us GenXers to go around. But that leaves a bigger gap where more experienced members are afraid to trust members who are MUCH younger with big decisions.

Another gap shows up around the issue of being a digital native (or not). Millennials and GenZ are VERY much digital natives and Boomers are not. GenX is the “transition” generation, and we’re not there to translate. Digital natives solve problems differently than their more analogue elders, and that can be challenging as well. Another participant pointed out that the best way to respond to that is to give your digital natives the outcome you’re seeking and then get out of their way on how to get there. You might learn something.

Solve the right problem

When members lapse, it’s really important to understand WHY they are lapsing before you start throwing solutions out. We talked about several scenarios:

  • Members have lapsed because they’re super-busy and forgot or didn’t notice the renewal notices coming.
  • Members have lapsed because the association isn’t communicating member value effectively.
  • Members have lapsed because value is actually lacking.
  • Members have lapsed because they’re actively upset about something the association is – or is not – doing.

If you think you’re, for instance, solving a communications problem when it’s actually a value problem, your retention and reinstatement efforts will be ineffective (you’re just trying to sell me on something I don’t use or want). Likewise, if you think members are upset but they’re actually just over-booked, you’re going to provide the wrong solution, and maybe a costly one (developing new benefits) when a simple tech solution is the real answer (setting up an easy way to sign up for auto-renewal).

What are you doing to ensure there’s space for everyone at your association? What are you doing to ensure you really know what’s going on with your members, current, lapsed, and prospective? 

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Have It Your Way

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
cheeseburger with all the toppings

Almost 14 years ago, I addressed a question first raised by Jeff Dc Canga:

How will we manage the change from a pre-set package of options (membership) to an individually negotiated exchange of value?

In that original post, I addressed issues of consumer expectations around mass personalization and customization, the concept of “cafeteria” membership, deciding whether or not to gate content, and the necessity of the occasional sacred cow barbecue.

As a commenter on that post put it:

Figuring out the balance between revenue needs, information sharing and the value proposition for membership is key to a vibrant association.

Exactly.

This topic seems to be at the fore again. I’ve recently had several inquiries and some new clients all looking to address their dues structure and value proposition.

I suspect this is another lingering effect of the pandemic. During the pandemic, many associations held the line HARD on dues increases while at the same time adding a bunch of new “included with membership” benefits. Which is totally logical: We were in a MASSIVE economic crisis, particularly in that first year, when then-president Donald Trump was badly mis-managing every single aspect of the public health emergency AND the economic emergency.

However, in the past four years, the situation has improved. Dramatically.

The US economy is now so strong, it’s literally propping up the entire global economy. The rate of inflation is up significantly, something we all feel every time we buy groceries, but job creation is at historic highs (as is the stock market), unemployment is at historic lows (particularly for people of color), and wage gains have outpaced inflation for more than a year.

Meanwhile, many associations are still, from the perspective of what we offer members and customers and what we charge for it, operating as if it’s April 2020.

Admittedly, it *is* hard to start charging for a benefit that’s been included with membership, particularly when that’s been the case now for several years. It *is* hard to raise dues appropriately when you’ve left them alone while inflation is up more than 20%.

All of this, to me, strongly indicates that it’s time, maybe past time, to examine your membership model.

  • Are your dues structured in a way that makes sense for your profession or industry, not as it was in 2019, but as it now is?
  • Should you shift your basis of dues calculation?
  • Is your basis of dues calculation equitable within your profession or industry?
  • What is your current cost to serve? Are your dues adequate to cover it?
  • What *else* are you expecting dues revenue to cover? Is it appropriate to require members to fund those programs, products, or services as part of their membership?
  • What are your “loss leaders”? Are you confident that’s the right approach for those particular programs, products, or services?
  • What do your members most value and use? What *don’t* they value or use?
  • Should your “included with membership” benefits change?
  • Do some programs, products, and services need to move from “included” to “optional” (with fee)?
  • Have some programs, products, or services outlived their usefulness? Is it time to take out some of those sacred cows?
  • Did you discover some new programs, products, or services as a result of the pandemic economic crisis that were initially intended to be temporary, but have proved so valuable they need to be made permanent? If so, what infrastructure or process changes do you need to make so you can move from “making do” to “this to core to who we are”?
  • Did new audiences find you during the pandemic? What are you doing to learn more about them and their key goals and biggest problems, so you can provide the solutions that generate long-term loyalty?
  • Are you being intentional about what’s available only to members, what’s freely available to everyone, what’s included for members and offered at a fee to customers, and what’s offered at a (differential) fee to both members and customers?
  • Are you still offering a “you can have it in any color you want, so long as it’s black” membership model? That may still be appropriate to your profession or industry. But maybe not.

As I concluded that original post 14 years ago, I don’t have THE answer to these questions. There isn’t ONE answer that fits for all associations (of course, I am available for hire to help you find the answers for YOUR association). But I do know that we need to figure out how to let our audiences have it their way in a way that makes sense for them, meeting their goals and challenges, and also for us, providing the financial stability we need to create those solutions for them.

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Innovate Now! But How?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Innovate Now! But How?
lightbulb against a sunrise backdrop

Associations are constantly being urged to innovate, but frankly, in a world of generative AI, venture capital, nanotechnology, medical advances, and big R&D budgets – none of which we have access to on a regular basis – that constant drumbeat of “innovate…innovate…innovate” can feel more than a little intimidating. It can even seem impossible.

The thing is, your association is never going to be Apple or Amazon. And that’s OK. You don’t have to change the world for everyone to have an impact on someone.

So if the association community is unlikely to discover an abundant, non-carbon-based, renewable energy source or find the cure for cancer or bring peace to the Middle East or create the next iGottaHaveIt device, what can we do? Where is our ground for innovation?

It’s right under our noses: membership and volunteerism – the two things we, as a community, can lay claim to owning.

And the thing is, we NEED to innovate in both of these areas, because they’re key to our operations and they’re in the midst of being subjected to some pretty powerful forces.

It seems to me that the current association model, particularly as relates to membership and volunteering, is an artifact of its creation by the Boomers. Membership is often a one-size-fits-all prospect, with lots of “good of the order” stuff, well, stuffed in there, whether or not a given member wants it or wants to support it. That lets us get away with pricing at least some of our offerings below what they actually cost us to produce, artificially inflating demand, which in turn, makes it hard to kill things that maybe should die.

Several years ago, John Graham gave a keynote at the Association Foundation Group’s national conference in which he pointed out that the association model is predicated on only about 25% of our members taking advantage of any given service that’s offered to them. The point he was making was that associations would be completely unable to support 100% of our members taking 100% advantage of 100% of their benefits, at least at current staffing and other resource levels. And he was right.

But another thought occurred to me: That means that, for any given benefit you offer to members, 75% of them don’t want it, and yet they’re paying for it. And we wonder why we have a hard time articulating our value proposition!

In short, we’re inundating our members with too much irrelevant crap.

No wonder they “don’t pay attention!” (how often have you said that?) They aren’t interested in 75% of what we keep insisting on telling them about – no wonder we can’t get their attention about the 25% that actually matters to them.

Our current models are out of synch with the reality of consumer experiences. We’ve all been trained to expect mass personalization and customization, on-demand services, paying only for the pieces we want and opting out of the rest (including opting out of paying for the rest), the sharing economy, and freemium models.

We need to be thinking seriously, innovating seriously, about how that affects the membership model NOW. Hell, we needed to start thinking about this yesterday.

Those same dynamics affect volunteering just as strongly (if not more so) than membership. Your next generations of volunteer leaders don’t have time to participate in never-ending committee meetings that don’t actually accomplish anything. They aren’t interested in having to “pay their dues” in scut work to “earn” a leadership position. They want opportunities that fit into their lives and that are targeted to their skills and experiences, not years of waiting to “win” a prestigious role by attrition, aka being able to outlast the competition.

Associations, and nonprofits more generally, REQUIRE volunteers to operate. But if we can’t innovate around what we offer and our expectations and put together a model that fits with the realities of life in 2024, there will be no one to do those jobs.

What are you doing to address these forces and how they will affect the building blocks of your organization? 

Where else can associations look to innovate?

Photo by ameenfahmy on Unsplash

Velvet Rope or Come Party with Me?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Velvet Rope or Come Party with Me?
group of people at a Holi celebration throwing gulal

Scene one: I’m in New Orleans on vacation wandering down Frenchmen Street in Faubourg Marigny looking for a good place to hang out and hear some tunes on a Wednesday night. First stop: the Spotted Cat.  It was so packed I couldn’t get in the door (literally), so I hung out on the sidewalk with a WIDE mix of characters (and nobody does “characters” like NOLA) for a while enjoying the music wafting out…for free. At the band break, I decided to move on, and down the street, I heard the sweet strains of Shamarr Allen’s trumpet pouring out of Cafe Negril. There was a short line, as the guy at the door struggled to keep up making change for the $5 cover when everyone kept handing him $20s. When I got inside, the crowd ranged from middle aged and older white people to hipsters from the neighborhood to a “professional hugger” from Austin (Keep Austin Weird!) – all ages, all races, all styles of dress, everyone just hanging out and grooving to the Underdawgs. Vibe? Awesomesauce, even before the generous pour, reasonably priced cocktails.

Scene two: One of my spouse’s co-workers moonlights as a DJ in DC. He was spinning at a chi-chi lounge on a recent Saturday night, and we thought we’d swing by and see him. So we roll up only to spot a velvet rope, two scowling bouncers, and a LONG line. Vibe?  B-A-D BAD.  And totally unwelcoming.  And definitely *not* groovy.

So what’s the connection to associations?

  • What does your organization look like to an outsider?  Not someone on staff, not someone who’ s been a member for a million years, not someone who’s served on your Board – someone who doesn’t know you at all but might be interested in what you provide?
  • Are you welcoming to everyone or only to the “right” people?
  • Do you make it easy for people to get access to what they want and need, even if they aren’t an “insider”?
  • Do you let people participate at the level they want to, even if that’s the equivalent of standing on the banquette outside the club just grooving to the great tunes for free?
  • What’s your barrier to entry?
  • What’s your association’s reputation in your industry, profession, or community?
  • Are you affordable to people of lesser means or lower professional stature who might benefit from what you offer?

In short: Are you groovy or snooty?

Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash