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