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Four Ways Association Membership Development is Changing and What You Can Do

By Aaron Manogue posted 11-25-2014 04:15 PM

  

Working in the association industry, you are well aware of the fact that it isn’t easy to continuously come up with new ways to educate and engage current membership. It’s even harder to do so while also trying to grow overall membership and maintain a healthy membership lifecycle.

Now you are faced with the task of positioning yourselves towards younger age-groups, namely millennials, in order to build a base of young membership and ensure future membership is solid. Not only is your target-market continuing to fluctuate, but the core concept of membership development itself is changing fundamentally at its’ core. Can things get any more difficult?

Here are Four Ways Association Membership Development is Changing Fundamentally (and what you can do about each one):

1) Print vs. Digital: There is an obvious migration taking place in the association industry from print to digital. Huge 3-ring binders filled with hundreds of pages of educational material that were distributed to all members is being replaced by digital publishing platforms or online knowledge centers. I talked in a recent post about why print isn't dead, and it's definitely not, but it absolutely has diminished in popularity among associations and their members.

 What to Do: Offering a blended learning strategy can prove to be invaluable to your organization. Blended learning is the practice of offering your association content in both printed and digital form. Studies have suggested that learners retain information better on paper than on a digital format, so the thought that everything is better online isn’t the case. In fact, a study by Omnipress that will be released shortly (results out December 15th), also suggests that even the technologically savvy millennials value print. For instance, a whopping 89% of the millennials we surveyed choose to include print in the way they consume professional and educational content. This means they either chose print exclusively, or as part of a blended learning offering. The study will even show that they prefer printed materials when it comes to internalizing important information.

 2) New Member Preferences: To increase new membership, you must first recognize the demographic you need to target and their preferences. One of the biggest lessons I try to share with association leaders is the fact that the people that you are actively going after to become new members are typically young professionals, from the ages of 23 to 30 (a large part of the millennial grouping). That's a tough demographic for a lot of associations to focus on.

“The thing we need to realize is that this age group has never gone without access to the internet, computers, or digital content.”

Since they were seven, eight, or nine years old, they've had some kind of exposure to it. Even in the days of dial-up internet, kids were being social on instant messaging such as AOL Instant Messenger, among others. Knowing this, you must be willing to provide content, access, and value to this demographic via digital means.

What to Do: As association leaders, you need to be finding ways to compliment your printed materials with convenient, easy-to-access material. A lot of associations are putting their content online in digital publishing platforms or into mobile apps for their conferences or publications. Having an executable plan moving forward to continue to improve your digital positioning is important. Remember, if you’re online, that’s great; but if you’re not looking for new ways to make your digital content better and easier to find, you’re out-of-date.

3) Online Communities: Even though networking and being social has become much easier in the days of social media, associations are offered a great opportunity to meet other professionals in your industry and learn from them. Thirty years ago, one of the only ways to get in front of other professionals like yourself was to join an association and attend conferences or tradeshows to learn from them. 

Now with social media, and online access to 1.73 billion users (estimated for 2014 by the eMarketer report Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates), it’s much easier to network. This makes the expense of attending and traveling to association tradeshows hard to swallow for a lot of members. This presents a major problem for most associations who hold conference throughout the year.

What to Do: Be active on social media, and create your own online community, much like the one that WSAE has here. Being active on social media (preferably Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for associations) is a great way to connect to your members and get in front of them on a more personal level.

Having your own online community like the one WSAE has created here can be extremely valuable. By creating a place that members can come to any time they’d like to access content shows you value your members’ time and want them to be able to access your content at any time, from anywhere.

4) Showing Value to the "Free Generation": Since a lot of potential new members grew up with constant access to digital content, and with the emergence of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing in the last fifteen years, people have come to expect to be able to search for information, for free, and find exactly what they're looking for. It's a tough thing for associations to show value in their content, even if it's online, when their target market is used to accessing things for free. 

What to Do: Access control and pay-walls are a great way to leverage this challenge, as many digital publishing platforms allow you to expose your content to search engines, but still limit access to paying members only. You’re able to allow current and potential members to search for and find your content, but you control who can actually access it without becoming a member. 

Tell me what you think! Are these proof enough that association membership development is changing, and if so, what are some other examples? I want to hear some real life examples of challenges you're facing!

 

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12-19-2014 12:19 PM

Thanks so much Paul! Showing value isn't a one time thing, as most association members know. It's a continuous process that requires the availability of multiple options. The way I describe it to association members is, how would they like it if they went to a restaurant and someone they didn't know ordered for them? Let people consume educational material the way that they prefer, otherwise it truly is an all or nothing type of situation.

12-19-2014 10:28 AM

Aaron, great points all around! I was just at Association Forum's Holiday Showcase last week in a Millennials Roundtable session and they cited many of your points namely:
1. The ability to show value in stages - a little or a lot. Let your members (and non-members) sample your offerings at their pace vs. an "all or nothing" approach.
2. The ability to easily connect and interact with others in their field including the ability to participate in mentoring programs. Millennials expect associations to have communities where they can connect collaborate and share as they are used to using these tools.
3. The ability to give back...right away with perhaps small but meaningful volunteer opportunities. see white paper above for on this. ASAE did a study in 2012 that indicated that if a member volunteers for something with the association they are 23% more likely to recommend the association to peers.Hmmm...they gave of their time and talent AND they refer others to the association. Now that is cool. Thanks again Aaron!