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Driving growth by tapping new member segments and catering to specialty groups.
REPACKAGING PRODUCTS AND CREATING A STRONGER BRAND. TAPPING A new membership segment. Becoming more specialized. Creating a credentialing program to become more relevant. Launching a member-get-a-member program.
Everywhere in the association world, it seems, organizations are grappling with ideas such as these, all of which point toward the perennial association question: How do you attract more members? Perennial, yes, but the question is probably asked with even greater frequency and urgency today because of the current state of the economy as well as an ever-increasing competitive environment within the nonprofit sector. Fashionable answers sometimes seem risky, sometimes inapplicable, and sometimes even contradictory-for example, tapping a new membership segment versus becoming more specialized.
Is How do you grow your membership? even the right question to ask? Is strong membership even necessary for an association to thrive? In the sidebar, "An Alternative Membership Model," Steve Worth of Plexus Consulting, Washington, D.C., discusses how associations must maintain their relevance by moving away from traditional membership models toward fee-for-service strategies, under which much of the association's revenue not only doesn't come from dues but doesn't come from members.
Nevertheless, most any association naturally would like nothing more than to beef up its membership base. For some associations, achieving that end might mean implementing a concrete idea birthed right in the membership department, such as an innovative member-get-a-member campaign. For others, it might mean rethinking the entire mission of the organization. Still for others, it might mean altering the public face of the association such that it more closely matches the mission.
New market segment, new brand
If you know anything about snowboarding, you know that snowboarders are, culturally speaking, closer to surfers than they are to skiers. You can imagine that this fact presented a problem for the Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA), Lakewood, Colorado, if they wanted to attract snowboard instructors into their organization. Snowboard instructors and ski instructors: It was a natural fit, and yet it was a most unnatural fit.
Indicative of that unlikely pairing was the fact that throughout much of the 1990s, according to Marketing Director Mark Dorsey, while the number of snowboarders and snowboard instructors in the country...