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Why the question most associations are asking is the wrong one.
Plenty of association leaders are quietly wondering whether their magazine is worth the trouble. It’s a fair question — and usually the wrong one.
A lot of associations produce a magazine — hard copy or electronic — as part of the member benefits package. And for many of them, pulling together each quarterly edition feels arduous, thankless, and disconnected from any real return.
That frustration is showing up in a bigger conversation. Right now, plenty of associations are reviewing their print media altogether, and for understandable reasons. Postage costs keep climbing. Finding volunteers who’ll reliably produce the right content is hard. Professional layout isn’t cheap. And more leaders are asking a sharp question their boards want answered: is print advertising actually delivering a return, or are we propping up a format out of habit?
Those are the right questions to ask. But “should we keep printing?” is the wrong place to start. The real question is whether your magazine does a job worth doing — and whether you can actually tell.
Most associations review their magazine on gut feel, then make a cost decision in the dark. You can do better than that, because the return is more measurable than people assume. Do the members who read it renew at higher rates than those who don’t? Does advertising or sponsorship revenue cover the cost of production and postage — or even exceed it? What do members actually say they value when you ask them? Are people requesting back copies, responding to articles, turning up to events the magazine promoted?
Not all of the value is financial, and the engagement a good magazine builds won’t show up cleanly on a spreadsheet. But the financial part you can test — and most associations have simply never run the numbers. Before you cut, run them. You may find the magazine is quietly carrying more weight than anyone gave it credit for. You may find the opposite. Either way, you’ll be deciding on evidence instead of fatigue.
Take a trade-based association — members who are out on the tools all day, hands full, not sitting at a desk refreshing an inbox. For them, the digital newsletter goes unread. But when they stop for a break, the magazine comes out. That’s the moment they actually engage with their association. It’s how they stay current with the standards, safety updates, and regulatory changes that affect their livelihood. Strip that magazine away and you don’t save money — you sever the one reliable connection you had with a hard-to-reach membership.
Now take the opposite case. A professional membership — lawyers, accountants, consultants — who live in their inboxes and read on screens all day. For them, a printed quarterly may be landing in the recycling unopened while the cost lands squarely on your budget. If that’s your membership, digital-only, or fewer but better editions, might genuinely be the right answer. Don’t keep printing out of habit or sentiment. The point isn’t that print always wins. The point is that the format should follow the member, not the other way around.
Four questions cut through it:
.Who are your members, and how do they really consume information? Field-based or desk-based? On screens all day or rarely?
.What is the magazine genuinely costing you — all in, including layout, print, postage, and the staff and volunteer time nobody counts?
.What is it returning — in revenue, retention, and engagement you can actually point to?
.What would members lose if it disappeared tomorrow?
If you can’t answer the last two with any confidence, that’s the problem to fix first. Often the magazine isn’t failing — your understanding of what it’s doing is.
A magazine produced as an afterthought is what drives the urge to scrap it in the first place. So treat the next edition as what it is: a chance to help your members, to connect with them personally, to tell the story of your association, and to sell your services through stories people actually want to read. The associations that get this right make deliberate choices. Six make the difference:
Make the content applicable. Start with the real challenges your members face, then build content around those concerns. If it doesn’t speak to something keeping a member up at night, it won’t get read.
Tell stories, not sales pitches. The instinct is to go straight for the hard sell every edition. Resist it. Slow down and tell a story instead. People connect quickly with stories and almost never with marketing-speak.
Make it personal. Run a message from your Chair or President. Profile a member in a Q&A. Put real faces and voices in front of your readers, not just announcements.
Include member-generated content. When members see their own contributions in print, they feel like active participants in the association rather than passive subscribers. It gives them a voice — and gives you content with built-in buy-in.
Invest in polished design. A professional graphic designer and a decent printer change everything. Members judge the credibility of your association partly by how its magazine looks. Cheap and cluttered sends a message you don’t want to send.
Get the writing right. Crisp, compelling content doesn’t happen on the first pass. An editor or copywriter to draft or even just proofread the final version makes a visible difference.
Reading that list, you might be thinking: that’s more work, not less — and I can’t even fill the pages I have now. The content problem is usually a planning problem, not a volume problem. You don’t need an army of volunteers. You need a lean editorial calendar mapped out a year ahead, so you’re never starting from a blank page. Member interviews do a lot of heavy lifting — fifteen minutes of someone’s time becomes a full profile. Repurpose what you already produce: a webinar becomes an article, a board update becomes a column, a conference session becomes a feature. And if the writing is the bottleneck, outsource the edit rather than the whole publication. Most associations are sitting on more content than they realise; they just have no system for capturing it.
Done well, a magazine is one of the most powerful member-engagement tools an association has. Done as an afterthought, it’s a quarterly
reminder that nobody’s quite sure what it’s for — and that’s usually what’s behind the urge to scrap it.
So before you cut print to save costs, ask the better questions first: what is this magazine meant to do for our members, is it doing it, and can we prove it either way? That’s a conversation we have often with association leaders weighing exactly this decision. If you’re reviewing your own member communications and want a sounding board, get in touch
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