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When an association comes to us worried about its membership, with numbers flat, renewals slipping, and a manager under pressure to turn it around, the first place we look is not the membership team. It’s the boardroom.
At Association Executive Services we are often approached by the people who carry membership on their shoulders. Our own team has worked at every level of membership management, from senior leadership to the administration desk, so we know this job inside out. We know the critical success factors. Growth. Retention. The two numbers that follow a membership manager in every performance review and every board paper.
But when an organisation asks us to help grow its membership, or to stop the bleeding when numbers are falling, we don’t start with campaigns, pricing tables or a new CRM. We start with a few blunt questions.
A membership manager is handed two KPIs and told to deliver them. Grow the base. Keep the members you have. Fair enough — that’s the role.
But the strategy that determines whether they can succeed is owned elsewhere entirely. It’s owned by the Board. And too often that strategy is a document the Board approved once, congratulated itself on, and never opened again.
So the manager goes to work with no clear strategic direction on who the association is actually for, why those people should join, and what value the organisation has committed to delivering to them. They run the campaigns. They chase the renewals. And when the numbers don’t move, the conversation lands on their desk, not the Board table.
That is the wrong table.
Here is what 30 years in this sector has taught me. A strategic plan that the Board genuinely owns — not approves and forgets, but uses — has a direct line to whether members join and whether they stay.
When membership is a deliberate strategic focus at the Board level, three things happen.
The Board defines who the association is for and what value it has committed to delivering. The people who deliver member services then know what the Board has decided, rather than guessing.
The Board sets measures that show whether its strategies are working, not simply whether the numbers moved up or down.
And the Board supports the work. A membership manager asked to grow the base with no budget, no systems, and no authority is being set up to fail. Resourcing is a strategic decision, and it belongs to the Board.
When membership is absent from the strategic plan, none of that happens. The manager is left to deliver an outcome the organisation has never properly decided to pursue. The proper delivery of value to members is impacted before a single campaign goes out.
There is one more place this shows up, and it’s in the CEO’s report to the Board.
Ask yourself how membership is reported in your board meetings. Is it simply an account of what happened last month — numbers up, numbers down, a few names? Or is it an indicator of how well the Board’s strategies are actually working?
Those are two very different reports. The first is a scoreboard. The second is intelligence. The second tells the Board whether to hold its course, change a strategy, or put more resources behind the people doing the work.
If your CEO’s membership reporting is only ever “what happened,” the Board has no way of knowing whether its plan is succeeding or quietly failing. And the membership manager has no way of knowing whether the resources they need are on the way.
If you are responsible for membership and the numbers are under pressure, my advice is to look up before you look out.
Before your next Board meeting, ask where membership sits in your strategic plan. Ask whether the Board reviews and refers to that plan in its meetings, or whether it only appears at planning day. Ask whether your team's feedback is reaching the Board. And ask whether the reporting your Board receives tells it anything about whether its strategy is working.
Membership growth and retention are not things a membership manager can manufacture on their own. They are the visible result of a Board that has decided on membership matters, written that decision into a plan it actually uses, and resourced the people to deliver it.
When an organisation comes to us and asks, “Can you help us develop our strategic plan?”, we always ask a question back: how will this plan live once it’s written? Because a strategic plan that the Board owns and uses is the strongest thing you can put behind your membership. A plan that gathers dust is worse than none at all, because it lets everyone believe the thinking has already been done.
If membership is on your agenda this year, that’s the conversation worth having first.
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.
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The membership fee strategy is not an accounting exercise. It is a leadership decision. And if your Board is setting fees based on what feels comfortable rather than what the organisation needs, you are already behind.
How we help membership based, not-for-profit associations now and into the future.
