I recently received an email from an association I belong to. The message was, essentially: We spent a lot of money building a great new website, invested hundreds or thousands of volunteer hours, and yet many members barely use it. Please go in and use it.
It struck me as an interesting contrast with how we usually think about products and marketing in the business world.
Imagine a company launching a new feature after spending a significant amount of money developing it. Six months later, hardly anyone uses it.
Would the company send an email to its customers saying:
“We invested a lot of money in this feature. Please start using it.”
Probably not.
Instead, someone would be asking different questions:
- Do customers actually need this?
- Do they know it exists?
- Is it easy to use?
- Does it solve a problem they care about?
- Did we communicate its value?
And if the answers weren’t good enough, the product or marketing strategy would be reconsidered.
This made me think about something broader: how associations think about their members.
At the end of the year, many organizations send another familiar message: Please renew your membership. We need your support to preserve the hobby.
There is certainly a legitimate argument for supporting the organization. Associations need members in order to exist, and their work can be important to the future of a hobby.
But notice the direction of the argument.
It asks the member to support the organization’s mission.
A business would ask a different question:
What value did we deliver to you this year, and what can we offer you next year that makes you want to stay?
That distinction matters.
Members aren’t employees. They don’t have an obligation to use the website, attend the events, read the publications, or participate in committees simply because the organization invested time and money creating them.
If members aren’t using something, that’s not necessarily a failure of the members. It may be feedback.
Maybe the feature isn’t useful. Maybe members don’t know about it. Maybe it’s difficult to use. Maybe the organization hasn’t explained why they should care.
And perhaps the same thinking should apply to membership itself.
Instead of saying:
“Renew your membership so we can preserve the hobby.”
we could be asking:
“What can we do for you that makes membership worth renewing?”
Better yet:
“What could we provide that would make a non-member look at what we offer and think: I want to be part of that?”
That’s a very different mindset.
It’s the difference between asking people to support an organization and building an organization that people want to support.
The first relies on obligation, loyalty and guilt.
The second relies on value.
And I suspect the second approach doesn’t just produce better retention. It might actually produce something associations desperately need:
new members who join because they see something they want, not because they are being asked to help preserve something they already know.
Preserving a hobby is a worthy goal.
But perhaps the best way to preserve it isn’t to convince people that they owe the hobby their support.
Perhaps it’s to make the hobby, and the community around it, so useful, interesting and rewarding that people genuinely want to be part of it.
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