Association Field Report (April 9, 2020)

Hey folks, the report from the field today is coming from outside because it’s so darn nice here in Northern Virginia today. Wish your family and all your staff members the best of health.
Here’s what I want to focus on today. You may be doing various transactions with your members right now and they may be struggling with how to distribute some of their cash. They may be registering for things, they may want to send a dues revenue check to you, and they may not be able to write the check. You might want to start thinking right now about utilizing ACH, electronic payments, credit cards, and so on because it might have been a sidebar before and now it may be the only way that your folks can pay you and maybe the only way you can pay others. Think about that right now as you’re adapting to all the new changes that this pandemic has brought to us. The other thing is that I know a lot of you are starting to look at virtual meetings and conferences. One of the things that we’re seeing there is either a greatly reduced registration fee with some fee free events for members. The most important thing right now is to get those connections developed. I wouldn’t necessarily only think about the registration fees but focus on how association sponsors want to connect and want to utilize these virtual conferences and webinar platforms. Think about them early on and how you’re going to engage your sponsor community. The third thing, as you know, is we do a lot of dues reviews and dues analysis for associations. I want to give you a very quick story about a review we did in 2016 for an association and we made some recommendations to them, including eliminating a dues cap on their top-level members. We recently reviewed that association again for another client in terms of looking at revenue growth for a lot of different associations. That organization grew their membership dues 18% within this short time frame. Now is the time, even if you don’t get to implement it until 2021, to look at your dues model and see if it can sustain your association for the future.
Hope this is helpful to you. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.