From Scattered to Strategic: Delivering What Members Really Value

Ask any executive director or CEO what their association offers members, and you will get a long list: committees, webinars, publications, awards, mentoring, career fairs. Ask which of those things members actually need, and the list gets much shorter. 

The real question isn't what to cut. It's where your resources are delivering what members want and where they're not. For a long time, associations strived to be buffets, one-stop shops and a home for their members. This led to an overflow of programs, content and events that made their true value hard to capture. We call this pattern the breadth trap: the belief that more programs equal more engagement. In practice, it's usually the opposite. Scattered effort produces scattered impact, staff burnout and members who cannot find the value that is there. 

We ran into this pattern from two vantage points—one of us leads a national student association, the other a program for senior security executives. Different members, same trap. Getting out of it starts with the first two steps of a five-part framework we call "FOCUS" (Frame, Omit, Concentrate, Unify and Sustain). This article focuses on the hardest part: where to focus and where to omit.  

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.