What Attendee Retention Really Says about Association Relevance

Across the association landscape, event attendance has become a pressure point. Events are more expensive to produce. Attendees are more selective about where they spend their time. And many associations are following a familiar pattern: strong pushes to drive first-time attendance, followed by a softer focus on who actually comes back.

In that environment, it's tempting to treat attendee retention as a downstream metric—something to review after the event, or a problem to solve with better reminders and earlier outreach. But that framing misses an important truth: Attendee retention is not just a measure of event performance; it is one of the clearest signals of an association's relevance.

Retention Is a Reflection of Value, Not Habit

Historically, associations benefited from highly loyal attendee bases. Many professionals returned year after year out of habit, institutional loyalty or a lack of alternatives. That dynamic is changing.

Please select this link to read the complete article from ASAE's Center for Association Leadership.