Customer or Member?

My association faced a challenge common to many if not all membership organizations: the imperative to diversify revenue sources and monetize our content expertise. Attacking that problem led to a shift in our business mindset.

I know many associations are uncomfortable with the word customer. We are purpose driven organizations, not commercial, commodity retailers. True enough. And lose sight of that fact even for a moment at your extreme peril.

But our association had accumulated a vast and unparalleled inventory of assets (content, programs, activities), derived from our unique expertise and designed by and for our membership to advance our tax-exempt purpose. Yet the actual consumers of those products and services already included a huge number of non-members (sponsors, exhibitors, authors, non-member attendees, non-member content seekers, etc.) 

In a word, customers. 

These were people who saw value in something we were already doing. Through their purchasing behaviors, even though they weren’t members, they were advancing our ability to honor our mission by generating needed financial resources.

Breaking the Member/Non-Member Perspective

But describing them as “non-members” is a self-limiting paradigm. It suggests that the best avenue to expanding the market is a “conversion to membership” strategy. This typically defaults to a focus on expanding membership^[1] by broadening definitions of eligibility or creating specialty membership categories as the only ways to increase the market for what the association has to offer. But it isn’t the only way. 

So instead of thinking of the world as divided between members and non-members, we simply started thinking of EVERYONE as customers. 

• Some of those customers choose to buy membership.
• Some of those customers choose to buy membership AND other products or services. 
• Some of those customers choose to buy something (or many things) but NOT the membership product. 

Some of that last category of customers are perhaps (and probably appropriately) excluded from membership. But the important thing is to simply recognize that, even if eligible, some aren’t interested and probably never will be interested in purchasing the membership product. Those are the potential customers you are leaving behind if you are marketing exclusively within a membership context.

I am NOT suggesting abandoning membership building strategies. But this simple change in perspective, exposes new possibilities that can be pursued in addition to and in coordination with those efforts. 

Market and Membership are Not Synonyms

So we have customers. Some buy membership. Others do not. They are all part of our potential market if we just define the product offerings in a way that appeals to their needs and is not limited to those intended to establish a membership connection^[2].

This line of thinking was heavily influenced by Amith Nagarajan’s The Open Garden Organization (2018), but the idea that everyone is a customer, some of whom might buy membership and others who never would, had already been planted (pun intended) in my mind before I read it. It’s a book worth looking into if it is not familiar to you and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Amith for helping me crystalize and articulate the strategy within my association.

This customer paradigm led to:

• A comprehensive, disciplined, and hard data-driven assessment of the market for every product (including but not limited to membership) in our existing portfolio^[3];
• Enabling us to start separately defining who were potential customers for each marketable offering (including but not limited to membership); in order to 
• Define marketing strategies customized for each.

This analysis, in turn, led to an association rebranding, market repositioning and name change.

Changing How, Not What

Adapting a customer mindset didn’t require changing WHAT the association was offering (although ideas for new products and strategic unbundling of existing offerings will certainly emerge). Rather, it brought precision to HOW we packaged, priced, and marketed each existing offering. It wasn’t about finding something new that needed to be created^[4]. But it vastly increased the horizon for how and where we might access new customers for our existing inventory of offerings (including but not limited to membership^[5]).

Not just: what do we need to do to attract more customers as members? (Though we still need to do that.) Instead: what are we already doing that might resonate with those for whom membership is not desired?

Strengthening the Membership Value Proposition

Perhaps paradoxically, thinking of membership as just one of many products available to customers, does not devalue membership. It in fact preserves and protects the membership product itself. Membership remains the organization’s core purpose, its reason for being, and its engine for new value creation. It is what empowers us to achieve, collectively, what members of the profession cannot achieve on their own. 

But rather than diluting the value of membership by trying to make it more attractive to more people with a looser connection to our mission (a questionable marketing strategy at best), our crown jewel (membership) can be stewarded and thrive, immune from mission distractions into new features of membership that often lead to mission creep. 

And viewing membership as a unique product (or bundling of products) made the need to adapt unique marketing and pricing of even the membership product clear. Effective membership marketing requires something different than effective marketing of more transactional and consumable offerings. Membership appeals for different reasons. Adopting marketing approaches specific to this product offers the promise of increasing our effectiveness in how we actually go about increasing membership.

A Blue Ocean Strategy

This customer paradigm also (at least in theory) reduces the threat to adjacent (and usually much larger) membership organizations. We weren’t coming after “their” members to make “us” their membership home. It was just looking at some small segment of their membership that marginally overlapped with ours for customers who might be interested in buying something other than membership that we had available. Offerings that were well within our scope and capacity, but in most cases, were too marginal to the larger, homebase organization’s mission for them to effectively satisfy themselves without losing focus^[6].

Ergo, minimized potential for counterproductive membership competition and redundancy of products in the market. It’s a blue ocean rather than a red ocean strategy. 

It is still early days, but the potential exists, if trust can be built, for future, multi-association collaborations to cooperatively and better meet the needs of that small sliver of customers where overlap exists. But first things first. We needed to get started.

Disclaimer

The ideas contained here are my own. I do not speak for any organization or company.

This case study describes something that was still in its earliest stages when I left the organization. There was still a huge amount of work to do to execute the strategy described. Time will tell if it is sustained or successfully realized.

The opinions expressed (and any errors) are entirely my own.

AI was used to generate the image accompanying this post. I do NOT use AI to generate or edit drafts. 

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^[1] Too often, expanding membership really ends up reducing the close connection to our core and causing mission creep, which ends up undermining the unique membership value proposition you started with. 

^[2] Non-member pricing of a la carte membership offerings is a baby step in this direction but is still locked in a market=membership paradigm. Increasing membership remains a valid, even critical function. It is just a separate and different strategy than the one I am focusing on here.

^[3] We didn’t just ask our board who they thought “ought” to value what. They were one, but only one of the segments focus grouped or surveyed. Then we tested their assumptions with wider surveys and focus groups.

^[4] That is a separate and equally critical imperative for every association.

^[5] I know that is the third time in two paragraphs I’ve used that phrase. But thinking of your portfolio as “including but not limited to membership” is critical to the customer mindset. It’s how you condition yourself to view every offering with your membership as but one of the potential markets for it.

^[6] In the interest of full disclosure: many of those adjacent organizations were understandably skeptical that our strategy wasn’t a threat to them. Seeing how it leaves them a clearer field to focus on their own core competencies and membership value proposition will only occur if our actual actions match our intentions.