Written by: Erin Lemons
Do you have a five- or ten-year plan for your career? What about milestones you want to achieve in your personal life? If so, these plans likely influence your decisions and help you make consistent progress toward your goals.
Your association is no different. To innovate, grow, and offer more value to your members, you must make a comprehensive plan for the future.
We’ll cover the core elements of a successful long-term strategy and walk through top tips to boost your association’s member engagement, keep you motivated, and empower you to achieve your goals.
Write It Down
Writing out your association’s goals and plans for the future is key. While they don’t have to be set in stone, a written record serves as a fixed reference point you can look back at. Plus, it will get your staff members on the same page to coordinate your efforts.
In this written plan, make sure to document your:
● Mission and vision statements, which explain the purpose of your association, your broad goals, and vision for the future of your organization and its members. This is a good time to revisit or refine these elements if needed.
● Detailed growth and retention plans that lay out specific, measurable goals for acquisition, renewal, and retention rates. For example, perhaps you want to grow your membership by 50% in the next two years and maintain retention at 75% or more.
● Revenue and income diversification goals that detail specific profit margin targets, projected or desired growth, and income streams you must support or add. Maybe you want to start selling branded merchandise within the next year and sell a combined total of 200 shirts, coffee mugs, and notebooks.
● Existing or expected technology integrations that improve staff efficiency, member experiences, etc.
● New or ongoing initiatives, including current or future commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), sustainability pledges, and partnerships with nonprofits.
Identifying and tracking success metrics is crucial—this is how you’ll measure whether you achieve your goals. For this reason, Protech’s guide to association management technology recommends choosing software that centralizes and secures all important member information and touchpoints on one platform. This makes it simple to organize, analyze, and report data.
Seek out an expert.
Seek Out An Expert
As you create or refresh your long-term strategy, consider working with a consultant like Sequence Consulting, who specializes in this area. While consultants may be necessary for enterprise-level associations or those with very complex needs, any organization can benefit from this form of support.
A relationship with a consultant will improve outcomes for your association by:
- Lending extensive expertise and experience: Most consultants have worked with associations of various sizes and industries and experienced many of the common challenges associations face. This depth of experience gives them the ability to strategize and address problems in ways your internal team may not be able to.
- Offering new perspectives: Because your team works for the association daily, you don’t have a truly objective perspective of the organization. Consultants bring an outside vantage point to your association, identifying challenges and opportunities your team might miss otherwise.
- Providing additional time and resources: Your staff might not have time to dedicate to long-term goals and planning. Consultants can provide the focused work and expertise needed to strengthen your strategy. With this approach, you don’t have to ask for more from a staff member who is already stretched thin.
- Keeping strategies up-to-date: Part of a consultant’s job is staying educated on the latest trends and developments in your industry and association management in general. They’ll be able to share these kinds of insights to help your operations align with best practices, keeping your association modern and relevant.
Consultants can leverage what they know about your association and its goals to help you form a clear, sustainable, long-term vision, all without adding more responsibilities to your staff members’ plates.
Reevaluate Your Technology
Using technology that is outdated or that your association has outgrown could be holding your association back.
As you plan for the future, review your association management software (AMS) to ensure it is:
CRM-based, meaning that it is built on a robust, secure CRM that will collect and organize all relevant association data.
Compatible with other tools, such as third-party apps or software solutions your association already uses—incompatibility results in siloed, fragmented data.
Comprehensive, offering all of the features and capabilities your association needs to manage its daily operations.
Scalable, ensuring it doesn’t have restrictive caps on the number of members or staff accounts you can have.
Review any other tools your association uses, including learning management systems (LMS), event management tools, marketing technology, content management systems (CMS), and reporting tools. Eliminate any tools or subscriptions you aren’t using to save money.
This is also a great time to remedy technical debt. Technical debt occurs when organizations take shortcuts or use workarounds to adapt or customize technology on a faster timeline. While these solutions may be functional, they often cause issues with software performance and scalability. Identify technical debt and plan for or apply stable, long-term solutions when possible.
Make Room for Innovation
The future will hold scenarios, innovation, and new ideas you can’t predict now. For example, who would have thought just 10 years ago that artificial intelligence (AI) would be as advanced as it is today? To prepare for the unexpected, leave room for innovation—and possible setbacks—in your plan. In other words, ensure your long-term plan is flexible and adaptable rather than rigid.
One way to do this is by adapting an agile framework, a methodology used in software development to promote continuous development and iterative planning. You might incorporate shorter, cyclical planning cycles, regular strategy reviews, and frequent adaptations to your plan based on feedback and outcomes. For example, create a lean plan for using AI, implement the tools, gather feedback, and adapt your usage guidelines.
Prioritize the Ethical Use of AI
Generative AI is booming across many industries, including for-profit businesses, nonprofits, and both trade and professional associations. When using these powerful tools, keep ethics in mind to protect your organization and your members.
BWF’s guide to responsible AI recommends including these key guidelines in your ethical AI strategy:
- Maintain data privacy and security.
- Promote fairness and combat bias.
- Obtain members’ consent for AI fundraising and other activities.
- Provide transparency and clear explanations for your AI use.
- Mitigate negative impacts on donor relationships.
- Maintain human oversight.
- Define clear accountability structures.
- Train employees.
- Conduct an AI readiness assessment with a consultant.
Applying these guidelines will help you keep member data and proprietary information secure, protect your reputation, and enhance trust in your organization during this evolving era of technology.
It’s easy to get bogged down by everyday tasks or small bumps in the road and lose sight of your long-term goals. However, a detailed plan will be a reliable roadmap for your association’s journey forward, keeping your focus fixed on larger goals that require more time and resources to complete. Using this roadmap, you’ll become a more prepared, innovative, and accomplished organization that is well-equipped to meet its members’ needs.
