Sequence Consulting Helping Associations Grow Faster

Tag: Membership Growth

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Is Your Association Membership Model Built for Growth?

Association Membership Model

Association membership models are under pressure. What used to work no longer creates the same growth, loyalty, or financial stability. The issue is not just dues or benefits. It is the structure of the model itself: who it serves, how value is delivered, how membership is purchased, and how the organization grows.

Why Traditional Membership Models Are Breaking Down

Traditionally, association membership followed a simple formula: members paid annual dues and received a set package of benefits. These perks could include access to exclusive content and discounts on industry resources, invitations to member-only events, and networking opportunities. However, this “one-size-fits-all” approach has become increasingly outdated. Today’s members are diverse and have broader needs and preferences. Younger members, especially, may be less interested in traditional benefits and seek more flexible options, like bite-sized content or project-based resources. The “Old Standard” model can’t keep pace with this evolving membership landscape, leading to frustration and declining participation.

What Is Changing

Statistics paint a concerning picture: 54% of association leaders express concern over their association membership model, and another 35% are somewhat worried (MGI 2023 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report). The call for transformation is loud and clear. The factors driving this challenge are multifaceted. Overdependence on event revenue, declining membership numbers (often with an aging demographic), and increased competition all contribute to this challenge. Additionally, attracting younger members and keeping pace with rising operational costs necessitate exploring ways to make memberships more relevant and financially sustainable.

The "Old Standard" model simply can't keep pace with the evolving membership landscape, leading to frustration and declining participation.

How Smart Associations Are Responding

Fortunately, there are straightforward strategies to breathe new life into your association membership model. Consider implementing autorenewal for recurring revenue, offering monthly or quarterly payment options (think “Netflix Model”), or introducing multiyear membership plans with attractive discounts. Flattening your dues structure to remove multiple tiers can also be an effective way to simplify offerings and appeal to a broader audience.

The Limits of Tiered Membership

While tiered memberships, with varying levels of benefits and fees, seem like an obvious solution, it’s important to tread carefully. Creating too many tiers can become overly complex and confusing for potential members. Additionally, the value proposition for each tier needs to be clearly defined to avoid resentment among different membership levels.

Emerging Trends: Redefining Value

Exciting new association membership models are emerging, offering fresh approaches to member engagement. Here are a few examples:

• All-Inclusive Membership: Offering a single, comprehensive package that includes various benefits, this model eliminates the nickel-and-diming perception, appealing to consumers’ desires for simplicity and value.
• “Friends of” Membership: A tiered approach that starts with a free or low-cost basic membership, this model allows for gradual engagement and upselling.
• “Meal-Plan” Membership: This model replaces complex discount structures with a credit system, empowering members to use their benefits as they see fit, enhancing perceived value.
• Professional Practice and Corporate Membership: These models extend membership beyond individuals to practices and enterprises, offering benefits that address the needs of larger entities and potentially unlocking significant growth opportunities.

We urge organizations to move beyond a piecemeal approach to membership innovation. Don't just pick and choose a single strategy – think strategically about how these innovations can work together.

Strategy: It's All About the Mix

We urge organizations to move beyond a piecemeal approach to membership innovation. Don’t just pick and choose a single strategy – think strategically about how these innovations can work together to create a powerful, comprehensive membership model. Remember, there’s no magic bullet – a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist. The key is to craft a dynamic structure that caters to your membership base’s diverse needs and preferences. By integrating these innovative strategies, you can build a membership model that thrives in the ever-evolving landscape of member expectations.

The Real Goal: A Model Built for Growth

The world of memberships is changing fast. Organizations clinging to outdated models are like runners stuck at the starting line. These innovative approaches aren’t just suggestions, they’re the map to long-term success. Take a moment to consider the trends we’ve explored. How can you leverage them to achieve your organization’s goals? It’s time to ditch the one-size-fits-all mentality and craft a membership strategy that speaks directly to today’s members.

The First Step Toward a Stronger Model

Don’t wait to breathe new life into your membership model. Take stock of what you currently offer. Explore the innovative strategies we’ve discussed – they might be the perfect ingredients to cook up a membership experience that truly resonates with your audience. Remember, every organization is unique. Whether you brainstorm internally or tap into our expertise, the key is embracing change and taking that first step. 

A stronger membership model starts with a willingness to rethink what no longer works.

Sequence helps associations rethink membership models by aligning structure, value, pricing, and audience strategy to support stronger growth and long-term relevance.

Additional insights: The Membership Model is Breaking Down — Here’s How Associations Can Rebuild It

Learn about our Association Strategy Consulting Services

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Why Group Membership May Be the Next Growth Model for Associations

Embrace Organizational Membership Unlocking Growth For The Future

Organizational Membership: The Future Of Membership Growth

Group Membership is Not a Growth Strategy

Many associations have “group” membership, which usually amounts to a modest volume discount, sometimes with a single invoice. The idea is that companies will want to pay for their employees’ memberships if they get a price break and a convenient way to pay. Unfortunately, these group membership plans do not do very well and are mostly an afterthought in the membership strategy. 

The problem is that companies don’t want to pay for any employee’s membership. Or at least far fewer companies do. Most organizations stopped paying employees’ membership dues when times got tough and never started again. Eventually, organizations realized it was unnecessary since employees who really want a membership are willing to pay for it themselves. 

Organizational Membership is the New Path to Growth

Organizational membership is an entirely different value proposition. It is a B2B offering designed with the executive decision-maker in mind. Discounts on individual memberships are but a part of it. The real magic in the offering is a distinct set of benefits that speak to the needs of the executives who make the decision. These are things that benefit the company and the executives themselves. 

What kinds of things? They must be things that have demonstrable financial value and elevate the decision-maker’s profile. They could include: 

  • Positive PR in publications highlighting the great things their organization is doing
  • Access to advocacy and policy leaders to be in the know and have their voices heard
  • A seat at the table on an Executive Advisory Council with the CEO
  • Help in recruiting employees with exclusive data and priority promotional opportunities
  • Substantial savings on education and events they have to pay for (e.g., continuing ed, training events)

There are two things to note about this list. First, these are things that only the association can provide but doesn’t offer now. Second, they have real bottom-line value to a corporation at a minimal cost to the association to deliver.  

This kind of offer works because it is a great business decision for the company. It has clear value and is easy to justify financially. 

Organizational Value is Worth Far More Than Dues

Associations think about dues, which is exactly right for the individual lens and dead wrong for organizations. Why? The value to the organization is not a matter of how many employees they sign up for membership; it is the tangible financial impact they will receive. How much is $1 million in savings worth to an organization? 

Corporations expect to pay for things this way—the greater the value, the more things cost. In organizational membership, larger companies generally get more value than smaller ones and thus pay more. A large organization might pay $100K for that $1 million in value. A smaller one might get less and so pay less. 

This value-based pricing is uncomfortable for many associations, but it is critical to effectively selling organizational memberships. 

An Explosive Growth Opportunity

A prominent medical society Sequence worked with launched an organizational membership with overwhelming success. They designed the membership for large health systems that employ physicians. They offer a suite of benefits, including inside access, publicity, burnout prevention, early access to residents for recruiting, and free continuing education. In addition, all of the physicians in the system are eligible for individual membership at no cost. 

The cost is value-based, ranging from a flat fee of $15k for smaller systems to $100K for large ones. The price does not depend on the number of individual memberships. Health systems sign up for the tangible financial value they receive. 

In the first year, 5,000 new physicians came in through enterprise membership, so many that they had to pause the program because they could not onboard them fast enough. Some of the largest systems have enrolled as many as 15K physicians. The association projects that more than half of its new members will join through organizational membership in a few years.

The Key is to Sell It the Right Way

What were the keys to success? First, an incredibly attractive set of benefits based on thorough research. Second, a convincing financial case. Finally, and most importantly, sales. 

Organizational membership is a B2B sale. It takes time and skill to reach and persuade the right buyers. In this case, it meant a sales resource dedicated to building this program, armed with the quality of sales materials executive buyers expect. It also meant solid executive support: the CEO will personally engage with executives at large systems to help convince them.  

Their vision and investment paid off. Other Sequence clients have had equivalent success with organizational membership programs custom-tailored for their markets. For example, the Executive’s Club of Chicago doubled its membership in three years after rolling out a new Enterprise Member value proposition. 

In another example, SAE International launched a subsidiary focused solely on the needs of companies in their industry and grew their non-dues revenue ten times over.  

How to Minimize the Risk

While the payoff can be very substantial, it can come with some risks. One concern is how much it might “cannibalize” individual membership. The risk is that organizational membership might ultimately decrease net revenue by offering discounted memberships to individuals who would have paid full price. 

It is a valid question that one can answer with good data analysis. Unless market penetration is exceptionally high, the revenue gains will outweigh the discounts in most cases. 

There is also a risk that big groups that join at once might leave at once, creating excessive volatility in membership. To reduce this risk, one can mitigate this with thoughtful multi-year contracts that include extended notice provisions and other safeguards.

The Future of Membership Growth

For many associations, individual membership has reached a plateau. Growth is meager, despite their best efforts, and it is unrealistic to expect big jumps in growth from doing the same old things. A new model is needed. 

Organizational membership allows associations to repurpose assets they already have to enter a new market where they have an immediate competitive advantage — and do so at a very low cost. The revenue and membership growth opportunities are significant. Too significant not to explore seriously.


For more on membership growth strategy see Association Success: 7 Ways to Thrive Not Just Survive.

Learn about our Association Strategy Consulting Services

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We help associations achieve results that last — from tripling growth to transforming revenue.

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Make Your Membership An Offer They Can’t Refuse​

Make Your Membership Into An Offer They Cant Refuse

Author: Lomesh Shah

When it comes to growing your association’s membership base, the first thing you should consider is your offerings. After all, members join your association for benefits, and if you’re experiencing slowed growth, chances are that either your offerings aren’t up to par or you’re not communicating them well. 

When marketing your association, you need a rock-solid membership value proposition, which essentially explains why someone should join your association. You might promote your unbeatable member engagement activities, cutting-edge course offerings, or vibrant community full of networking opportunities. 

To craft a membership offer your association’s audience won’t be able to refuse, explore these top four recommendations for improving benefits and creating a compelling value proposition.

1. Add Member Value, Don't Discount Dues

In a classic supply vs. demand model, the answer to lower demand is to decrease prices. However, lowering your dues rate might be a mistake. After all, if members aren’t finding much value in your offerings when they cost $100, there’s no guarantee they will suddenly become interested in them when they cost $50. By going down this path, associations often end up sacrificing significant revenue with little to show for membership growth.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reconsider your pricing model to engage and retain members. When it comes to adjusting your membership fees, consider these strategies:

  • Offer discounts to specific audience segments. A more innovative approach is to lower dues for specific segments like students and young professionals who may be more cost-sensitive. This strategy helps fill your association with potential future members who will eventually pay full dues. 
  • Experiment with an open-door membership model. Create a free membership tier with an open-door model. This approach gives free members access to limited benefits so they can see what your association has to offer, and you can entice them to upgrade by promoting gated opportunities. 
  • Provide new member specials. Get new members in the door with special offers and discounts. For example, you could offer a discounted rate for the first year of membership or provide new members with exclusive savings, such as discount codes for courses or ticketed events. 

Remember that lowering costs alone doesn’t automatically make your membership more valuable in the eyes of potential members. To attract members, you need to offer a compelling membership value proposition. 

If you use any of these pricing strategies, leverage your association’s membership software to monitor affected members’ behavior. For instance, you might notice members who take advantage of new member specials leave your association when their discounts expire, signaling a need for stronger long-term benefits. 

2. Bundling Benefits Builds Member Value

Increasing awareness of benefits is crucial; otherwise, they hold no value for members. Lack of awareness of benefits often comes from two scenarios

  • Benefits are not articulated well. If members are unclear what they are purchasing when they buy a membership, they will likely not be able to tap into their benefits. 
  • Benefits are confusing. Sometimes, associations offer so many benefits that members have trouble understanding what their membership level provides, figuring out how to access benefits, and knowing what is valuable to engage with. 

If the second scenario sounds like your association, one solution might be to bundle benefits together into organized membership tiers rather than individual sales offerings. This not only makes high-value opportunities more enticing and accessible but also allows for the removal of outdated benefits that clutter communication with members.

Reframing the concept of “products” to encompass all the ways the organization serves its members opens up opportunities to highlight the value proposition of membership and why potential members should be interested. 

This approach also allows you to highlight the value of offerings you might not be able to sell directly. For instance, you might promote access to your membership network through your community engagement platform as a base-level benefit. 

3. Make Member Value Crystal Clear

Ensuring that membership benefits are well-defined is essential for retaining members. Prospective and existing members can only fully appreciate and take advantage of the value you offer if they are clearly aware of what they receive through their membership. 

Many organizations that offer membership encounter a challenge in renewing first-year members. Tradewing’s guide to member engagement suggests providing new members with a welcome kit that introduces them to your association and teaches them how to leverage their benefits. A few items you might include in this kit include the following:

Make Your Membership Into An Offer They Cant Refuse
  • Welcome letter
  • Lanyard and member ID card
  • Branded merchandise
  • Event calendar 
  • Association handbook

 

While your events and association guidelines may change over time, providing initial physical copies can prompt greater initial engagement from new members. Be sure these items also include directions for accessing future benefits. For instance, you might add a QR code for your online event calendar to your printed copy. 

4. Offer a Grace Period

Members will often decide if your association’s benefits are truly worth it when it’s time to renew. Ensure they have plenty of time to thoroughly weigh your offerings by providing a renewal grace period. Additionally, grace periods provide a few other benefits, such as:

 

  • Time to clear up renewal issues. By providing grace periods, you allow members to rectify any oversights in renewing their membership while still having access to all the benefits and perks associated with their membership. 
  • Multiple chances to renew. Members often lapse because they simply forget to renew. As Fundraising Letters’ selection of membership renewal letter templates explains, it’s highly possible for busy members to miss your email telling them their renewal period is coming up. With an extended grace period, you have multiple opportunities to check in and ensure members don’t lapse due to poor communication.
  • Opportunity for last-minute offerings. Keep an eye on members reaching the end of their grace period, and consider reaching out with special offerings to continue with your association. For example, you might provide them with free membership for the first month of their next year. 

 

The length of your grace period depends on your association’s membership model and offerings. Some associations might offer just a couple of weeks, while others might provide multiple months before cutting off benefits.

 

Conclusion: A Membership Value Proposition They Can't Refuse

In conclusion, consider the possibility of a membership value proposition that professionals can’t refuse. With the potential to restructure your current model and create an irresistible offer, your association can capture members’ attention and loyalty. Take advantage of this chance to provide a value proposition that stands out and keeps your community engaged.

Learn about our Membership Marketing Strategy Services for Associations

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How To Attract & Recruit Younger Members To Your Association

Recruiting Younger Members Feature
Author: Debbie Willis

Gen Z is more connected, tech-savvy, and driven by purpose than generations before theirs. As they enter the workforce, they’re looking for organizations that reflect their values, offer flexibility, and create opportunities for growth. These individuals have high expectations for their memberships. They want meaningful engagement opportunities and a sense of belonging within the communities they join.

 

Associations like yours are constantly challenged to be relevant to the next generation of potential members. By embracing modern trends, you can create a membership experience that resonates with younger demographics and encourages them to join your program. Let’s explore key strategies for connecting with young professionals.

Focus on Professional Development

LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that 8 in 10 people believe learning adds purpose to their work. Today’s employees are seeking out and spending more time on learning and development (L&D) opportunities that:

 

  • Help make progress towards career goals
  • Keep them up-to-date in their fields
  • Are personalized for their interests and career goals

 

Gen Z is particularly interested in learning opportunities that fuel professional progress. 53% of Gen Z agreed that learning allows them to explore potential career paths at their companies. That’s 16 percentage points higher than the Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers who were surveyed!

 

L&D is one of the primary reasons people join associations, especially for individuals who are just starting out in the field. It brings them up to speed by offering training that their employers might not provide. 

Creating Your Professional Development Opportunities

Learning comes in many forms! You might provide workshops, mentorship programs, industry reports, or interactive courses that fuel growth. Consider offering a variety of opportunities to cater to different learning styles.


One of the best emerging opportunities is online courses. This form of eLearning combines the power of effective professional development with the convenience of the online space.

Using an association LMS, you can create tailored learning pathways that allow members to chart their own development journeys and choose opportunities that align with their professional goals. You’ll create a structured sequence of courses that guide learners through a specific topic or skill development process. Members can complete courses at their own pace, earn relevant certifications, and ultimately fuel their own development.

How To Attract Recruit Younger Members To Your Association

Let’s say you’re creating a professional development pathway for marketing professionals. You might offer these modules:

 

  • Module 1: Introduction to Digital Marketing – A course that covers the fundamentals of digital marketing with the goal of understanding key marketing concepts and tools
  • Module 2: Social Media Marketing – A course focusing on social media content creation, paid social ads, and audience engagement strategies
  • Module 3: SEM Strategies – A deeper dive into search engine marketing (SEM) that explores topics like keyword research, on-page SEO, and PPC campaigns
  • Module 4: Data-Driven Marketing – Insights into collecting, analyzing, and using marketing data, covering topics like Google Analytics, data visualization, customer segmentation, and A/B testing
  • Assessment: Marketing Professional Certification – An exam that tests knowledge and skills gained through the pathway in order to earn an official certification

 

Learning pathways are effective for personalizing engagement opportunities at scale. Depending on your LMS, you might be able to create your own courses or use prebuilt content and resources. You can even offer industry-recognized certifications that appeal to younger members who are looking to improve their resumes.

 

TopClass recommends choosing an LMS that integrates with other technologies, like your online community platform and member management system. You’ll be able to provide easy access to L&D opportunities, create more tailored learning paths for each user, track progress, and create collaborative learning experiences.

Embrace Digital Transformation

Younger generations prioritize convenience, flexibility, and accessibility, which makes embracing digital tools crucial for associations.

 

Digital engagement opportunities break down geographical barriers and offer instant access to content, making it easier for members to participate on their terms. By adopting these tools, associations can better reach younger members who value efficiency and on-demand access.

 

Digital transformation doesn’t stop with eLearning, so let’s explore some additional digital engagement opportunities for connecting with younger generations.

Online Events

Virtual events and webinars provide an accessible way to engage members without the barriers of location or travel costs. These events can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, offering a convenient option for busy, tech-savvy members.

 

If you have an online community, you can create a dedicated space where members can register for upcoming events, join live sessions, and view recorded content. Consider hosting different types of online events that provide value to members, such as industry-specific webinars, career development workshops, networking events, or panel discussions.

 

Make these events interactive by offering opportunities like:

 

  • Breakout rooms for smaller, focused discussions that allow attendees to network or dive deeper into specific topics in an intimate setting.
  • Chat functionality to allow participants to share thoughts, ask questions, and interact with speakers and fellow attendees.
  • Live polling to encourage members to voice opinions or participate in fun quizzes during sessions.

 

Virtual event tools like Zoom offer these interactive features, helping you create more engaging event experiences.

Mobile App

Younger generations value the flexibility that their mobile devices offer. A mobile app for your association allows members to engage in discussions, browse events, and access learning materials anytime, anywhere on their smartphones.

 

With a mobile app, members can take courses, track their progress, or complete certifications on the go, so they can integrate learning into their daily routines. For younger, tech-savvy members, this flexibility is a key draw.

 

Clowder highlights several mobile app features for associations that draw engagement, such as:

 

  • A newsfeed to keep members updated with the latest announcements and content related to their interests
  • A resource library to access whitepapers, case studies, courses, and other educational materials
  • Member forums that allow members to discuss topics, share knowledge, and solve problems together
  • One-to-one messaging that enables members to connect with others directly, share opportunities, and seek advice
  • Group and chapter segmentation to organize members based on geographic area and professional interests, which is great for fostering micro-communities within your association
  • Event and conference management so members can discover, register, and plan out their participation in your association’s events.

 

You’ll also be able to send push notifications to keep members informed about new courses, upcoming events, or other important updates. With timely reminders and updates, they’ll never be out of the loop!

Offer Flexible Membership Options

Younger members often have different needs when joining associations, such as affordability, flexibility, and the opportunity to explore membership benefits before committing. To make a membership offer that younger generations can’t refuse, you’ll need to consider these needs and preferences.

 

You might implement tiered membership options, allowing members to choose the level of benefits that best suit their preferences and budget. For example, a basic tier could offer access to essential resources, while a premium tier could provide additional perks like exclusive content or networking opportunities. Additionally, offering discounts to students or early-career professionals can make membership more accessible to younger members who may be on a tighter budget.

 

To take flexibility one step further, consider offering shorter commitment periods, such as a six-month trial membership. This gives newer members the chance to determine your association’s value before committing to a longer-term membership.

Younger members often have different needs when joining associations, such as affordability, flexibility, and the opportunity to explore membership benefits before committing. To make a membership offer that younger generations can’t refuse, you’ll need to consider these needs and preferences.

You might implement tiered membership options, allowing members to choose the level of benefits that best suit their preferences and budget. For example, a basic tier could offer access to essential resources, while a premium tier could provide additional perks like exclusive content or networking opportunities. Additionally, offering discounts to students or early-career professionals can make membership more accessible to younger members who may be on a tighter budget.

To take flexibility one step further, consider offering shorter commitment periods, such as a six-month trial membership. This gives newer members the chance to determine your association’s value before committing to a longer-term membership.

Foster a Sense of Community

For many younger professionals who are just entering the field, forming connections and building a network is a major benefit of association membership. A strong sense of community provides a support system and helps them navigate their careers with greater confidence.

 

An online community is an invaluable tool for fostering this sense of belonging. It serves as a one-stop shop for association activities, including events, networking, membership management, and learning opportunities. By centralizing these opportunities into one platform, you make engaging with your association’s community a breeze!

 

When implementing your LMS, check whether it offers social learning features, such as discussion forums or group collaboration. This enables members to connect over shared learning experiences and helps build a supportive community that keeps younger members engaged in your association.

 

In addition to online opportunities, you might offer social events, such as informal meetups, networking events, and community volunteer opportunities. Forming interest-based groups or committees also gives members a chance to collaborate on shared goals and passions.

Learn more about growth strategies for associations.

Start Improving Your Membership Program!

The future of your association lies in the hands of the next generation of leaders. Younger professionals have different preferences, values, and expectations from older generations. To remain relevant and grow, your association should evolve its strategies to meet these needs.

 

By focusing on the elements we suggested, you’ll create unique value that younger professionals won’t want to pass up. 

 

Get started by evaluating your current opportunities. Do you provide plenty of online opportunities, particularly for learning? Are your membership options flexible? Can you do more to create a vibrant community? Focus on improving one of these areas to start and watch as your members become more active!

Learn about our Membership Marketing Strategy Services for Associations

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How Associations Can Win Back Lapsed Members

Win Back Lapsed Members A Guide To Success

This article first appeared in Associations Now as “Baby Come Back! How to Win Back Lapsed Members and Why You Should”

Learn common reasons why members leave their associations and creative strategies to pull them back in for the long term.

When a member leaves, it doesn’t mean goodbye forever. Members who have walked away may be the easiest ones to get back. Most organizations turn to recruiting new members to fill gaps in enrollment, but since they don’t already know you, this group is more challenging to convert. You have much convincing to do before they’re ready to sign on.

Meanwhile, for every four or so new members you get, you lose one existing member who doesn’t renew. Let’s put it this way—if your retention rate is 75 percent, you must replace a quarter of your membership with new members every year before you see any growth.

If you want to boost enrollment, your organization’s best bet is improving retention. Engaging new members immediately when they join is the key to cultivating an engaged base that renews without a second thought.

Despite your best efforts, some members are bound to leave. The keys to getting them back are how long you offer them opportunities to renew and how well you understand their needs.

IT's NOT YOU; IT'S ME

Ask yourself why members leave. The odds are that it’s not personal. Research reveals that the top reason for nonrenewal is usually “I didn’t see the value in membership” (followed by “I just forgot to renew.”) Lapsed members aren’t disgruntled. They’re just disinterested—for now. As often as not, losing a member is not about you. Maybe membership with your organization is a classic case of “right person, wrong time.” The best examples of this are recent graduates and young professionals; while they might not need their association right away, they frequently rejoin seven to 10 years later when it makes sense for their career.

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

But you’ve already asked, and they said no, right? On average, we’ve found that the most successful organizations start renewal campaigns 3.9 months before the membership in question expires. Throughout that period, they invite that member to renew 7.1 times. Even after being offered every opportunity to renew, some members still don’t. Why bother to keep trying? Because these same successful organizations keep asking for over a year after a member lapses, sending 5.8 more invitations to rejoin. And it works.

If you focus on what your members care about, your chances of creating a loyal base that renews repeatedly are strong.

Nonmembers who know you, like lapsed members, are far more likely to respond to your invitations than anyone else. In one of our recent tests, nonmembers who had previously engaged with the organization in any way were six times more likely to respond than those who never had.

Lapsed members know you. At one point, they saw the value in membership, whether they experienced it or not. With lapsed members, you don’t have to make any introductions. You need to find the right way to make the ask.

But you’ve already asked, and they said no, right? On average, we’ve found that the most successful organizations start renewal campaigns 3.9 months before the membership in question expires. Throughout that period, they invite that member to renew 7.1 times. Even after being offered every opportunity to renew, some members still don’t. Why bother to keep trying? Because these same successful organizations keep asking for over a year after a member lapses, sending 5.8 more invitations to rejoin. And it works.

YOU KNOW EACH OTHER

This brings us to the next point: You know them, too. If you track member data (and if you don’t, you should), you have information about what your lapsed members are interested in. What did they open, download, or attend as members? That information is the key to bringing them back. Time and again, tests show that the most effective membership messaging is segmented by interest. Engage with members on things they care about, and they’ll respond.

This is especially true for lapsed members who already know you and need a reminder of the unique value you have to offer them. For example, 75 percent of previous American Lung Association (ALA) donors had not engaged in over a year. Initially, ALA thought donors cared about over 30 things. Upon close inspection, they found that their base was focused on three significant areas: lung health, clean air, and smoking cessation.

ALA immediately increased email engagement by 50 percent by tailoring their messaging to these three interests. Although many of their donors had lapsed for over two years, ALA reactivated 7 percent of their file in one year. In two years, they reactivated 300,000 donors and grew their active file by 50 percent. (See How We Helped American Lung Association Grow Their Base 50%)

By understanding what individual members care about and tailoring your messaging accordingly, this massive growth is within reach for your organization.

The Way Forward TO WIN BACK LAPSED MEMBERS

But will they stay this time? If you focus on what your members care about, your chances of creating a loyal base that renews repeatedly are strong.

If your association is like most, your audience is not infinite. Only so many people can join, many of whom are already members. Many have never been. In between sit people who were once members but are no more. Treating the middle ground like your best prospects is a winning formula for growth.

Learn about our Membership Marketing Strategy Services for Associations

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Is Your Member Segmentation Wrong?

Member Segmentation Is It Limiting Your Success

This article originally appeared in Sidecar as Is Your Member Segmentation Strategy Wrong?

Most associations segment their membership in the same way: by career stage. So young professionals might be one segment, mid-career folks another, and so on into retirement. They do it this way because it seems obvious and easy – but is there a chance it’s wrong?

When determining whether or not your member segmentation strategy is helping increase member engagement, ask yourself: Do our different segments act differently?

The Problem With Career-Stage Member Segmentation

If career stage has been the category used for your member segmentation, it’s likely been difficult to spot any trends or changes. For example, do mid-career and late-career members respond to different messages or engage with different things? They probably don’t.

Career-stage segmentation does not work because it doesn’t tell you how to treat people differently to get the best response – It is not actionable.

What you need to know is how your audience is different, which often falls into two distinct categories: what interests them and their relationship with you.

  • Education
  • Patient Outcomes
  • Practice Improvement
  • Advocacy

These groups were very distinct. For example, many physicians were not interested in advocacy, but those who were were highly passionate. So, talking about advocacy to the wrong people may have led to unsubscribes while talking about advocacy to the right people got an enormous response.

Segmenting By Interests

One of the most effective ways to segment your audience is by interests – after all, people will always respond better to things that interest them. Moreover, some things your association does are far more interesting to certain people than others. So how can you know which things and which people?

For starters, let your email be your guide. Cluster your email by topic and look at which members respond to what. You will begin to see patterns, and that’s where your member segmentation should start.

In an analysis we completed at Sequence for the American Medical Association, we found that there were four principal areas that physicians responded to:

Understanding Interests Through Action

How do you know what people belong in which segment? If you know what emails and content a member responds to, that will tell you. If you don’t, you can analyze your data for “look-alikes.” That is, members likely to respond to advocacy because they look like advocates in other ways. For example, they may open the same emails or visit the same pages. They may even have similar demographics.

Taking it one step further, an outside data shop can also help you use consumer data to segment non-members by interest. For example, the medical society in the story above doubled its member growth rate in this way.

The Loyalty Ladder

The other member segmentation strategy that always applies is how engaged your members are with you. Picture a ladder with your most engaged members on the top. These are your Super Fans. They are longtime members active in everything you do. They are your governance and volunteers. You wish every member were like them.

On the bottom are the unengaged. They joined but have not done anything. These are your Window Shoppers. In between are increasing levels of engagement. Members have more lifetime value at each level and become more likely to renew, so your goal is to move your members up the ladder.

Members at each rung of the ladder will react to different things. But, more importantly, you want them to respond to different things.

  • Lower on the ladder, you want them to engage with the “stickiest,” most high-value things you have to offer (Your data can tell you what the high-value things are, which will be the topic for our next article.) For example, volunteering, free webinars and resources, along with member benefits including insurance.
  • Higher up the ladder, you do not need to drive more engagement; you want to appreciate them and keep them excited. Part of your strategy should be a concerted effort to recognize them and give them special opportunities.
This approach allows you to concentrate your resources where they will do the most good and engage the members methodically to increase loyalty.

Don't Ignore Non-Members Either

You can also extend this approach to non-members. People come to your events, subscribe to publications, and contribute to journals – yet they aren’t members. More often than not, these non-member “constituents” make up a larger group than members.

For example, you can look at non-members who attended your event and infer their interests from what they did there or how they are similar to members whose interests you know. Once you have that information, your segmentation strategy can be to send more of those resources via email with a call to action to turn them into members.

Thinking about non-member interactions as rungs on the ladder allows you to walk them up to a membership.

Member Segmentation In Action

You do not have to choose between these approaches. Some of the most successful associations combine these segmentation strategies to attract new members and increase loyalty as effectively as possible. A winning acquisition and retention strategy allows interests to guide messaging and loyalty to inform offers.

It used to be that only the largest, data-savvy associations could achieve this kind of member segmentation. That is not true today. Better technology makes data analysis easier and cheaper every day, even in-house.

Could you be doing your member segmentation wrong? There is no reason not to start doing it right.

To learn more read 3 Steps to a Great Nonprofit Brand Strategy

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5 Game-Changing Strategies for Membership Marketing Success

Mastering Membership Marketing 5 Game Changing Breakthroughs You Need To Know

This article first appeared in Associations Now as “Five Breakthroughs in Membership Marketing“

It's Time for a Breakthrough in Membership Marketing

Traditional membership marketing is predictably low return and has stayed the same for years. Most associations were slow to adopt email marketing when it came on the scene in the mid-90s. Today, 85% of associations use email, and 48% say it is one of their most productive channels.[mfn]2022 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report,
Marketing General[/mfn] Still, click rates remain low, on average less than 2%.[mfn]Average Industry Rates for Email as of April 2023, Constant Contact[/mfn]

Many associations have delved into social and digital advertising but have failed. Only 14% say social media is effective, and 10% say the same of paid digital.

The good news is that membership marketers can expect a lot better. We have recently tested innovations in membership segmentation, targeting, messaging, and advertising that performed four to nine times better — in one case, twenty-seven times better — than the old-school tactics they replaced.

1. FOCUS ON YOUR "CUSTOMERS"

As I have written previously, your members are not your only customers. Your organization has relationships with many other people who interact with you differently. They attend your events, take your training, and write for your journals. One client calls them “ghost members,” people who are with you in spirit but not in membership.

It is a truism in marketing that your best prospect is the customer you already have. Why? On the one hand, they know you, so you don’t have to work hard to introduce yourself. This is even more important than you might think. Most associations have less than 35% awareness across their trade or profession.
Moreover, your customers see you as valuable in some way, so you don’t have to do so much to convince them. Most importantly, you know them. You know who they are and what they like, which is more than half the battle in marketing.

If true, your non-member customers should be your best membership prospects. But are they? We tested sending the same emails to a list of non-member customers and a rented email list of cold contacts. The emails sent to non-member customers performed 8.6X better than emails sent to cold lists. Not to mention, the rented list was expensive, and the customer list was free.

What does this tell you? First, you should be marketing membership to your non-member customers. But also, you should be actively cultivating your list of those customers by capturing opted-in emails at every touchpoint you can.

2. LAPSED MEMBERS CAN BE YOUR EASIEST NEW MEMBERS

In a previous article, I explained why lapsed members are an even more under-tapped audience. Most associations move on from members who don’t renew after a month or two. Some may try to win them back but then give up. This is often short-sighted. 

Lapsed members do ghost members one better: They not only know your organization, they know your membership experience and saw value in it when they joined. Members don’t lapse because they hate you. They lapse because they don’t see your value at that moment. 

Are lapsed members a lost cause, or can you remind them of your value and bring them back again?

At the American Lung Association (ALA), 75% of their donor file had been dormant for as long as two years. Historically, ALA had forgotten about them and focused all their efforts on finding new donors.

We helped ALA develop an email campaign that built on what ALA knew about these donors, namely, what they cared about. Of all ALA’s great work, people gravitate to four significant issues: clean air, lung health, and smoking cessation. They sent messages that spoke to lapsed donors about what they cared about – and only what they cared about – inviting them to be part of the solution again.

The result? In one year, they reactivated 7% of their lapsed members. In two years, ALA grew their donor file by 50% — over 600K active donors – by focusing on long-forgotten lost causes.

3. SEGMENT BY INTERESTS

A significant reason for ALA’s success was segmentation by interest. Sending clean air messaging to people they knew to care about clean air was many times more effective than their old, unfocused messaging. As we have found before, organizations do not segment their messaging or segment based on career stage or employment setting, which is seldom effective.

In another powerful example, we helped American Medical Association (AMA) analyze their member data to arrive at four interest-based segments: Advocacy, Practice Improvement, Patient Outcomes, and Medical Education. Segmenting their marketing this way helped triple their member growth in one year.

This is one way targeting your customers and lapsed members can pay off big. Because you know their interests, you can segment them effectively. In our most recent test, a leading engineering society used data they had collected on “ghost” members to identify the specific technical interests of their prospects. It tested interest-based messaging against their standard “generic” messaging. The interest-specific messages performed four times better than the generic ones.

4. Make EMAIL PERSONAL AGAIn

Email is the mainstay of many membership marketing programs, but it has become less effective as people have tuned email out. Of the nearly 145 billion emails sent daily, 84% are considered spam. A full 54% of email users delete or ignore spam.[mfn]What Percentage of Email is Spam In 2023?, Earthweb[/mfn]  You don’t think your membership emails are spam, but your prospects probably do because it looks like commercial email.

People like personal email, however, and a more personal approach to membership email can be far more effective. In another recent test, we sent a series of emails to prospective members that appeared to come from a well-known member of the society (with their permission, of course). The subject line was personalized, and the body of the email was a short, personal invitation to join the organization.

This straightforward approach has powerful results when done correctly. In our test, people clicked through personal emails twenty-seven times more often than impersonal messages and enrolled five times more often.

5. take another look at digital

At the beginning of this article, I pointed out that most associations need better results from digital advertising. Traditional banner and search ads are expensive, and the results could be better. Newer, less conventional advertising can be far more effective when correctly integrated with email campaigns.

All major digital advertising platforms (Google, LinkedIn, Meta) can target custom audiences. That is, provide them with a list of individuals you want to reach and advertise only to them. Because it is so targeted, it is a far more efficient way to advertise. We have found that the most effective way to use custom audiences is to support your email campaigns.

Using this approach, prospects who receive your emails are exposed to your digital ads simultaneously. The ads increase awareness and offer another way to respond, improving the success of your campaign.

In one recent test, we created a custom audience on LinkedIn comprised of prospective members identified using the tactics discussed above. These individuals received membership marketing emails and were exposed to LinkedIn ads simultaneously.

The emails with digital ad support performed 22% better than emails without digital help. Because LinkedIn ads are pay-per-click and the primary purpose of the test was to drive email response, the cost of the ads was significantly lower than a stand-alone digital ad campaign.

LinkedIn also offers Sponsored Messaging, which allows you to reach prospective members in your custom audience via direct messages that appear to come from another LinkedIn member. In another recent test, we sent personal messages to a custom audience, like the personal emails discussed above, personally inviting prospective members to join the organization.

This tactic yielded open rates as high as 56% — more than seven better than traditional emails sent to the same list. This approach was far more efficient than regular LinkedIn ads, yielding three times more click-throughs at only 6% of the cost.

Conclusion

These next-level membership marketing techniques deliver transformational membership results. New ways of targeting the best prospects, segmenting your audience, and reaching them in new ways with new messages can revolutionize recruitment. Best of all, they are well within reach of any association that wants to take their marketing to the next level.

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Turning Nonmember Customers into an Engine for Association Growth

Unlocking Association Success Transform Nonmembers Into Loyal Members

This article first appeared in Sidecar as Are Your Members Your Best Customers?

Your Nonmember Customers May Be Your Best Future Members

How to grow engagement? It’s a law of nature in marketing: Your best prospect is the customer you already have. Research consistently shows that it costs six to seven times more to get a new customer than to keep one, and in membership terms, smart associations understand what that means for retention. A dollar spent on retention goes much further than a dollar spent on recruitment.

It goes further than current members, too. Your second-best customers are likely to be your lapsed members – strange as it may sound. Members who have left you may be the easiest to recruit again because they know you, and you know them, which is half the battle in acquisition.

However, are these the only groups that associations should be thinking about to grow engagement? What about your nonmember customers?

Looking Beyond Your Membership To Grow Engagement

Are members your only customers? The answer is no, but most associations don’t think that way. After all, they’re membership organizations, and members matter most. While that might be true, they’re not the only ones who matter.

What about all the others you serve who are not members? People who attend your events, take your training, buy your publications, and more? These are your nonmember customers.

Unfortunately, associations don't cultivate customer relationships and leave a lot of money on the table.

Understanding The Impact of NonMember Customers

In purely financial terms, these customers are possibly more valuable than most of your members. How? Someone who attends two to three events each year, every year is probably contributing more revenue than a member who simply pays their dues. They will probably be more loyal than unengaged members, too. “But they should become members!” you say. Of course they should. They might be your best prospects of all. After all, non-member customers know you, have a relationship with you, and get value from you. More importantly, you know who they are and how to talk to them. They should be prime targets for recruitment, and they are. One large engineering association tested marketing specifically to non-member customers and found they responded three to five times better than the general market.  

The Challenge for NonMember cUSTOMER Engagement

But what if they don’t want to be members? This is where most associations fall down. They push the non-responders to the side and move on to the next prospective member. In reality, there is plenty of upside in growing those non-member relationships. The people most likely to come to an event are those who come to other events. People who like your events will likely enjoy your training and vice versa.

Unfortunately, associations don’t think this way, so they don’t cultivate customer relationships and leave a lot of money on the table.

Associations make significant investments in technology to manage their member relationships: to communicate with, engage and renew them. Very few make similar investments in managing non-member customer relationships.

Building a Customer Engagement Plan

The first part is hard for most associations. Events, training, subscription, and membership data are usually not kept in one place. If they are, they are generally not looked at with a single view of the customer, namely, the big picture of their relationship.

The first step would be to figure out how many customers you have. If you add up all of the people who have transacted with you in the last five years, including lapsed members, how big is your audience? Your customer universe will likely dwarf your current membership. How much untapped growth opportunity is there?

If you think of membership as one opportunity among others for nonmember customers,
you unlock many new avenues to deliver value and grow engagement.

Consolidating Customer Data

The first part is hard for most associations. Events, training, subscription, and membership data are usually not kept in one place. If they are, they are generally not looked at with a single view of the customer, namely, the big picture of their relationship.

The first step would be to figure out how many customers you have. If you add up all of the people who have transacted with you in the last five years, including lapsed members, how big is your audience? Your customer universe will likely dwarf your current membership. How much untapped growth opportunity is there?

Setting Goals for NonMember Customer Interaction

The second part of managing a customer relationship is making it into what you want it to be. What do you want from your customers besides membership? Is it to maximize revenue right now? To cross-sell your offerings? To grow engagement and repeat business? Only managed customer relationships achieve these things. Unfortunately, that is what most associations leave on the table.

Making the Most of Your Association’s Relationships

While many associations only focus on their members, a customer-centered strategy is just a mental leap away. You have thousands, if not tens of thousands of relationships today with customers who will never be members. So how will you make the most of them?

If your best prospects are the customers you already have, your best customers are the ones you treat like customers. If you think of membership as one opportunity among others for nonmember customers, you unlock many new avenues to deliver value and grow engagement.

For more on how to grow engagement see: Member Engagement: Three Big Problems and Three Ways to Fix Them and How To Improve Member Engagement.

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How the AMA Doubled Its Membership Growth Rate

AMA Membership Growth Case Study

Client: American Medical Association (AMA)
Challenge: Flat membership, physician apathy, and a story no one was telling effectively
Outcome: Membership growth rate doubled; acquisition costs fell; retention rose; member satisfaction reached new highs

Amai Logo Digital Rgb

The Situation

When Todd Unger joined the American Medical Association as Chief Experience Officer, one of his first acts was to respond to a LinkedIn message from a physician who said he and his colleagues weren’t members — and didn’t feel the AMA represented them.

Most executives would have filed it away. Unger flew to meet him for lunch.

What he found in that airport hotel was a doctor who had written a book about what it felt like to be a physician in America today — spending two hours on administrative work for every hour of patient care, fighting insurance companies for basic approvals, watching patients leave the pharmacy unable to afford their prescriptions. The second chapter of that book was titled: Why the AMA Must Die.

Unger’s takeaway wasn’t defensiveness. It was clarity. “If I had him for 20 minutes,” he said, “I could turn that around. But I can’t fly all over the country and have lunch with everyone who doesn’t like the AMA. How do we scale this story?”

That question became the foundation of what Unger and Sequence Consulting would call the Digital Reboot.

What We Found

When Sequence began working with the AMA, the organization had done many things right. It had made changes, invested in modernization, and tried to keep up with a rapidly shifting profession. And yet membership was flat. The largest segment of physicians had no opinion about the AMA whatsoever — not hostile, not engaged, simply apathetic.

The diagnosis Sequence brought was precise: the AMA had a storytelling problem, not a product problem.

The organization was doing consequential work — speaking for physicians in Congress, confronting chronic disease epidemics, removing the administrative barriers between patients and doctors, driving the future of medicine. None of it was breaking through. Physicians didn’t know what the AMA was doing because the AMA had never built the infrastructure to tell them.

Three specific findings shaped what came next:

Physicians didn’t need more benefits. They needed a reason to believe. The instinct in most membership organizations is to add value through discounts, access, and tangible perks. What Sequence and the AMA team found was that these incentives could push someone over the edge — but they couldn’t create the underlying will to join. That required a clear, compelling answer to a simpler question: does the AMA represent me? Most physicians couldn’t answer yes, not because the AMA didn’t represent them, but because they’d never been told how.

Demographic segmentation wasn’t predictive. Behavioral segmentation was. The AMA had extensive research on physicians by age, specialty, and career stage. But these segments weren’t reliably associated with membership likelihood. Sequence led a mapping exercise that traced physician journeys from medical student through retirement — and the AMA team then built a data-driven behavioral segmentation from actual content interactions across email and web. Three segments emerged that were genuinely predictive: Practice Innovators (focused on running their practice and keeping up with technology), Activists (deeply engaged in advocacy), and Learners. Each needed different content, different messages, and different reasons to join.

The AMA’s publishing model was organized around internal priorities, not member needs. Content was produced by business units promoting their own work. The result was a fragmented publishing platform that served the organization’s internal structure rather than the interests of the physicians it was trying to reach. A tectonic shift was needed: from community newspaper to strategic publishing platform, with every piece of content evaluated against whether it served the member segments the AMA was trying to reach and retain.

The Approach

Working with Unger and the AMA membership and marketing team, Sequence helped design and execute the Digital Reboot — a comprehensive strategy to rebuild how the AMA recruited, engaged, and retained members across every digital touchpoint.

1. A new value proposition — built from listening, not assumption. The team went back to physicians, students, and residents and asked what they actually needed from the AMA. What emerged was a positioning built around a single idea: the physician’s powerful ally in patient care. Every word was chosen deliberately. Physicians had entered medicine as a calling. In an era when control over their practice was being stripped away — by insurers, by administrative burden, by technology — they needed someone unambiguously in their corner. That’s what the AMA could be, and that’s what the new positioning said.

2. Behavior-based segmentation driving personalized outreach. The new segmentation — Practice Innovators, Activists, Learners — replaced the old demographic approach and became the organizing logic for all membership communications. Instead of broadcasting the same message to all physicians, the AMA could now speak directly to what each segment cared about. An Activist received messages about what the AMA had saved them — “Did you know the AMA saved physicians $500 million a year by blocking that merger?” A Learner received content tied to clinical and educational resources. The response was consistent: I had no idea.

3. Membership Moves Medicine — a campaign built on proof points. The AMA launched a membership campaign called Membership Moves Medicine, built on a library of concrete, translatable proof points drawn from across the organization. The hard work wasn’t creative — it was canvassing every corner of the AMA, listening to what was actually being achieved, and translating organizational wins into language that a physician would recognize as relevant to their daily life. The campaign closed the gap between what the AMA was doing and what physicians knew it was doing.

4. Making physicians feel powerful — literally. One of the most unexpected elements of the campaign came from a photographer who normally shoots celebrities. The AMA began photographing its own members — physicians, students, residents — in the same style. When one member picked up her photo, she said: I feel really powerful. That moment crystallized something important. The AMA’s value proposition was about being a powerful ally. If the organization could make physicians feel powerful through its marketing — in an era when control was being taken from them — that was the brand strategy made real. Forty-foot banners with member faces hung from the ceilings at the AMA’s annual meeting. For many staff, it was the first time they’d seen a member’s face in the building.

5. Rebuilding the affinity program around real physician needs. The existing affinity program was a semi-random basket of discounts — including a popular Mercedes-Benz discount that drove joins but not loyalty. Members would join for the discount and leave. Sequence helped the AMA rethink the program from scratch: not what could generate revenue or partner fees, but what would meaningfully address the real problems physicians faced. The result included partnerships targeting physician burnout (Headspace meditation, offered free for two years) and medical student debt (Laurel Road financial services). Benefits that aligned with the AMA’s mission and built the kind of value that drove renewal.

The Result

The AMA doubled its membership growth rate.

Acquisition costs fell. Retention improved. Member satisfaction reached new highs. And critically, the Digital Reboot didn’t just produce numbers — it produced a repeatable system. The behavior-based segmentation, the proof-point publishing model, the Membership Moves Medicine campaign infrastructure — these weren’t one-time interventions. They were capabilities the AMA now owned and operated.

The results have been independently corroborated by multiple external sources. ASAE’s Associations Now reported that “AMA experienced a 35 percent growth from 2011 to 2020. And, during the first year of the pandemic, membership was the greatest it’s been since 1949.” At the AMA’s 2024 House of Delegates meeting — documented in a report published by PubMed — the CEO stated that membership had “climbed to levels not seen for decades” and that the AMA had achieved “outstanding financial stability.” These are not claims made by Sequence. They are documented by independent editorial and institutional sources.

Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer, American Medical Association

“We doubled our rate of growth much faster than expected. Our acquisition costs are lower. Our members are happier and more engaged. Retention is up.” — Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer / SVP Physician Engagement, American Medical Association

“It’s been a dramatic impact. Transformative. They’ve been critical in achieving what we have in two years. We could have never done it without Sequence.” — Todd Unger, American Medical Association

What This Means for Your Association

The AMA’s challenge before the Digital Reboot is one of the most common patterns Sequence encounters: an organization doing genuinely valuable work that its members don’t know about, communicate in language its members don’t connect with, and structured around the organization’s internal logic rather than the member’s actual experience.

The instinct, when membership is flat, is to add benefits, run promotions, or invest in acquisition campaigns. What the AMA’s story shows is that none of that works until the underlying story is right. Incentives can push someone over the edge. They can’t create the will to join.

Three questions worth asking about your own association:

If a physician — or engineer, or attorney, or accountant — asked you why they should join, could you answer in 30 seconds in a way that made them feel represented and understood? Or would the answer be a list of benefits they could probably find cheaper elsewhere?

Does your content serve your members’ interests, or your organization’s internal structure? The two are often not the same.

Do your members know what you’ve done for them lately — specifically, concretely, in terms they recognize as relevant to their daily work?

For the AMA, the answers to those questions in 2015 were uncomfortable. The work of making them comfortable again is what the Digital Reboot was. And the growth that followed wasn’t luck — it was the predictable result of an organization that finally learned to tell its own story.

This is one of two case studies from Sequence Consulting’s work with the American Medical Association. Read the companion piece on how the AMA captured the employed physician market through its Health System Engagement program — and reached record total membership.

About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.

[Schedule a conversation about your membership growth →]

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How the AMA Reached Record Membership by Reimagining Who Its Customer Was

AMA health system membership growth case study
Client: American Medical Association (AMA)
Challenge: Half of all U.S. physicians were now employed by health systems — and the AMA’s individual membership model was structurally unable to reach them
Outcome: Group membership grew 158% in five years; AMA reached 302,000 dues-paying members — the highest total in its history
Amai Logo Digital Rgb

The Situation

For most of its 175-year history, the American Medical Association built its membership around a single, stable assumption: physicians are independent professionals who make their own membership decisions. The model worked. For generations, the AMA enrolled physicians one at a time, built loyalty through individual engagement, and grew into the largest physician organization in the United States.

Then the physician market changed — and the model didn’t.

By the time Sequence Consulting began working with the AMA on its group membership strategy, more than half of all practicing physicians in the United States were employed by hospitals and health systems rather than practicing independently. Eighty percent of residents completing training were entering employed positions. The population of independent physicians — the traditional target of individual AMA membership — was declining every year, from 38.5% of practicing physicians in 2021 to 33.6% by 2025, with projections showing continued decline toward 28% by 2030.

The consequence was structural, not incidental. AMA penetration among employed physicians was just over 1%. The organization had built a sophisticated, well-resourced individual membership program — and it was aimed at a shrinking market while the majority of physicians sat largely out of reach.

The AMA wasn’t in crisis. Total membership was holding. But the trajectory was unmistakable, and the underlying market reality was getting harder to ignore: the individual membership model, however well executed, could not reach employed physicians at scale. The buyer had changed. The product hadn’t.

What Sequence Found

Sequence’s work began with a rigorous diagnosis of the physician market and the economics of the existing membership model — asking not just what was happening to membership, but why, and what it would take to change it.

The findings were precise and, in some cases, uncomfortable.

The individual membership model was structurally misaligned with how employed physicians made decisions. An employed physician doesn’t make the same kind of membership decision as a private practitioner. Their time is allocated by their employer. Their professional development resources are often managed or influenced institutionally. Asking an employed physician to opt in to AMA membership individually — paying out of pocket, justifying the time — was asking them to behave like an independent professional when they weren’t one. The barrier wasn’t the AMA’s value. It was the model.

The AMA had already tried to solve this with discounts — and it hadn’t worked. Before 2018, the AMA offered a group program structured primarily as a bulk discount on individual membership. Larger health systems received larger discounts — up to nearly 50% off — and participation generally required 75% physician uptake. Despite the apparent generosity of the offer, there were essentially no takers.

The reason was instructive: framed as discounted individual memberships, the decision fell to physicians, who didn’t see enough individual value to opt in at scale. Meanwhile, even the discounted price represented a meaningful system-level expense with no clear system-level return. The problem wasn’t the price. It was that health systems were being asked to buy something designed for a different buyer.

The real opportunity was to reframe the buyer entirely. Sequence’s analysis identified a different question: not “how do we get more employed physicians to join individually?” but “what would make health systems want to provide AMA membership to their physicians?” Health systems had strong organizational reasons to invest in physician engagement — burnout, retention, workforce stability, and credibility were all significant institutional priorities. An AMA relationship that addressed those priorities was potentially very valuable to a health system CEO or CMO. The AMA had never approached health systems as customers.

The shift in physician practice was not temporary. Sequence’s research made clear that the trend toward employment was structural, not cyclical. Independent physicians had declined every year for more than a decade. The pool of physicians making individual membership decisions was shrinking, older, and less responsive than it had ever been. Any strategy that depended primarily on individual physician acquisition was working against the grain of the market. Future growth required reaching physicians through the institutions where they worked.

The Approach

Sequence designed the health system membership model, built the case for it internally at the AMA, and drove it through board approval — a process that required convincing a 175-year-old physician membership organization to fundamentally change who its primary customer was.

That internal challenge is worth acknowledging. Proposing that the AMA launch a B2B institutional membership category — shifting from individual physician as buyer to health system as buyer — required making the case to leadership, staff, and a volunteer board that the existing model had a structural blind spot. Sequence researched, designed, and presented the analytical case that moved the organization from skepticism to commitment.

The model that emerged was built around three core shifts:

1. Health system as buyer, physician as member. Rather than asking employed physicians to make individual membership decisions, the new model positioned health systems as the purchasing entity. A single institutional decision could enroll hundreds or thousands of employed physicians. This removed the individual friction that had kept employed physician membership at 1% and aligned with how health systems already thought about physician benefits and professional development investment.

2. A value proposition built around system-level priorities, not individual benefits. The redesigned offer moved decisively away from discounted individual membership. Instead, it bundled AMA membership with assets tied directly to what health system leaders cared about: physician well-being programs and burnout assessment tools, access to AMA’s advocacy team, organizational recognition through AMA channels and the Joy in Medicine program, workforce support resources, and the institutional credibility of AMA partnership.

Health systems were no longer being asked to subsidize individual dues. They were being offered a partnership built around the outcomes their organizations were already trying to achieve. The conversation shifted from “how much of a discount?” to “what does this do for our physicians and our organization?” — and it resonated.

3. A tiered flat-rate pricing model that supported institutional decision-making. The pricing structure was designed for an organizational buyer, not an individual one. Tiered flat-rate pricing based on system size made the cost predictable, budget-friendly, and easy to approve internally. It removed the per-physician math that had made the earlier discount model feel expensive at scale and positioned the AMA as a strategic partner rather than a vendor negotiating headcount.

The Permanente Federation joined as the program’s charter member in 2018. Its participation — a large, historically independent health system choosing to engage with the AMA in a fundamentally new way — was the proof point that made the model real for the market.

The Result

Group membership grew 158% in five years — from approximately 26,000 physician members in 2021 to nearly 67,000 by 2025.

The AMA reached 302,000 dues-paying members in 2025 — the highest total membership in the organization’s history.

That record didn’t happen because individual membership rebounded. It happened because the health system model opened access to a population of physicians the individual model couldn’t reach. While individual physician membership declined modestly over the same period — a reflection of the structural market shifts Sequence had identified — group membership more than compensated, driving the overall total to historic highs.

The model also changed the economics of membership in important ways. Group membership renews at the health system level rather than the individual physician level, which means revenue is retained even as individual physicians come and go within a system — a fundamentally more stable retention dynamic than individual opt-in renewal. Health system members view AMA membership as a valuable professional benefit of their employment. Health systems leverage that as a physician recruitment and retention tool.

In the words of health system leaders who joined the program: “We came in through Joy in Medicine, but it quickly became more than that — it helped us organize everything we were trying to do around physician well-being.” And: “It gives us credibility internally. It helps us align leadership and show that what we’re doing is grounded in something bigger.”

What This Means for Your Association

The AMA’s health system story is not a healthcare story. It’s a structural story — and the structure it describes is playing out across every profession that has seen significant consolidation, employment, or institutionalization over the last two decades.

The pattern Sequence identified at the AMA shows up in law, accounting, engineering, architecture, pharmacy, and dozens of other fields: a profession that was once largely independent is increasingly practiced within large organizations. The individuals associations want to reach are employed. They make fewer independent professional decisions. And the membership models built for a world of independent practitioners are gradually losing their reach.

The AMA was reaching 1% of employed physicians not because those physicians didn’t value what the AMA offered. It was because the model required them to behave like independent practitioners. When Sequence reframed the question — from “how do we recruit employed physicians?” to “how do we become valuable to the organizations that employ them?” — the entire growth equation changed.

Three questions worth asking about your own association:

Has the professional or organizational structure of your potential membership base shifted significantly in the last decade? Consolidation, employment, and institutional scale mean that in many professions, the people associations want to reach are making fewer independent decisions. If your membership model is built for independent decision-makers and your market has moved toward employed or institutionally affiliated professionals, you may be facing a version of the AMA’s challenge.

Are there institutional buyers — employers, firms, systems, agencies — who have organizational reasons to want their people engaged with your association? Physician well-being, workforce retention, professional development, and institutional credibility are the reasons health systems engaged with the AMA. Most large employers in most professional fields have analogous priorities. The question is whether your association has built a value proposition that speaks to those priorities at the organizational level.

Is your membership product designed for how your potential members actually make decisions today — or for how they made decisions when your model was built? This is the hardest question, because it requires acknowledging that a model that worked well for a long time may no longer fit the market it was designed for. The AMA’s individual membership model wasn’t broken. The market around it had changed.

The lesson of the AMA’s health system model is not that individual membership doesn’t matter — it does, and the AMA continues to invest in it. The lesson is that when the market shifts structurally, the associations that grow are the ones willing to ask whether their model still fits the world their members actually live in.

This is one of two case studies from Sequence Consulting’s work with the American Medical Association. Read the companion piece on the Digital Reboot — how the AMA transformed its individual membership program, tripled its growth rate, and rebuilt the case for individual physician membership.

About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.

[Schedule a conversation about your revenue strategy →]

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How the Executives’ Club of Chicago Leaned Into Its Purpose — and Doubled Membership

Executives’ Club Membership Growth Case Study
Client: Executives’ Club of Chicago
Challenge: A century-old business leadership organization with stalled membership, declining event attendance, and a model built around in-person access that no longer fit how modern executives engaged
Outcome: Membership doubled to 3,500 individuals and nearly 300 corporate members; corporate partnerships grew 80%; NPS jumped from -5 to +50; 100% corporate member retention in the first year

The Situation

The Executives’ Club of Chicago has been at the center of Chicago’s business community for more than a century. Its programming has featured presidents, prime ministers, and the most consequential business leaders of every generation. Its membership rolls have read like a who’s who of Chicago’s corporate and civic leadership.

By the time Dr. Margaret Mueller joined as CEO in 2019, the Club was facing a challenge familiar to many legacy associations: the model that had built it was no longer serving the community it was meant to lead. Membership growth had stalled. Event attendance was slipping. The energy that had once made the Exec Club a must-belong institution was fading.

The Club’s traditional model — centered on exclusive, high-production in-person events — had been built for a world where physical presence was the only way to access world-class speakers and peer networks. That world was changing before COVID. Then COVID arrived, and it changed overnight.

Mueller, who had a background in market research and brand strategy rather than traditional association management, recognized immediately that the pandemic wasn’t just an operational crisis. It was a strategic inflection point. She engaged Sequence Consulting to help her understand what members truly valued, what the Club’s right to win was in a changed environment, and how to rebuild around it.

What We Found

Sequence’s work began with member research — understanding not what members said they valued, but what actually drove their engagement, loyalty, and willingness to pay.

The central finding was both simple and profound:

The Club’s greatest asset wasn’t its events. It was its community.

Members didn’t value the Exec Club primarily for the speakers it booked or the venues it used. They valued it for who else was in the room — the peer relationships, the leadership community, the sense of belonging to something that mattered in Chicago’s business life. The event was the occasion. The community was the product.

The existing model had this backwards. It treated the event as the core offering and the community as a byproduct. That meant the value was episodic — it existed when you attended an event and disappeared when you left. It also meant that anything that prevented attendance — a busy schedule, a travel conflict, a pandemic — severed the relationship entirely.

A second finding sharpened the diagnosis: the model was one-size-fits-all in a world that demanded flexibility. A single membership tier with a single event-centered value proposition couldn’t serve the full spectrum of what executives needed — from early-career leaders building networks to senior executives seeking peer counsel to corporations wanting to develop their leadership pipelines. The Club was leaving significant membership and revenue on the table by treating everyone the same.

The Approach

Working with Mueller and the Exec Club team — and in collaboration with creative partner Energy BBDO — Sequence designed a transformation built around a clarified purpose and a fundamentally restructured membership model.

1. Lean into purpose, not product. The strategic reframe that drove everything else: the Executives’ Club’s purpose wasn’t to produce events. It was to connect, develop, and grow best-in-class leaders. Events were one vehicle for that purpose. A community platform, peer groups, content, and digital engagement were others. Once the purpose was clear, the full range of ways to deliver on it became available.

This reframe proved its value immediately — and dramatically — when COVID hit.

Rather than retreating or going dark, Mueller made a bold decision: the Club would open all of its programming to the entire business community, free of charge. Within days of the lockdown, the Exec Club had pivoted to virtual events, securing the former head of the Illinois Department of Public Health as a speaker to provide guidance to panicking business leaders. Coffee and Connects — held four mornings a week with HR, finance, employment, and coaching experts — became a lifeline for Chicago’s business community.

The risk was real. Free programming could devalue the membership proposition entirely. Instead, it did the opposite. As Mueller described it: “It became a sampling strategy. People loved what they sampled and became members.”

The pandemic, which destroyed many associations’ event revenue and membership bases, became the Exec Club’s most powerful recruitment engine — because the organization had been clear enough about its purpose to lean into it when the pressure was highest.

2. Restructure the membership model around real needs. Sequence helped design a tiered membership architecture that replaced the one-size-fits-all approach with options genuinely tailored to different member needs:

Corporate memberships offered leadership development, event access, and dedicated support for organizations wanting to invest in their executive pipelines. Individual memberships were enhanced with curated peer groups, networking, and online learning communities. A non-resident membership tier was introduced after the pandemic — giving executives outside Chicago access to virtual programming, with in-person event access available at non-member rates when they visited. This extended the Club’s reach beyond its geographic base for the first time.

3. Build community infrastructure, not just event infrastructure. Sequence helped design the content and community platforms that made the membership valuable between events — not just at them. This included executive webinars, research reports, and an online knowledge library; Executives’ Exchange, a members-only online forum for peer dialogue and collaboration; and a redesigned digital experience that made the Club accessible to members wherever they were.

4. Rebrand around the new value proposition. Working with Energy BBDO, the Club developed a brand identity that honored its century of history while projecting a modern, forward-looking image — repositioning from “the place where Chicago’s business elite gather” to “the catalyst for leadership growth and meaningful connection.” The brand change reflected and reinforced the strategic shift.

The Result

Membership doubled — growing to 3,500 individual members and nearly 300 corporate members.

Corporate partnerships grew 80%, reflecting a partner community that saw the Club as a significantly more valuable platform than before.

NPS jumped from -5 to +50 in two years — a 55-point swing that reflected not just satisfaction but genuine enthusiasm from members who felt the organization was delivering something meaningful.

100% of corporate members were retained in the first year of the new model.

And critically, all of this happened through COVID — the period that broke most event-dependent associations. The Exec Club didn’t just survive the pandemic. It used it.

These results are independently confirmed by multiple Crain’s Chicago Business reports. When Mueller stepped down in 2025, Crain’s reported that she had “led the organization through the turbulence and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic while also doubling its membership” and that “membership grew to 3,500 individuals and nearly 300 corporate members and the group saw an 80% increase in corporate partnerships.” When her successor was announced, Crain’s confirmed the same membership and partnership figures. And in its 2024 Who’s Who in Chicago Business feature, Mueller herself described the COVID free-access strategy in her own words: “It became a sampling strategy. People loved what they sampled and became members.”

This is one of the most externally documented membership transformations in Sequence’s portfolio — every major result confirmed independently by one of Chicago’s most credible business publications.

Margaret Mueller Phd Ceo Executives Club Of Chicago

“Our membership doubled in the last three years. Sequence helped us lean into our purpose, restructure our model, and reframe our value proposition to deliver what our members needed most.” — Margaret Mueller, PhD, CEO, Executives’ Club of Chicago

What This Means for Your Association

The Executives’ Club story is about what happens when an association gets clear enough about its purpose to act on it — even under pressure.

Most associations know, at some level, that their real value isn’t the programs they run or the events they produce. It’s the community they convene, the professional identity they confer, the relationships they make possible. But the model is built around the programs and the events, because those are tangible and billable. The community is treated as the output rather than the product.

The Exec Club reframe — from event-centered to community-centered — sounds simple. The execution isn’t. It requires understanding specifically what members value, which member segments have meaningfully different needs, and what organizational capabilities need to be built or rebuilt to deliver a community-centered experience consistently.

It also requires the confidence to lean into purpose when the pressure is highest. When COVID hit and events became impossible, organizations that knew what they were actually for had options. Organizations that had conflated their model with their purpose had very few.

Three questions worth asking about your own association:

If your events disappeared tomorrow, what would members lose that they couldn’t get anywhere else? The honest answer to that question tells you whether you’re selling community or selling event access.

Are you serving your full member spectrum — or a version of it? The Exec Club’s one-size model was leaving early-career leaders, remote executives, and corporate buyers with unmet needs. Tiering the model opened three markets at once.

Are your community assets — peer groups, forums, content, networks — as developed as your event assets? Most associations invest heavily in what happens on stage and underinvest in everything that happens between events. The relationship between those two is usually the key to retention.

The Executives’ Club of Chicago doubled membership not by running better events, but by becoming clearer about what it was fundamentally for — and building a model that delivered on that clarity for every member, in every circumstance, including a global pandemic.

About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.

[Schedule a conversation about your membership model and value proposition →]

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How the American College of Rheumatology Grew Membership 50% in 3 Years

American College of Rheumatology membership model transformation case study
Client: American College of Rheumatology (ACR)
Challenge: A membership model structured around individual physicians that had evolved over time rather than been designed as a system — creating barriers for early-career professionals, leaving interprofessional audiences underintegrated, and making membership an individual decision in a team-based profession
Outcome: 50% membership growth in three years; interprofessional membership nearly tripled; international membership expanded significantly; more than 40 practices adopted team membership; fellows-in-training retention improved to the point where lapses became negligible
Acr

The Situation

The American College of Rheumatology was not struggling to grow.

The profession was expanding. New audiences were emerging. Demand was there. The constraint was the membership model.

ACR had built one of the most respected professional societies in medicine — the publisher of the field’s leading journals, the convener of the largest annual rheumatology meeting, and the organization responsible for clinical guidelines that govern practice across the specialty. Alongside ACR sat ARP — the Association of Rheumatology Professionals — a parallel organization serving the interprofessional care team: nurses, physician assistants, physical therapists, pharmacists, and the full range of allied health professionals who work alongside rheumatologists in treating patients with rheumatic diseases.

The two organizations served the same professional community. But the membership model had been structured primarily around individual physicians, with dues and benefits that had accumulated over time rather than been designed as a coherent system. As the field changed, the friction became visible.

Early-career professionals faced cost barriers that made membership difficult to justify when student loan debt was real and employer support wasn’t guaranteed. Interprofessional audiences weren’t fully integrated — present, but not purposefully served. Membership remained an individual decision in a profession where care was delivered by teams. Value was fragmented across programs and pricing that had grown complex over time.

Growth was available. The model was making it harder to capture.

What We Found

Sequence conducted a comprehensive research and analysis process — internal stakeholder interviews across more than twenty ACR and ARP departments and committees, member and non-member insights, competitive benchmarking, persona development, and segmentation review. The consultation process included the ACR Board, Executive Committee, Committee on Finance, Committee on Marketing and Publications, Governance Task Force, and ARP Executive Committee — a breadth of engagement that was itself a strategic choice. A model transformation affecting every constituency in a two-organization system needed to be developed with every constituency at the table.

Several structural problems emerged clearly from the research.

The career lifecycle wasn’t being served. There was no systematic approach to bringing members in early and keeping them through career transitions. Students and fellows faced abrupt pricing jumps that caused lapses at exactly the moment when building professional identity mattered most. Early-career professionals had cost barriers that made membership feel like an expense rather than an investment.

The interprofessional opportunity was underbuilt. Rheumatology had, to its credit, been more inclusive of its interprofessional care team than most medical specialties. But the membership model hadn’t kept pace with the team-based reality of how practices actually operated. A physician’s nurse practitioner, physical therapist, and practice manager participated in patient care together every day — but membership was still an individual decision made separately by each person, at prices that weren’t designed for team enrollment.

Content was insufficiently tied to membership. Significant resources were freely accessible to non-members, diluting the case for paid membership. The most valuable content — clinical guidelines — remained appropriately open access given their public health implications. But a range of educational programs, resources, and tools that could have strengthened the membership value proposition were available to anyone.

The a la carte structure was adding friction without adding value. A base membership with numerous separately-priced options created decision fatigue and focused attention on what members weren’t getting rather than on the substantial value of what they had. Simplifying toward a bundled model would increase perceived value at equivalent or higher price points.

International and team audiences had no real home. There was no formal pathway designed for the growing number of international rheumatology professionals who wanted ACR affiliation. There was no group option that made institutional sense for practices that wanted to invest in their whole team.

The Approach

Sequence designed a comprehensive membership model transformation — presented in phases to ACR’s governance bodies and the Committee on Finance — that addressed every dimension of the structural challenge.

Redesigning the individual membership structure across the career lifecycle. The individual membership architecture was rebuilt to eliminate barriers at entry and create a clearer path into full membership:

Free student membership for medical students, residents, and graduate students — bringing people into the ACR community at the moment when professional identity is forming, before cost becomes an objection.

Discounted early-career tiers at 50% off for three years post-fellowship — bridging the transition from training to practice without the pricing cliff that had been causing lapses.

Transitional pricing at 75% off for fellows-in-training, members over 70, those who are fully retired, and those who are permanently disabled — honoring different life stages without forcing people out of the organization.

Expanded access for allied health professionals and international members — creating formal pathways for audiences that had been present but underserved.

Moving to a bundled membership model. The shift from a base membership with many a la carte options to an all-inclusive model with limited a la carte pricing only for big-ticket items simplified the value proposition and made membership easier to justify. Sequence developed specific criteria for what should be bundled versus kept separate — and a range of educational programs, virtual resources, and practice tools moved into the included membership bundle.

Introducing team-based membership. The Team Membership Package allowed practices to enroll physicians and their interprofessional staff together — with discounts scaling by team size. Groups of three received 20% off. Groups of five received 30% off. Groups of seven received 40% off. The package included consolidated invoicing, practice recognition (a badge for websites and a plaque for the lobby letting patients know the entire care team were ACR members), and all individual membership benefits plus practice-specific resources.

The model explicitly targeted the physician as the sale point — positioning team membership as a professional development investment for the practice rather than an individual enrollment decision by each allied health professional. This reframe was critical. It moved membership from a personal choice to an institutional one.

Designing the pathway-based member experience. Five pathways organized the member experience around what members actually do: Practice Management, Science of Rheumatology, Treatment of Rheumatology Patients, Voice of Rheumatology (advocacy), and Rheumatology Pipeline (workforce development). Members selected the pathways most relevant to their work and received curated content, communications, and program recommendations accordingly.

Unifying two organizations under one strategy. The central architectural decision was positioning ACR and ARP not as parallel organizations with separate strategies, but as two expressions of a single mission — serving all professionals engaged in the fight against rheumatic diseases. ACR had always been ahead of most medical societies in its commitment to interprofessional inclusion. The model transformation codified that commitment structurally.

As Tami Brehm, ACR’s membership leader, described it: “We feel we’re a team-based specialty and that’s how we approach it.”

The Result

Membership reached 10,600 — a 50% increase in three years.

That growth came from exactly the segments the model had been designed to serve:

Interprofessional membership nearly tripled — the clearest validation of the team-based approach. Physicians who had once been skeptical of interprofessional inclusion became advocates for it as they saw the model working in their own practices.

International membership expanded significantly — the result of formal pathways that hadn’t existed before.

More than 40 practices adopted team membership — a new model that had been designed from scratch and didn’t exist before the engagement.

Fellows-in-training retention improved to the point where lapses became negligible — the direct result of eliminating the pricing cliff that had been driving early exits.

Critically, the core physician membership remained stable. ACR expanded its market without shifting away from its base — the outcome that every membership model transformation aims for and many fail to achieve.

The membership model transformation was independently recognized by the American Association of Medical Society Executives (AAMSE), which awarded ACR its 2025 Profiles of Excellence Award in the membership category — recognizing the model as a standout example of innovation in medical society management.

“The audiences that we intended to grow — we did just that.” — Tami Brehm, American College of Rheumatology

What made the growth sustainable wasn’t just the new tiers. It was that the model aligned membership with how rheumatology is actually practiced — as a team-based specialty where physicians, nurses, PAs, physical therapists, and practice managers work together. When membership reflects that reality, the case for joining becomes self-evident.

“I have physicians advocate for the interprofessionals. I couldn’t have scripted that any better.” — Tami Brehm, American College of Rheumatology

The shift in physician culture — from tolerance of interprofessional inclusion to active advocacy for it — was something the model helped enable. When physicians saw their own teams engaged, learning, and contributing to the professional community, the abstract argument for inclusion became concrete. The model made that visible.

Tami Brehm Acr 1

“In this world, we focus so much on our differences. If you can just look at things from common ground — that’s where the magic really is. What do we have in common and where can we build from that?” — Tami Brehm, Vice President, Membership and Governance American College of Rheumatology

What This Means for Your Association

The ACR story is about what happens when an association is willing to step back from the accumulated decisions of its history and ask a harder question: if we were designing this membership model today, for the members we have now and the market we’re in now, would we build what we have?

Almost always, the honest answer is no. Membership models that made sense when they were designed drift out of alignment over time — as the profession changes, as the content landscape shifts, as new segments emerge that the original model didn’t anticipate.

The gap between the model an association has and the model it would design today is the strategic opportunity. For ACR, that gap was specific: early-career barriers, interprofessional underrepresentation, an individual purchase model in a team profession, and fragmented value. Closing that gap — systematically, with a model designed as a coherent system rather than a collection of accumulated decisions — produced 50% growth in three years.

Four questions worth asking about your own membership model:

Does your dues structure match the career lifecycle of your members? The moments when people are most likely to join — or most likely to lapse — are predictable: entry to the profession, transition from training to practice, early career, employer subsidy changes, retirement. A membership model that prices consistently across those moments treats all members the same. A model designed around those transitions reduces barriers where they matter most.

Is your profession team-based in practice but individual in membership? If the care, work, or decision-making in your field happens in teams — practices, firms, departments, systems — but your membership model requires individual enrollment decisions by each person, you’re asking people to make a personal choice about something they experience collectively. Team membership reframes that decision at the institutional level, where purchasing authority often sits.

Are you serving the full professional community or the core physician/practitioner segment? ACR’s inclusion of interprofessional members was genuinely unusual in medical societies — and it drove nearly a tripling of interprofessional membership when the model was properly designed around them. Most associations have adjacent professional audiences they’ve welcomed informally but haven’t fully served structurally. Designing for those audiences isn’t a distraction from the core — it’s an expansion of it.

What content is so valuable that members should have to pay for access? The content gating question is uncomfortable because it requires acknowledging that giving things away for free has real costs — to the membership value proposition, to dues revenue, and to the case for joining. ACR made deliberate decisions about what to bundle, what to gate, and what to keep open. Those decisions were made with criteria, not institutional habit.

The ACR membership model transformation didn’t happen because something was broken. It happened because leadership was willing to look honestly at what the model was and wasn’t serving — and to undertake the organizational work required to replace it with something better designed for the profession they actually serve.

About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.

[Schedule a conversation about your revenue strategy →]

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How a Leading Pharmaceutical Trade Association Added Six New Members in Twelve Months

Pharmaceutical trade association membership recruitment case study
Client: A prominent Washington, D.C.-based pharmaceutical industry trade association
Challenge: Strong industry relationships going unactivated; no structured membership recruitment process; CRM sitting unused
Outcome: Recruited six new member companies in twelve months against a goal of two
Phrma Logo

The Situation

Trade associations in the pharmaceutical industry operate in one of the most demanding environments in Washington. Their members are among the most scrutinized companies in the country, their policy agenda is perpetually contested, and the value of belonging — access, advocacy, collective voice — is genuinely high. For a well-established association in this space, membership should practically sell itself.

And yet this association was struggling to grow.

It wasn’t a resources problem. The association had experienced leadership, strong existing relationships across its industry, and a CRM system — HubSpot — already in place. It had a clear sense of which companies it wanted to recruit. Leadership had set a goal of adding two new member companies over the coming year, which felt ambitious given recent history.

When they engaged Sequence Consulting, the problem wasn’t immediately obvious from the outside. But it became clear quickly: almost everything required to recruit new members was already present. What was missing was the process to connect it.

What We Found

Sequence began by mapping the full recruitment picture — who the target companies were, what relationships the association already had with them, what touchpoints existed, and how the association was currently managing outreach.

The diagnosis was straightforward, and familiar.

The relationships existed — they just weren’t being activated. Board members, senior staff, and existing member executives had direct relationships with decision-makers at every target company. These were genuine connections, built over years of industry engagement. But they were sitting in people’s heads, not in any system, and no one owned the process of turning them into recruitment conversations. Outreach happened informally, when someone remembered to do it, rather than as a managed and tracked effort.

HubSpot was installed but not functional as a recruitment tool. The association had made the investment in a capable CRM. But the system hadn’t been configured for membership recruitment workflows, contact records were incomplete, and staff hadn’t been trained to use it as a prospecting and outreach tool. It was functioning as a contact database at best — not as the recruitment engine it could be.

There was no clear owner of the end-to-end recruitment process. Membership recruitment in many associations is everyone’s responsibility in theory and no one’s in practice. Without a defined process, assigned ownership, and a way to track pipeline, even strong relationships and genuine prospect interest fail to convert. Prospects fall through the gaps not because they weren’t interested, but because no one followed through systematically.

The core insight: this wasn’t a strategy problem or a value proposition problem. It was an execution problem. The association had what it needed to grow. It needed a system to put it to work.

The Approach

Sequence’s engagement focused on three things: designing the relationship strategy, building it into the CRM, and training the team to run it independently.

1. Relationship mapping and prioritization. Working with association leadership, Sequence conducted a structured mapping of every meaningful relationship the association — through its board, staff, and member executives — held with target companies. This went beyond a list of names. For each prospect, the team identified who in the association knew whom at the target company, the nature and strength of that relationship, and the most credible path to a recruitment conversation. Prospects were tiered by likelihood and prioritized for outreach sequencing.

2. Building the recruitment workflow into HubSpot. Sequence designed and configured a recruitment pipeline inside HubSpot tailored to the association’s specific process — from initial outreach through proposal, negotiation, and close. Contact records were enriched, relationship ownership was assigned, and pipeline stages were defined so leadership could see at a glance where every prospect stood and what the next action was. The system moved from contact database to active recruitment tool.

3. Training and handoff. Once the system was built and the initial pipeline populated, Sequence trained the membership team to run it. The goal from the beginning was a clean handoff — Sequence designed and stood up the capability, and the association owned the execution. Within a defined period, the team was running the process independently, with the CRM providing the structure and accountability that informal outreach never had.

The Result

The association set out to recruit two new member companies. It recruited six.

That result — three times the original goal — came not from a new strategy, a repositioned value proposition, or a major investment in marketing. It came from activating relationships the association already had, through a process disciplined enough to actually see them through to close.

The six new members represented a meaningful increase in both dues revenue and the association’s collective industry voice. Equally important, the association now had a repeatable recruitment system it owned and operated — one that would continue generating results long after the Sequence engagement ended.

What This Means for Your Association

This case study isn’t about a turnaround or a transformation. It’s about something more common and, in many ways, more frustrating: an association with genuine assets — strong relationships, committed leadership, real tools — that wasn’t converting those assets into growth because no one had built the process to do it.

Most association membership teams are good at relationships. Very few have a disciplined, tracked, managed recruitment process that treats prospective members the way a sales organization treats prospects. The gap between those two things is where growth gets lost.

The questions worth asking about your own association:

Do you know every meaningful relationship your board and staff have with your top prospective members — and is anyone actively managing those relationships toward a recruitment outcome?

Is your CRM configured to support recruitment as a managed process, or is it functioning primarily as a contact list?

If you set a membership recruitment goal for the next twelve months, does a clear process exist to achieve it — or does success depend on informal outreach and individual initiative?

For most associations, the honest answer to at least one of those questions is uncomfortable. The good news is that the fix is usually less complicated than it appears. The assets are often already there.

About Sequence Consulting Sequence Consulting works exclusively with professional and trade associations to grow membership, strengthen revenue, and clarify strategy. Founded in 2001 by Chris Vaughan, PhD and Lisa Vaughan, Sequence brings the rigor of Big Strategy consulting to mission-driven organizations. Trusted by 12 of the top 20 U.S. associations.

[Schedule a conversation about your revenue strategy →]