Sequence Consulting Helping Associations Grow Faster

Tag: Retention & Winback

Posted on

How the American Lung Association Grew Its Active Donor File 50%

American Lung Association donor retention winback case study
Client: American Lung Association (ALA)
Challenge: 75% of the donor file had not engaged in over a year; new donors were onboarding and immediately lapsing; 2.3 million people were sitting in an untouched inactive file
Outcome: 300,000 lapsed donors reactivated in two years; active file grew 50%; email engagement increased 50%; retention improved significantly through a new welcome stream
Americanlungassociationlogo 9f973a83 C623 4d84 9b64 0ac8fe425a52 Prv

The Situation

The American Lung Association is one of the most recognized health nonprofits in the United States — a century-old organization with a clear mission, strong brand, and a donor base built over decades. By almost any external measure, it looked healthy.

The internal reality was different.

When Sequence Consulting began working with ALA, 75% of the organization’s donor file had not engaged in more than a year. New donors were signing up and going quiet — adding to the lapsed file when they should have been building loyalty. The active, engaged base that fundraising and mission impact depended on had quietly eroded while the nominal file size stayed large.

ALA wasn’t losing donors in a dramatic, visible way. It was losing them slowly, quietly, one non-renewal and one unread email at a time. The problem was structural — a mismatch between how the organization communicated and what donors actually cared about — and it had been building for years.

CEO Harold Wimmer made reversing the decline a top strategic priority. Under the leadership of CMO Julia Fitzgerald, ALA committed to a long-term engagement strategy. They had recently made a significant investment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud — a platform with capabilities the organization had never fully deployed. The question was how to use those capabilities to turn the engagement picture around and start growing the active base again.

What We Found

Sequence began with a diagnosis of why donors were lapsing — not what ALA assumed, but what the data actually showed.

Two findings shaped everything that followed:

ALA was trying to be everything to everyone — and connecting with no one. ALA had identified more than 30 things it believed donors cared about, and was attempting to communicate across all of them. The result was messaging that was broad, unfocused, and easy to ignore. When Sequence analyzed the donor base, a very different picture emerged: donors were concentrated around three core areas of concern — lung health, clean air, and smoking cessation. Those three things drove the overwhelming majority of engagement and giving. Everything else was noise.

The fix was immediate and measurable. By consolidating messaging around those three areas and eliminating the clutter, ALA increased email engagement by 50% almost instantly. Donors hadn’t stopped caring. They had stopped being reached in a way that connected with what they cared about.

New donors were being lost before the relationship started. New donors were enrolling and receiving little meaningful engagement in the critical first weeks and months of their relationship with ALA. Without early, repeated connection to the organization’s mission and their specific interests, new donors were lapsing at the same rate as everyone else. The file was growing at the top and leaking just as fast at the bottom.

The insight: the best time to prevent a lapse is in the first 90 days. An engaged new donor is dramatically more likely to renew. An unengaged new donor is almost certain not to. Every dollar spent acquiring a new donor that wasn’t followed by a disciplined onboarding program was being partially wasted.

The Approach

Sequence designed two interconnected campaigns built on ALA’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud investment — and built the internal capability to make them sustainable over time.

1. The Member Winback Campaign

The winback strategy targeted ALA’s 2.3 million lapsed donors — a file that had been largely untouched, in some cases for years. Rather than treating lapsed donors as a single undifferentiated mass, Sequence designed a segmented, personalized, CRM-driven drip campaign that:

Consolidated ALA’s thirty donor segments into three highly productive ones, making targeting and messaging dramatically more precise. Reminded lapsed donors of their past giving and their specific history with the organization — what they had supported, what had changed as a result, why it mattered. Made targeted, personalized asks calibrated to each segment’s interests and giving history. Created an automated, evergreen structure that would continuously reactivate lapsed donors over time rather than requiring a fresh campaign effort each cycle.

The personalization was the key differentiator. Lapsed donors, particularly those gone for more than a year, aren’t typically hostile — they’ve simply drifted. Research consistently shows the most common reason for lapsing is “I didn’t feel connected” or “I forgot to renew.” A message that reflects their specific history and speaks to what they care about cuts through that drift in a way that a generic re-engagement appeal never can.

2. The Welcome Stream

The welcome stream solved the onboarding problem — engaging new donors repeatedly and meaningfully during the first 90 days, before drift had a chance to start.

The multi-part welcome sequence asked new donors about their specific interests and connection to ALA’s mission areas. It offered meaningful opportunities to engage beyond giving — content, advocacy, community — to build a relationship rather than just a transaction. It made targeted asks for repeat donations calibrated to early engagement signals, and created a feedback loop that allowed ALA to refine messaging based on what was actually driving engagement.

The welcome stream was designed to be evergreen — automatically reaching every new donor without requiring ongoing manual effort — and to compound in value over time as ALA’s understanding of its donor segments deepened.

Building the capability, not just the campaign

Critically, Sequence didn’t just design and run the campaigns. The engagement built ALA’s internal capability to own and evolve them. The three-segment framework, the CRM workflows, the campaign architecture, and the measurement approach were all designed to be operated and improved by ALA’s own team — creating a platform that would continue generating results long after the engagement ended.

The Result

In one year, ALA reactivated 7% of its lapsed file.

In two years, it had reactivated 300,000 lapsed donors and grown its active file by 50%.

Those numbers deserve context. ALA didn’t acquire 300,000 new donors. It recovered 300,000 people who already believed in the mission, had already given, and had simply drifted away. The cost of reactivating a lapsed donor is a fraction of the cost of acquiring a new one. The speed at which a reactivated donor re-engages — they already know you, already trust you, already made the psychological decision to support you once — is dramatically faster. This was growth that had been sitting in an untouched file, waiting for the right message.

The welcome stream compounded the gains by stemming future erosion. New donors who went through the onboarding sequence retained at materially higher rates — meaning every dollar spent on acquisition was working harder.

Email engagement increased 50%. Retention improved significantly. And ALA now had a repeatable, evergreen system for both winback and onboarding that the internal team owned and operated independently.

Julia Fitzgerald Cmo American Lung Association

In the words of CMO Julia Fitzgerald: “Member Winback campaign: Game changer. Welcome Stream: Game changer.”

What This Means for Your Association

The ALA story is one of the most practically transferable in Sequence’s portfolio — because almost every association has a version of this problem sitting in its data right now.

The pattern is nearly universal: a large nominal file, a much smaller active file, and a gap between them that has been growing quietly for years. Most associations know the gap exists. Very few have a disciplined, data-driven approach to closing it.

Three principles from the ALA engagement that apply directly to any association facing similar challenges:

Your lapsed file is your most undervalued asset. Lapsed members and donors aren’t gone — they’re dormant. They already know you, believe in your mission, and made the decision once to support you. Re-engaging them is faster, cheaper, and more predictable than acquiring new members from scratch. ALA reactivated 300,000 donors from a file it had barely touched. Most associations have a version of that file sitting in their CRM right now.

Segmentation is the difference between noise and connection. ALA was trying to be everything to 30 different donor interests. The reality was three. When messaging collapsed around what donors actually cared about, engagement increased 50% almost immediately — without a new benefit, a new campaign, or new acquisition spend. The donors hadn’t changed. The relevance of the communication had.

The first 90 days determine whether a new member stays. Onboarding is the most underleveraged tool in most associations’ retention arsenal. A new member who is engaged repeatedly in the first 90 days — who feels welcomed, connected, and valued — renews at dramatically higher rates than one who receives a welcome email and then silence. The cost of building a disciplined onboarding sequence is a fraction of the cost of the acquisition it protects.

The question worth asking about your own association: do you know how many people are in your lapsed file, why they left, and what it would take to reach them with a message that actually connects? If the answers are unclear, the opportunity is probably larger than you think.

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 retention and winback strategy →]

Posted on

How ASHP Got Ahead of a Membership Problem Before It Became a Crisis

Ashp Membership Growth Strategy

Client: American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP)
Challenge: A decade of strong membership growth masking emerging vulnerabilities — churn reaching 30%, retention slipping among students and new practitioners, employer subsidies declining, and short-term tactics papering over structural problems
Outcome: A 10-point membership growth strategy delivered to CEO and COO; retention rebalanced against acquisition; communication overload addressed; member value gaps identified and mapped to a concrete execution roadmap

Our History Ashp Logo 2014

The Situation

Most associations call Sequence when something is wrong. Membership is falling. Revenue is contracting. A board is asking hard questions. The call comes from a place of urgency, sometimes crisis, and the work begins with triage.

ASHP was different.

When Hannah Vanderpool, VP of Member Relations at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, reached out to Sequence, ASHP wasn’t in trouble. The organization had experienced a decade of steady membership growth. Member satisfaction was high — 72% overall, rising six points year over year. The association had a strong staff, a track record of innovation, and a genuine culture of member intimacy that most organizations can only aspire to.

Vanderpool had read an ASAE article about how the American Medical Association had grown membership dramatically — particularly among students, young professionals, and health system groups. Sequence’s Chris Vaughan had been interviewed for that piece. She cold called him.

What followed wasn’t a rescue conversation. It was a strategic one. ASHP had noticed signals — early indicators that the decade-long growth trajectory might not be sustainable — and leadership wanted to get ahead of them before those signals became problems.

“Most people call us when they have a problem,” Vaughan recalls. “Things are going badly and they need help figuring out how to make it better. ASHP didn’t have a problem. They thought maybe they might have a problem soon and they didn’t want that to happen. That really struck me — they were that on top of it and that ahead of things. It was unusual. Super refreshing.”

That decision — to bring in strategic support proactively, with the flexibility to think clearly and act deliberately — is the first and most important thing the ASHP story teaches. As Vanderpool put it at the end of the engagement: “Don’t wait for a crisis to bring them in. You’re kind of frozen then. We had the flexibility to really brainstorm and blue sky and be visionary rather than trying to fix a boat that’s rapidly sinking.”

What We Found

Sequence conducted a full analysis of ASHP’s membership trends, retention data, member satisfaction research, lapsed member studies, and segment-level dynamics going back over a decade.

What the data revealed was a picture that looked healthy on the surface but had meaningful cracks underneath.

Growth had peaked — and the engine was showing strain. Total membership had grown steadily from 2013 through 2022, reaching its peak that year. But 2022 and 2023 showed the first meaningful declines. New memberships were holding relatively steady, but defections had risen and renewals were slipping — particularly among the segments that represent ASHP’s future.

Churn had reached its highest level in a decade. The overall churn rate hit 30% in 2023. That number was being masked by strong acquisition — ASHP had been filling the bucket faster than it was leaking — but the strategy was increasingly fragile. Retention among students had collapsed from 53.2% in 2021 to 28% in 2022, recovering only partially to 33.5% in 2023. New practitioner retention was holding below 47%. The industry median retention rate for professional associations is 90%. ASHP was running at 75% — 15 points below the benchmark — and leadership had not been tracking it in those terms.

Short-term tactics were creating long-term problems. ASHP had implemented a range of acquisition and retention tactics — free trials, extended memberships, discounted student programs including “Free P1” — that generated short-term bumps but failed to build lasting loyalty. Many students who joined through free programs failed to transition to paid memberships. Discounted and free memberships had reduced dues revenue. The underlying issue, as Sequence’s analysis identified, was that these efforts were treating the symptoms of churn, not the cause: a value proposition that wasn’t compelling enough to sustain long-term membership, particularly for early-career and student segments.

Satisfaction was high — but satisfaction wasn’t translating to retention. 70% of members reported high satisfaction. 30% were churning annually. These two facts coexisted, and the tension between them was the most important finding in the dataset. Members valued what they got from ASHP — particularly CE, clinical guidelines, and member discounts — but many were joining for specific transactional reasons rather than out of long-term commitment to the organization. When employer subsidies disappeared — the leading reason for non-renewal at 86% of lapsed members — there was no deeper relationship to hold them.

Competition was becoming a strategic threat. 40% of lapsed members reported joining another organization — ACCP or APhA — that they felt better met their needs. This wasn’t just attrition. It was market share loss to direct competitors. And with fewer students entering pharmacy school overall, ASHP’s historically significant student membership base faced a structural headwind that acquisition tactics alone could not solve.

The communications problem was hiding in plain sight. Sequence went further than most consultants — enrolling as ASHP members themselves to experience the membership firsthand. What they found: “You guys are overwhelming us with communications. You’re so excited to share everything that you’re doing that you’re actually killing us with information.” ASHP had grown complex and developed communication habits to match — but volume without relevance was producing disengagement rather than connection. Open rates were suffering. The “more is more” assumption was wrong.

There was a generational gap in the value proposition. The pharmacy profession was changing. Fewer students were entering pharmacy school. The needs of early-career practitioners and students — student loan debt, financial management, wellbeing, work-life balance — were meaningfully different from the needs of established practitioners who had been loyal members for decades. ASHP had historically resisted broadening its programming beyond “professional with a capital P” services. Sequence’s diagnosis was direct: you have to look at these members as whole people, not just as professionals with scientific practice needs.

“They pointed out new service offerings that ASHP should make that I historically had resisted,” Vanderpool said. “What our students and new practitioners are struggling with was student loan debt or how to manage finance or wellbeing and resilience. And Sequence was really good to say — you’ve got to look at these people like whole people. That really made me pause.”

The Approach

Sequence delivered a 10-point membership growth strategy to ASHP’s CEO and COO in April 2025 — organized into priority strategies for immediate action and mid-term strategies to build sustainable long-term growth.

Priority strategies addressed the most urgent vulnerabilities:

Going deeper into member data and tracking retention by segment monthly — giving ASHP the discipline to manage retention as actively as it managed acquisition. The shift from monitoring annual totals to tracking segment-level retention in real time was itself a meaningful organizational change.

Strengthening ASHP’s position as the definitive clinical hub for health-system pharmacists — conducting a content audit, launching a branded identity campaign, and expanding sub-specialty navigation to make ASHP feel essential and irreplaceable rather than convenient and interchangeable.

Revising the organizational and group membership model to appeal to employers and health systems — shifting the membership sale from individual pharmacist to institutional buyer, creating organizational reasons for health systems to invest in ASHP membership for their pharmacy staff. This mirrors the model Sequence designed for the AMA that drove record membership through health system group enrollment.

Re-evaluating the members-only content strategy — auditing what was freely available versus genuinely exclusive, considering gating high-effort content like podcasts, and reassessing open access to clinical guidelines. Like the ADA, ASHP had significant resources accessible to non-members that diminished the value of the membership decision.

Identifying and targeting at-risk members using behavioral data — defining early warning indicators (no login activity in 60+ days, missed renewal window, no section or CE engagement) and using automation to intervene before members lapsed rather than after.

Reducing communication overload through a comprehensive audit of all outbound communications — delivering the kind of disciplined, relevant, well-timed messaging that drives engagement rather than the high-volume approach that was producing disengagement.

Mid-term strategies built the foundation for sustained growth:

Developing tailored career pathway toolkits for each career transition — student to new practitioner, new practitioner to established practitioner, practitioner to pharmacy executive — so ASHP felt like a longitudinal professional partner rather than a point-in-time resource.

Expanding personal and financial support offerings to serve whole-person member needs — partnering to deliver wellbeing and financial tools that serve early-career members where their real needs are, not just where ASHP had historically been comfortable.

Building a student-to-young-professional pipeline strategy — strengthening the connection during school, capturing personal email addresses before graduation, and sustaining the relationship through the critical transition when employer subsidies often disappear.

Promoting ASHP’s sections more effectively — leveraging the data showing that section participation significantly boosted member satisfaction and retention, but that awareness of sections was low and their value was undersold.

The Result

The strategy is now in execution. Detailed action plans have been shared with ASHP’s internal working teams across each of the ten strategic priorities.

The most immediate measurable impact came from the communications diagnosis. ASHP moved quickly — engaging a communications consultant to redesign its email strategy — and early results showed higher open rates. Less frequency, more relevance, better results. The principle Sequence identified translated directly into measurable improvement within the engagement window.

The rebalancing of acquisition and retention focus — from an almost exclusive emphasis on new member acquisition to genuine investment in retention — gave Vanderpool and her team a fundamentally different framework for where to direct resources. “I learned that I really focused more on acquisition to fill the bucket of total membership,” she said. “And I wasn’t as balanced in looking at retention. The data showed you’ve been doing great with acquisition, but if you really want to bump up total membership consistently, you need to put as much attention on retention. So it helped me rebalance my efforts.”

The engagement also produced something harder to quantify but equally important: organizational clarity. “Working with Sequence on our membership trends over the past many years really clarified for me where we were doing well and where we really need to pivot. I have a much clearer path now on what I need to focus on — whether it’s recruitment or retention, which membership constituencies, or what IT strategies I need to continue to have a really strong membership trajectory. I don’t think I would have had the discipline to do that myself.”

Hannah Vanderpool Vp Member Service American Society Of Healthcare Pharmacists

“Don’t wait for a crisis to bring them in. You’re kind of frozen then. We had the flexibility to really brainstorm and blue sky and be visionary rather than trying to fix a boat that’s rapidly sinking. I feel very fortunate that we were in that position. I feel like we’ve come out even stronger and even more optimistic.” — Hannah Vanderpool, VP Member Relations, American Society of Health-System Pharmacists

What This Means for Your Association

The ASHP story is the most unusual in Sequence’s portfolio — and in some ways the most instructive — because it’s the one that didn’t start from crisis.

Most associations engage strategic consultants reactively. Something has gone wrong. Membership is declining. Revenue is falling. A major initiative has failed. The board is asking questions that staff can’t answer. In those situations, consulting can absolutely help — but the work starts under pressure, with fewer options, and with less time to be thoughtful.

ASHP shows what’s possible when an organization engages proactively. Because Vanderpool and her team came to Sequence before the trends became a crisis, Sequence could do something most clients can’t afford: go deep. Analyze data going back a decade. Identify the structural causes rather than just the surface symptoms. Design a 10-point strategy rather than a 2-point intervention. And give the organization the time to implement deliberately rather than reactively.

The signals ASHP saw — churn creeping up, student retention collapsing, early-career members treating the organization transactionally, employer subsidies declining — are not unique to pharmacy. They appear across professional associations in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, and dozens of other fields. The question isn’t whether those signals will appear. It’s whether your organization will notice them early enough to respond thoughtfully.

Three things the ASHP engagement makes clear:

Satisfaction and retention are not the same thing. ASHP had 72% member satisfaction and 30% annual churn. Those numbers coexisted because members can genuinely value what they receive from an association while still not renewing when the transactional reason for joining disappears. If your retention strategy assumes that satisfied members renew, you’re likely losing a cohort of satisfied members every year that you don’t know you’re losing.

Acquisition can mask retention problems for a long time. If you’re filling the bucket fast enough, you may not notice how quickly it’s leaking. ASHP had masked below-benchmark retention with strong acquisition for years. The risk is that acquisition tactics have costs — financial, organizational, and in the case of free trials and discounted memberships, structural — that compound over time even as they disguise the underlying problem. Getting below the acquisition numbers to track retention by segment is the diagnostic move that changes everything.

The best time to engage strategic support is before you need it. This is the lesson ASHP’s Hannah Vanderpool put most directly, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The associations that get the most from a Sequence engagement are the ones that come with room to think, not the ones that come with their hair on fire. If the signals are there — and for most associations, they are — the question is whether you’re willing to look at them honestly enough to act.

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 strategy →]