Researchers are amazing. They combine this figure with that one, divide by the square of the hypotenuse (or something from fifth grade math), do some statistical magic and come up with a pretty accurate prediction. Since I’ve been on this quantitative kick lately, I was wondering how many members total there are for the 102,000 associations out there.
According to Generations and the Future of Association Participation, by Arthur C. Brooks (now president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research),
“We can predict the future of association membership by combining U.S. Census population projections with the predicted probability that people of each age and generation will join. The number of association members can reasonably be expected to rise over the next 10 years, from about 51 million members at present to about 55 million by the year 2015.”
That has me wondering: Who are those 4 million people? Younger than current members, of course, but anything else? As we all know, at least half of them will be inactive checkbook members. But of the active ones, what can we forecast?
- It’s safe to say that they will be even more vocal than today’s active members because they’ll have more ways to voice their opinion, share their ideas, ask for help.
- They’ll be more technologically savvy than today’s members because they will be working with more technology on a daily basis and will know how to use it to organize their personal and professional lives.
- They will not think or act in silos. Associations are very vertical organizations today but as the lines blur between personal and professional, they will also blur across professions and industries. I’ve never understood why every association in a given industry has to have its own magazine. Aggregated content is a wonderful thing, a huge time saver and, when done by an organization you can trust, a great way to filter all the information out there. Future association members will be less patient with narrowness and will want a clear view of the whole landscape not just this little vertical slice of it.
- They will be more mobile both in a geographic and a professional sense. “Virtually every job today is potentially temp work, and maybe half the careers as well,” writes pollster John Zogby in The Way We’ll Be. That will make them harder to hold onto as members but open the door to all sorts of portable member services. Think of the Rollover IRA and apply that to your membership model—when I change jobs or move to the other side of the country, how can I rollover my membership and my member experience?
What’s your percentage of the 4 million? Are you ready to acquire and retain them? Who will your members be?
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