Reinvent or die! Social media will render associations obsolete! The recession was the death knell of non-profits! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Sound familiar? There’s a lot of gloom and doom out there and I am certainly guilty of spreading a little of it myself. I’ve spent most of my career working in very entrepreneurial organizations where change was measured in minutes not months or years. Associations change very slowly when they change at all and I have the patience of a gnat.
But you know what? People have been pushing the “change or die” agenda on associations for about 10 years now and, well, it hasn’t happened. As Mark Twain said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
I’ve thought about this a lot lately. Associations don’t change for a reason: They don’t need to.
A lot of what associations do is right. You don’t get to be 100+ years old without meeting a need, serving your members, adapting to changing times without messing with the fundamentals. The three-legged stool of members-board-staff can be an infuriating race to lowest-common denominator decisions but it can also result in the healthy dialogue that leads to relevant programs and services. The system of checks and balances ensures buy-in as much as it ensures arguments. Looked at another way: They wouldn’t argue if they didn’t care.
Of course, you have to separate obfuscation and inertia from things that genuinely need to happen. Social media is a boon to associations, not a threat. The recession gave them a chance to whip their resources into a shape that made them more agile. Reinvention inevitably bubbles up from what members want—or you court an entirely new category of member that demands new and different things. In both cases, you end up with something that is totally new and yet built on the solid foundation of the old.
It’s called continuity, stability, dependability. None of that comes from changing willy-nilly. There are a lot of things associations could do better and some of them have their heads stuck permanently in the sand but, in many, many cases, you’re fine. You just need to figure out what does need fixing and do something about it.
