I’ve been to two association clients’ events this week and people are a lot more cheerful now than they were a year ago. Both of these are industries that literally fell off the cliff and the companies are still dealing with the impact. One guy talked about how both the value of his business and the value of his house had gone to zero. The partners in his firm are “wearing tools”; they no longer manage people who do the work, they’re doing the work themselves. But they’ve survived and the feeling was that recession is the mother of innovation.
The problem for them and for associations is that they may have lost a generation. They laid people off and they didn’t hire. New graduates or people who lost their jobs may have had to leave the profession or the industry altogether. Reinvention is great but that leaves everyone with a dip in enrollment at the end of the decade.
One guy said that his company would hire the class of 2011 and that they will get better jobs with more responsibility and more autonomy. In the meantime, he loses that injection of energy and drive and ambition. And where does that leave the 10% of unemployed, and the classes of 2009 and 2010? Where does that leave the associations that would have recruited some of them to membership?
It leaves them with the need for innovation. How can you better serve the members you’ve got? What new ideas bring both benefits to them and revenues to you?
