> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.itsbarry.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # If Membership Were Invented Today, Would It Look Like Membership? - URL: https://www.itsbarry.com/if-membership-were-invented-today-would-it-look-like-membership/ - Published: 2026-09-15T12:12:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T12:12:11.000Z - Author: Barry Schieferstein, CAE A few weeks ago, while thinking about membership, I started writing about my relationship with Rock City Church in Columbus. Without thinking about it, I began with the words, “I belong to Rock City.” Then I caught myself. Rock City does not have membership in the way I have always understood it through associations. I never filled out an application or paid annual dues that moved me from nonmember to member. Yet I attend regularly, volunteer, tithe, participate in activities, believe in the mission, and want to help advance it. I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself. So why had “I belong to” come so naturally? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had been treating two different ideas as though they were the same. **Membership is a status. Belonging is a relationship.** That distinction has caused me to reconsider some of the questions associations spend a great deal of time trying to answer. We ask how to grow membership, improve retention, attract younger members, and demonstrate the value of joining. Those are reasonable questions, but I am beginning to wonder whether they start too late. ## Membership Made Sense As with many of the operating models associations inherited, there were good reasons for membership to develop the way it did. Professional and trade associations formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under very different conditions from those we operate in today. They gave people with shared professional or industry interests a practical way to exchange knowledge, establish standards, build relationships, organize collective work, and support the infrastructure required to do those things. They also operated in an environment where access itself was limited. Specialized information was harder to find, publications could provide knowledge that was not readily available elsewhere, and meetings created opportunities to exchange ideas and build professional relationships across geography. Associations helped establish standards and professional norms, and in some cases membership itself carried recognition or status. Membership helped define who was affiliated with the organization, who could participate in governance, who had access to information and activities, and who contributed financially to the infrastructure required to do the work. Over time, that structure was asked to do more. Membership became a way to provide access, fund the organization, establish governance rights, create professional affiliation, offer economic benefits, recognize status, and connect people to a professional community. There was nothing inherently wrong with that bundle. Under the conditions in which it developed, many of those functions reinforced one another. The question is whether they still need to be bundled together today. ## When Access Is No Longer Scarce Many things that once required an association relationship are now readily available elsewhere. Specialized information is abundant, and professional education comes from universities, commercial providers, consultants, online platforms, and countless other sources. People can build professional networks through LinkedIn and other digital communities without joining an organization, while conferences compete with many other ways to learn and connect. AI is making access to information and expertise easier still. That does not make association products less valuable. A journal can still be excellent, an association conference can still be the best place for a profession to gather, and education developed by subject matter experts can still be better than what is available elsewhere. But being valuable is different from being exclusive. For many years, associations could make a relatively straightforward membership proposition: pay dues and gain access to things that would otherwise be difficult, expensive, or impossible to obtain. As those things became available from more places, we became increasingly sophisticated about demonstrating the value proposition. We show how much members save on conference registration, assign value to the journal, calculate preferred pricing on education, and identify resources reserved for members. There is nothing wrong with demonstrating value. But when we repeatedly ask people to evaluate membership by comparing the price of dues with the economic value of the benefits they receive, we are encouraging them to evaluate at least part of the relationship transactionally. That has made me increasingly interested in what happens outside those transactions. ## Belonging Is Built Through the Relationship My relationship with Rock City is useful because it forces me to separate belonging from any single activity. I don’t belong because I tithe; tithing is simply one way I engage with and support the church. Nor do I belong because I volunteer, attend a service, or participate in an activity. Those are all different expressions of the relationship. Taken together, however, they create something larger. I participate and contribute while also benefiting from the community and supporting its mission. Over time, those interactions have created a sense that this is a community I am part of. Belonging emerged from the relationship rather than from one designated transaction. Consider what that distinction might mean for an association. One person pays annual dues but otherwise has almost no interaction with the organization. Another does not pay dues but attends the annual conference, purchases education, volunteers, contributes expertise, participates in a technical community, and donates to the foundation. Under the traditional model, the first is a member and the second is a nonmember. That may be an accurate administrative distinction, but does it accurately describe their relationships with the association? If the second person participates more, contributes more, and interacts more frequently with the organization, it becomes difficult to argue that the membership designation tells us very much about which person has the stronger affiliation. Membership can certainly be one expression of affiliation. I am increasingly unconvinced that it should define affiliation. ## What Is Membership Actually Doing? Once we separate membership from belonging, it becomes easier to see how many different functions we have bundled together. At ASNT, for example, our paid Professional membership currently includes access to our monthly journal, discounts, and voting rights. Those benefits sit together inside one membership tier, but they serve very different purposes: journal access is a content decision, discounts are a pricing decision, and voting rights are a governance decision. There may be perfectly good reasons to bundle them together. The question is why we assume they must be. Access to information, financial support of the organization, governance rights, professional identity, community participation, discounts, recognition, and status do not inherently have to be provided through the same mechanism. That does not mean they should all be separated. It means we should understand what job each is doing before assuming membership is the best container for all of them. Status is a useful example. I rarely describe my relationship with ASAE by saying that I am an ASAE member. I am much more likely to identify myself as a CAE or talk about serving as chair of ASAE’s Meetings & Expositions Professionals Advisory Council. One represents professional achievement and the other contribution and leadership. Those distinctions carry meaning because of what they represent, not simply because I pay dues. That makes me wonder whether membership needs to carry the full burden of creating identity or distinction. People may develop deeper connections through expertise, certification, leadership, service, philanthropy, or other forms of contribution. Membership can still be part of that relationship without being the only dividing line that determines who is inside the community and who is outside it. ## We Didn’t Set Out to Ask This Question at ASNT Our membership redesign at ASNT did not begin with any of this. We had 13 membership types and declining membership, and we wanted to make it easier for more people to enter the ASNT ecosystem. Eliminating membership was not under consideration, nor were we trying to redefine belonging. Our thinking was much more straightforward. If we removed the financial barrier to joining ASNT, we believed more people would enter our system. We expected them to purchase products, and we expected some percentage eventually to upgrade to paid membership. We replaced the 13 membership types with three tiers: Associate, Professional, and Professional Plus. Associate membership was free, while the paid tiers provided additional benefits. This was a business decision, and we treated it like one. We developed financial models around what we expected people to buy and how many Associate members we thought might eventually upgrade. Our Business and Finance Committee reviewed the model, and the board ultimately approved the change unanimously. Much of what we expected happened, but not always in the ways we expected. The biggest surprise was who came through the door. Roughly 70 percent of new Associate members had never previously engaged with ASNT, so removing the financial barrier did not simply move existing customers into a free membership category. It allowed us to establish relationships with people we had not been reaching. Associate members also spent more with us than we initially projected, and after the first year a greater percentage upgraded to Professional membership than we expected. From the standpoint of the original business case, those were encouraging results. There was another result we had not adequately anticipated: Associate members also left. Some people tried free membership and did not renew it. There was no dues increase to object to and no financial barrier to remaining an Associate, yet making membership free was not enough to make everyone want to stay. Removing the barrier made it easier to enter ASNT. It did not, by itself, create a relationship. ## What Happens Between Transactions? That experience has changed the way I think about the success of the model. When we created Associate membership, conversion to paid membership was an important measure, and it still matters. Paid membership generates revenue and provides benefits people value. But I no longer think conversion is the only successful outcome. If an Associate never upgrades to Professional membership but regularly attends events, purchases education, volunteers, participates in a technical community, contributes expertise, or supports the ASNT Foundation, I consider that a successful relationship with ASNT. The more important question becomes how we create more relationships like that and give people reasons to remain engaged even when there is no immediate transaction in front of them. Associations have become very good at engaging people when there is something to buy or renew. We communicate when it is time to renew membership, market conferences when registration opens, promote courses when someone needs education, and offer publications or credentials when there is a professional need. Those interactions matter, but they leave an important question: what gives someone a reason to engage when there is nothing to buy? That question matters beyond membership because almost everything associations produce now faces some form of competition. A commercial organization, an independent community, the internet, or increasingly AI can provide alternatives to many of the products and information associations historically offered. Our products can still be better, more authoritative, or more relevant, but we can no longer assume we are the only place people can get them. Associations do, however, have an unusual opportunity to create durable communities around a shared profession, industry, or cause where people are not simply customers. They can contribute expertise, take responsibility for collective work, develop relationships with peers, help shape standards or professional practice, volunteer, lead, and support a mission they believe matters. Other organizations can create communities too, but this kind of sustained participation in collective work is deeply connected to why many associations exist. Our freemium model helped us answer one question about how to get more people through the door. It eventually caused me to ask a different one: why does membership need to be the thing we are trying to get them into? ## The Revenue Question Cannot Be Ignored It is much easier to ask that question philosophically than it is to answer it while running an association. Membership dues provide predictable recurring revenue, and associations have employees to pay, technology to maintain, programs to operate, governance to support, and mission-driven activities that may never generate enough direct revenue to support themselves. Existing organizations also have decades of infrastructure built around membership. Bylaws may define voting members, volunteer positions may require membership, technology distinguishes between members and nonmembers, pricing structures depend on member discounts, and boards monitor membership counts and retention rates. None of that disappears because we decide belonging is more important than membership. Historically, some associations also had programs or services so closely tied to professional or business success that access itself provided a compelling reason to maintain membership. In the *ASAE Handbook of Professional Practices in Association Management*, John B. Cox described these as “golden-handcuff” or affinity programs and connected them to the unique niches associations once occupied. The multiple listing service historically played something close to this role in real estate: access to an association-related resource could be extraordinarily important to someone’s ability to succeed professionally. That kind of exclusivity can support an effective revenue model, but many of those niches face more competition today. Even the MLS operates in an environment where consumers and professionals have access to real estate information through many more channels than they once did. More importantly, the example highlights a distinction between the economic relationship and the broader relationship with the association. If someone renews primarily because they need access to something available only through membership, renewal tells us that the product is valuable and the economic relationship is working. Those are important things to know, but they do not necessarily tell us whether the person feels connected to the organization beyond that product. That does not make the transaction bad. Associations need successful transactions. We simply should not mistake evidence of a successful transaction for evidence of belonging. Even when the economics work today, leaders still need to ask how sustainable that model will be if the exclusivity supporting it continues to erode. ## The Answer Is Not to Blow Up Membership Questioning membership as an organizing principle does not mean an association should eliminate dues, remove every member benefit, or abandon a model that is working. The more useful approach is the same one I have argued for with other inherited association structures: preserve it, redesign it, or replace it. Membership should be open to the same examination. For one association, that may confirm that membership remains exactly the right mechanism. Another may decide that more people should be able to participate without becoming paid members, separate certain benefits from membership, or reconsider which privileges genuinely require exclusivity. Over time, some may conclude that functions historically bundled into membership work better elsewhere. An existing association has to make those decisions carefully. That starts with understanding the relationship: why people join, why they renew, how they participate, and which interactions appear to deepen their engagement. It also requires understanding the economics, including how much revenue truly depends on dues and what financial consequences a change could create. Governance has to be examined separately because voting rights, bylaws, articles of incorporation, and state law may impose requirements that have little to do with the broader question of who feels that they belong. The goal is to test assumptions rather than simply replace one set of assumptions with another. That was ultimately the value of the ASNT experiment. We modeled the economics, made a controlled change, observed actual behavior, and adjusted our thinking based on what happened. The lesson is not that every association should adopt freemium membership. It is that changing one assumption can reveal questions that were difficult to see while operating entirely inside the old model. ## If We Were Starting Today Associations spend considerable time asking how to grow membership, improve retention, and strengthen the membership value proposition. I still think those questions matter, but I am no longer convinced they should be the first questions. Before asking how to get more people to join, I think we should ask why people affiliate with us in the first place. Some may come because they need access to a product. Others may identify with the profession, want to contribute, seek relationships with peers, or believe deeply in the mission. The more fundamental question is whether those reasons for affiliation can create a sustainable relationship with the organization. If we were creating an association today without legacy membership categories, bylaws built around members and nonmembers, technology designed around those classifications, or an existing dues stream we needed to protect, would we invent membership? Maybe we would. There are still good reasons to create formal affiliation, and there may be good reasons to charge for it. But I am less certain that we would automatically bundle access, discounts, governance, professional identity, recognition, financial support, community, and belonging into the same annual transaction. Existing associations do not have the luxury of starting over, but they do have the ability to ask the question. We do not have to eliminate membership to stop treating membership as the relationship. If the relationship we want to create is one in which people participate, contribute, benefit, support the mission, and feel part of something larger than themselves, we should start by designing for that relationship. Then we can decide what membership is actually for.