The idea of the “generation” as a grouping is a wholly American invention. The Lost Generation is the first truly named group, a term coined by author Gertrude Stein and later popularized in the epigraph of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Since then we dubbed the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha successively. The very concept is utterly arbitrary at best, possibly even bad for society at its very worst. So why do we care?

It can make sense to group people into age groups. It makes sense to think someone who’s 60 needs something altogether different from their professional association than a 30 year-old. And there have been growing assumptions that younger people don’t do email anymore, though that may be less of a case than previously thought. While “nobody” answers phones we all have a cell phone in our pocket, it’s just part of life. There’s got to be better ways to see what people want, to target and message, and deliver on the value proposition.

Just sticking with the sheer amount of data that’s gathered, and the myriad ways to segment, there’s a good number of other methods of targeting outreach and tracking member need that serve a greater purpose than an arbitrary age bucket. For professional associations, things like the highest level of education or certifications earned – or asked for – are powerful. Two diploma holders 30 years apart might actually want the same thing while two Zoomers, one with a grad degree and the other a bachelor’s, are going to need a different experience despite their closeness in age. On the trade association side, revenue or staff size can be vital in how you treat a member organization. It’s hard to believe that the multinational company in your member base wants the same thing from you as the 3 person shop in a garage somewhere. Sure, the second one might hit Amazon level eventually, but they’re going to need a boost from their association friends. Meanwhile, that big company might just want a voice on Capitol Hill. Going beyond age to where they are in their life – subtle but different – just allows for a clearer resonance. 

If associations work hard at one thing, it’s simply trying to hear and understand what their members want. Surveys, engagement scoring, tracking online community activity, even just bugging people via phone, there’s so much. It’s a lot of work though! Sifting through noise, filtering out the overly boisterous minority voices that just want things precisely their way, it can be mind-numbing. With the right tools though, and with the right effort, you can understand that maybe that course IS what everyone wants. That a conference doesn’t have to be cookie-cutter, there can be sessions that draw everyone in. Asking and answering, reacting to what people actually tell you, can be a perfect way to organize and build an association.

Actions speak louder than words. We know that people who went to a wine tasting twice probably did so because they enjoyed the first time. When you observe people’s specific behaviors, it’s a powerful way to survey them without asking a single question. And this can be an easy fallback. Simply for economic reasons, you’re more likely to find a Michelin star restaurant full of mid-career and older people, while the dive bar across town is where the young professionals hang. But this leaves a lot of other activities ignored. It ignores the fact that not everyone joins the association at the same time, but they still need to be engaged.

Smart associations know to have a common roadmap, that has branching based on where they are on the member journey. Using a centralized data model allows associations to give that new member what they need early on, then as they move deeper into their engagement with the organization they can be fed what matters next. Courses, events, the right advert at the right time (I recently heard of an association that explicitly DOES NOT send sponsor or partner messaging to new members for 15 months, to help them get more acclimated) all these different messages and opportunities are right for someone, but not for everyone.

This could be looked at as a tweak of a sort of “mentor/protégé” system that many associations want. Especially in the professional association sphere, there are a handful or so of career tracks and groups that are serviced and delivered content. So of course you can figure out what a new member in a certain job or discipline might want to learn and see, but that’s just focused on the role. What about their goal? Where does that pathway lead, and maybe it’s not wrong to feed content that might be considered “advanced”? It’s as much about building pathways as it is looking at who is responding to your messaging. So rather than just saying “this is early career”, maybe give the option to later career people, then there’s the chance to pitch it as an opportunity to work with the next generation in their field. 

We have to sort and segment our audiences in some way. It’s a known fact – presented at our own Predict conference recently from our partners at Higher Logic – that the smaller the segment, the greater the impact. By that exact notion then, it is wholly wrong to just go and assume that whole sweeping tranches of certain age groups want and need and behave in a certain way. Listening, watching, and trying novel ways to resonate, that’s the path to true success. Anyway, sometimes it’s fun to hang out with the old guy at the conference, why shouldn’t we be seated next to each other? He has fun stories. And, of course, the wisdom. 

Member engagement sits at the core of everything an association does. No matter the staff-member, no matter the member benefit or event or email sent, each is a piece of the larger tapestry that is member engagement. While this is a generally accepted fact for any forward-thinking and plugged-in association leader, knowing what to do with this knowledge – or even what membership engagement really means – can be a nebulous task. What do members want to do? More importantly, why are they taking the actions they are, why aren’t they taking advantage of affinity programs or new benefits we rolled out this year, and what can we do to call them to act?

The real issue lies in that while most associations serve a very specific niche, industry, profession, or need, the membership base isn’t a monolith. We’ve watched over the last four-plus years as the makeup of the industry has shifted dramatically, the needs of members have changed, and even how they get reached is different than it ever was. Gen Z don’t answer the phone, boomers are retiring and exiting the professions, and millennials and Gen-X are too busy to take advantage of the traditional opportunities of association membership. On top of all the other things out there that people want in their life, and all the other sources of information and learning and networking – engagement, quite literally – that are increasingly available, associations need to be smarter about what they do, and how they reach out.

Engagement is a living thing

As mentioned, the needs of a membership change over time, and so the offerings an association provides should shift, as well. It’s important to track not just what people do with you – what events they attend, what courses they take, what emails they respond to – but also what they don’t care about. A popular class from five or ten years ago can fall out of favor. A well-attended event that’s long been seen as a key piece of the annual conference, could actually be costing you money.

Tracking behavior is key, but when applying an engagement score and weighting those behaviors, making sure you audit it over time is just as important as those weights. If a large group of your membership – those in mid-career with families – don’t have time for the big conference every year, what else can they do, and what else is important? How will that change next year, or in five years? There are young people just entering “student membership” range now – that so-called Generation Alpha – who have grown up differently and want to experience life and their careers differently than even Gen Z. Watching the shifts in engagement between these age groups, between demographics any any number of other subsets of your membership, is paramount and can teach so much to the staff, if they’re looking. It even creates new segments of outreach – not of traditional demographics, but of behaviors and needs themselves. That is the real path of a living engagement.

Be proactive

When an association is tracking engagement correctly – whether with something cutting edge like our own Acumen platform or with a homegrown tool in Excel – use it to be proactive. So someone joined last year, great! And better yet, they’re engaged, they’re clicking on emails, they’re taking a course, they might even be considering going for that certification. But it isn’t just on rails at that point. Be proactive, see what else someone like that member might want to do next. Experiences get stale if something new isn’t offered. Whether it’s the membership experience, a movie franchise, or your annual vacation, doing the same thing over and over gets boring, repetitive, and ultimately makes people less interested. Understanding that pathway that a member should be on helps in every department. Marketing knows what messaging will ring loudest, membership can accurately project retention (and even leverage a well-built engagement score on high-engagement non members), the events team will know who will want to come to this year’s conference, and who might need a nudge.

Use engagement scoring as a tool

Dovetailing off that, use the scoring rubric at the heart of a well-rounded engagement score as a tool to track new actions. When a new association product or benefit is launched, track the micro-impacts it has to the engagement of whatever member subset or demographic that you’re targeting. Use A-B testing to see how different groups respond to messaging around it. Test long-held organizational beliefs and prove to your leadership that’s sometimes the old way of doing things is the wrong way.

Engagement scoring – when executed with a proactive, data informed and results-focused mind and practice – can unlock a wealth of value for an association. Peering into the path of membership, from first touch to organizational evangelist, can help you and your colleagues understand what really matters to members, and make sure that each year is a new journey for members ,and the right one for them. Many tools out there provide some level of engagement scoring, and using these can be a good snapshot of what people are up to, but members– and engagement itself- is a moving target, always shifting. Doing an engagement scoring exercise that’s holistic and looks beyond just the big things, beyond just the data in the AMS even, can be a valuable effort for any association.

We’ve reached a point where quantifying what was once thought to be uncountable and purely anecdotal is easy with modern technology. Associations have to be able to know what their members are up to, and what they might want to do next. With all the other distractions and chances for engagement that your members have, whether professionally or otherwise, being heard through the noise takes novel ideas, new tools, and a bit of risk taking. That’s not always easy in the association world, but the organizations that do take a chance and think outside the box will find positive results. That means more members, happier members, and a clearer future.