Acronym

Association doomsday comes when there is no thoughtful and insightful answer to a simple compelling question. "If your association were to disappear today, who would miss you and why?" It is not an easy question to answer. While there are hundreds (thousands?) of "anti-association business models" on the planet, few consistently delivered the perceived value essential to success. That will change. There have been valiant attempts. There was Mark Walsh, the former GE and AOL wunderkind who launched VerticalNet in 1997 with all the functional tools of a manufacturing trade association community and non of the face-to-face features. After losing $311 million the company (read: experiment) was sold to ItalCementi for $15.2 million.

Do not take comfort in this debacle. Someone is sure to refine the model and make another run at associations. Indeed, some already have. There are many highly effective and successful "for-profit" associations functioning in the "feel and form" of classic associations without the traditional governance and deliberative decision-making so pervasive in our business. They are not "real associations" as you or I might think of them, but they do provide intense levels of on-line and print content, deep information libraries and resources, member services staff, education, conferences and community focused learning models including lots of "face-time" Some have even launched chapters.

As comfort levels rise with the ability to discuss business or professional issues "face-to-face" across Skype or other video means, the meaningfulness of face-to face gatherings will change. Not go away mind you, but change. It was fun to track comments on ASAE's Social Media channels for its 2010 Annual Meeting and read about the excitement participants expressed about meeting their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo friends in person at meeting. The on-line interaction was the initial meeting spot and the face-to-face experience at ASAE's meeting validated (or not) the on-line experience. Social media has turned the primary association model of meeting your peers through personal interaction and gatherings on its head. That's not a small change.

The risk for associations (or any organization for that matter) is not recognizing how quickly the ground beneath your industry, profession or field will shift. We went from 3-D movies to 3-D television in a nanosecond. Much of our new media content can now be accessed across an endless array of platforms, all leveraging the growing broadband and wireless world we inhabit. If an "anti-association" can deliver the content you or I need when we want it, where we want it and in a way we can best utilize it, at a fair fee will any of us really wait for our "real association" to catch-up. Don't be too sure.

For the better part of a year now, we've been working with small groups of association people (not just CEOs) at the Association Forum of Chicagoland who have volunteered to wrestle with questions about future models. They are working in four "domains": technology, economics, human resources and advocacy. The group wants to start "caffeinated conversations" around these areas and the changes that need to take place to allow associations to survive and thrive in the future.

It is imperative that all associations and their professional organizations engage in this type of conversation. It is something that I've been harping about for years. We tend to puff ourselves up about our member focus and the good we do as associations. Meanwhile our lunch is being eaten.

I would take issue with Kerry Stackpole's comment that for-profit associations aren't "real" associations. A tax code designation doesn't determine reality. I've incubated four four-profit associations and they function just like non-profit associations. The main difference is that they are not bogged down by volunteer governance. Oh, they have volunteer advisory bodies that bring expertise to the table, but those bodies do not set policy or conduct administrative oversight. That is done by a small "board" of owners. And members and leaders of non-profit associations are not owners. The have no equity interest but, instead, have a license to use.

It is good that tough questions are finally being asked about the future of the current association model. I just hope that it's not too late to find answers.

To clarify, in no way did I intend to imply "for-profit" associations weren't real. My point was that because of their unique governance structures and operating models they were different than what we used to call "real" associations. As someone who has consulted to a growing number of "for-profit" associations over the years, they surely are real and different. I concur that exploration and development of new models are essential to the survival of for and not for profit associations at whatever growth stage they may be experiencing.

Ok Joe, I'll bite.

First of all, I want to push back on one thing in your post, when you say:

"Things like conferences, advocacy, and certification. Despite the forward march of technology, the value of all of these is still quite high. I've just never been able to make the leap in my mind from self-formed groups to large-scale products and services."

The social web is changing all these things in my opinion.

Conferences: Ever heard of Meetup.com? It was all the rage in the 2004 presidential election. It's still around. Closer to home: in the comments of my post, look at what Donna Dunn said about Prometheus or the UnTech Conference. Not only is it possible without associations, it's happening.

Advocacy: Not as direct, but the social web sucks away some of the relevancy of advocacy efforts in my opinion. To steal from Collins a little bit, when an issue is Big Hairy Ordeal, people affected by it can find each other online and act collectively, often times with greater effect than through a traditional organization. The lesser issues are ones that people care less about, and so they will value their association's role in those areas less.

Certification: For me, this one goes to trust. I think it's a fact that people distrust large institutions, be it government, business, nonprofit, whatever. I personally cringe at the thought of a world without certifications. However, nothing is black and white, certainly not certifications. There will be factions that want it this way or that, that think this kind of professional should be included and that one excluded. As the importance of having the certification increases, so does the potential for anger and distrust. Pre-social web, perhaps that wasn't a big deal, it's more of a deal now.

And I realized I never got to Joe's question about the association model. Here are my thoughts about that:

To answer, though, I want to combine the thoughts you present in the post with a thought that haunts me with regularity, and that is a comment Seth Godin made to me, and I may not get it exactly right here, but he essentially said that he thinks a lot of trade and professional societies seem to exist primarily so that the staffs of those organizations can get paid.

The lifecycle of an association is pretty well documented: a group unites around a common interest. They decide on objectives to accomplish and volunteers get to work. Eventually, they establish more and more objectives and the work gets too complicated without organization. An organization and board of directors is born. Eventually, the board realizes there is too much to organize for them to do it alone, so they hire help. A multi-year, sometimes painful process unfolds as volunteers and staff figure out their roles. What's left is a mature organization, where staff figures prominently in shaping an organization's outcome, from goal development through goal achievement.

It's easy for me to see how the social web can affect this lifecycle -- I think it elongates the first part of the cycle, because it's easier than ever before for a group of people to take action and work on objectives without the need of someone else to help them organize. This is the first change -- I think a lot of groups of common interest will fade away before ever realizing the need for additional organization, and so fewer legal-entity organizations will be born.

In the foreseeable future, I think the same things makes the messy middle even messier. Groups that should have faded away will follow the lifecycle and organize anyway, and a staff will cling to their jobs and try to keep the organization alive when it should be allowed to go fallow.

And finally, and probably most important to this discussion, I think we're going to see that the lifecycle doesn't end with that mature association. I think there's a new stage developing, and that is one where volunteers take back a lot of the functions that have traditionally been staff driven in mature organizations. I think we're going to see a different specialization arise in association staffs. That specialization is in community management, and these people are going to need meeting plannings skills, publishing/knowledge and content skills, marketing skills, etc. I also think association staffs will contract considerably -- some of it due to outsourcing, but a lot of it because volunteers will use available tools in ways that make less organization from a staff needed.

I think this sounds like doomsday to a lot of people. It doesn't to me. I think it's the natural evolution and it will ultimately make organizations stronger and more focused on what is important to the people who care, who share that common interest to begin with.

Thanks everyone for the comments. A question, then a couple thoughts.

Kerry and Bruce: could you point out a few examples of the for-profit associations you've seen or worked with? (I don't doubt they exist, but it would be great if you could link to a couple examples for fellow readers and I to take a look at.)

Also, Kerry, thanks for bringing up VerticalNet. I wasn't in associations at the time, so I only know bits and pieces of that story. I dug up these three articles (from the references on the Wikipedia page on VerticalNet) to learn more, and I thought they were worth sharing here for anyone else who isn't familiar.

To the topic of the larger question about association doomsday, this discussion now reminds me of the opening line from David Gammel's Associations Now article, "Accelerating Engagement Online and Beyond," from last May: "An association is essentially a conglomerate of small businesses, all targeted at a highly focused market, with a consensus-based governance model slapped on top."

The idea that an association is built as a mix of businesses might mean that associations face individual threats to several of their functions but no single knockout threat that would replace everything associations do in one fell swoop. In other words, it seems there is no Netflix to our Blockbuster.

In a way, this danger of "a death by a thousand cuts" might be worse for associations than if there were a single, clear threat. At least the latter would give people a sense of urgency. Trying to convince people to change their behavior based on a long-term, drawn-out, amorphous threat isn't easy.

Scott, thanks for your detailed scenario. A lot of what you say seems quite plausible. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what you propose comes true.

Last, I want to point out a tweet from Kevin Holland in response to this post:

associationinc: @joerominiecki Assns will be done in by thinking about assns instead of thinking about their individual markets.

A great point. The "thousand cuts" that an association might face will all be unique to its own industry or market, which makes this discussion that much messier.

Wow, I'm agreeing with Kevin Holland! ;-)

We do need to be careful about being too circular in these discussions--associations must exist because without them, there would be no associations! I love being a part of the association community. It's a part of my professional identity. But that doesn't mean associations are entitled to exist. Focusing too much on "pro-association" or "anti-association" can lead us down a circular path.

I tend to see it as an issue of management innovation, rather than an issue of association survival or demise. Read Gary Hamel's The Future of Management, because he points out how oddly antiquated nearly all of our basic management practices are (for both corporations and associations alike). The "threats" we are perceiving to associations could be the beginning of significant innovation in management, and on the other side of those profound innovations, the distinctions between for profit and nonprofit are radically different (and already are being challenged, a la Kerry and Bruce above), and maybe too the difference between associations and business.

Joe:

Great discussion on where associations might go in the future. Scott's description of an association lifecycle feels all too familiar from my association work.

Regarding conferences, I don't think associations exist to create conferences for their members. It is not typically a service that a member requests. Nor, is it found in their mission or vision statements.

Many young associations created their conference as a way for their members to meet face-to face, share and exchange information. Unfortunately today, many association conferences are a necessity as they provide revenue to the bottom line. And I've seen cases where the annual meeting provides up to 80% of the entire annual association's budget. In those cases, associations have backed themselves into a corner regarding the conference. If they didn't provide the conference, there would not be money to retain staff.

H-m-m, that sort of sounds like Scott's paraphrase of Godin: "A lot of trade and professional societies seem to exist primarily so that the staffs of those organizations can get paid."

I'm coming late to the party but I always inferred that we were all about self-perpetuation and unrepentantly so, in my employers at least, and I'm not actually sure that's a bad thing. If we were in the commercial world or operated on a for-profit basis, would people be criticizing us for that? The market generally decides whether we're dinosaurs or mammals, and the nature of living means we'll ignore the subtle signs of extinction or entropy until it's too late but we'll probably know we're dying for some time before we actually do.

In the meantime, I think most of us will plan, develop, and maintain programs as if we're surviving and we're doing the right things because it's built into our work ethics and naturally reflects the nature of being a specialist. In my large orgs, I think of the frequent eye rolling that would meet the old sayings ... "membership is everyone's job" or "taking a member's call isn't an interruption--it's part of what we do." It's just our nature--if an organization hires you to be a policy specialist or a psychometrician or an exhibits manager, that's how you view your contribution to the whole. If you leave that association you'll ply the same trade elsewhere. The key positions that would unify us and emphasize collective purpose & mission--CEO, COO, other C-Suite--seemed to be very focused on the board or committees overseeing their budgets and work rather than a membership (or profession or industry) at large, and we interpreted that as their acts of self-prevservation. (Those dynamics of everday work made our strategic retreats and discussions seem very surreal, something we'd do 2 days out of the year.)

I like the discussion and I'm really just rambling, but I do feel our sector could expire someday and society would not be as adversely affected as we think--many of us would need to get a new logo on our paycheck but humans would rely on other vehicles to meet, exchange ideas, push for representation, etc. and simply choose that alternative structure (or absence of one) over the structure we offer them today.

As always, Kevin Whorton (or as I like to call him, The Other Kevin) brings amusing straightforward-ness to the conversation. But really the point he makes at the end is the important one -- "humans would rely on other vehicles to meet, exchange ideas, push for representation, etc. and simply choose that alternative structure (or absence of one) over the structure we offer them today."

The problem with associations isn't that they exist only to pay staff, as Seth Godin quipped to Scott Briscoe. The problem is that they are staffed by association staffers. By which I mean, people who are more focused on "association stuff" than the industries/professions they work for -- and who honestly believe that all associations can and should do the same sorts of things. When those "sorts of things" -- magazines, tradeshows, conferences, buying programs, whatever -- wither under new competition, the natural reaction of these sorts of folks is to fear doomsday.

But maybe your industry/profession doesn't need "association stuff." Maybe it needs something completely different. Maybe it needs a kick in the pants.

As long as we continue to think that we are what we do today then we live in fear of doomsday. Because what we do today -- whatever it is -- is going away. Instead we need to think about what our specific sectors need in order to succeed, and give them that. Not what we think we're good at.

Maybe association people have created some of our own problems. There's this thing called a "CAE" that implies that there's a standard set of practices that should be followed by everybody who works for an association, no matter what market it serves. There are management/leadership consultants who fill the air with studies and articles and blog posts about "associations" as if it were a monolithic sector, because these consultants need paying customers, and it's easier if associations think they are just like every other association.

Maybe these sorts of things are more sources of association mediocrity than solutions to it.

Now, I'm an association veteran of almost 20 years now (god!) and I happen to love it. But as I get older I find myself stopping more and more during the day and wondering, "Am I doing this because it's what my market needs -- or because it's what I think we're good at?"

Yeah, associations are undergoing a (r)evolution, whether we realize it or not. But I'm afraid we are not going to find the secret to victory by talking amongst ourselves.