Acronym

Finally had a moment to look through the ASAE Foundation's new economy study: Associations After the Recession: Attitudes and Beliefs Among CEOs and Members, and one of the things that strikes me is how little confidence association CEOs have that 2011 is going to be better than 2010.

Here are a couple of charts from the report:

There's a definite upward trend, but I'm surprised the slope of that line is not even steeper. We're coming out of the worst recession in 90 years and only a third of association executives are expecting increased revenue from publications sales or sponsorship revenue? Put another way, two-thirds of execs have no expectation that 2011 will be the year in which they start to climb out of the recessional trough. Is this the new consumerism model? Where consumers and businesses who for the last two decades (longer than that, but excessively so in the last 20 years) overextended to have more are now content to consume less?

I'm not saying execs are wrong to think this way and to have low expectations. Here's another chart from the same report, but it reports a different study. Rather than surveying association CEOs, this study went to people who belong to associations:

As a trend, yes, it's better -- association members think their employers are going to cut back less than they did 18 months ago. But I'm kind of alarmed by a third saying association meeting attendance will be curtailed. Think about that for a second. It's already low. The economy hit rock bottom a little while ago. And a third of these people are saying they expect their companies to cut back even more. And staff travel cuts, at 43 percent, is a really big number. Again, you'd think nonessential travel would have already been trimmed.

One kind of nuts-and-bolts observation about the studies is that participation across the last three years has consistently dropped off. Clearly it's not a topic that is as top-of-mind as it was. But I'm hoping we can do another study in a year or maybe a little bit longer. Maybe after there is a little doubt there is a good recovery underway. We don't really have baselines for this study. Maybe the answers to these questions hit low barriers. Maybe, for example, at any given time regardless of the economy, there's going to be 25 percent of people saying that they expect funding for staff to attend professional development meetings is going to be curtailed. It will make interesting studies if we can hold people's interest long enough.