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Given the array of benefits at any given association, what's the best way to calculate the value of access to all of those benefits? Even for the association executive familiar with all the benefits, it's not an easy question to answer. So how do prospective members do it?

In the Friday morning general session at Digital Now, author Dan Ariely illustrated the various ways the human mind acts in irrational ways. Several examples he shared related to buying decisions, and he made two strong points that brought the membership model to mind:

• The complexity of a decision can quickly overwhelm the mind. In the face of that complexity, doing nothing is often the chosen response.
• The human brain has a difficult time assigning an absolute value to an object. Most buying decisions involve comparisons to other products, prices, and so on.

After his presentation, I asked him to apply these ideas to membership and product delivery. Here's what he had to say.

On the a la carte model:

"An a la carte option has the potential to be much more complex. What happens if the amount of choices are overwhelming and they don't know what to do? It will create procrastination; it will create delay."

On membership packaging:

"I'm guessing that people who are running the association know exactly what the benefits are. They can say, 'Here are the 17 benefits you're getting out of this, and here are the 15 benefits you get out of this and the 35 benefits you get out of this package.' But I am willing to bet a substantial amount of money that, if you ask the members, they have no idea what the benefits are. Or maybe they know some of them, but they don't really understand them fully. But for sure they don't understand how much they should be willing to pay for those benefits.

"So you're giving people an abstract, difficult decision about something they know very little about, with very little help. This is creating a very difficult decision in front of them, and the odds are for just giving up."

So both options can run the danger of being too complex. Whatever model they choose, associations must strive to make the decision to join or buy as simple as possible.

How to do that? Ariely offered a potential guiding notion when I asked about fundraising:

"For most people, their association is not the huge part of the way they define themselves. It may be a way, but it's not the major one. So why would they donate to an association rather than donate to my kids' school or to my local religious organization or to a disease that my mother had? It is important to realize that decisions about donations and coordinated action are about emotion and not about cognition. It's not about cost-benefit analysis."

Making an emotional case might be more difficult if you're not asking for money for a charitable cause, but the emotional decision-making basis remains the same, and you should find creative ways to appeal to it.

Follow along with the Digital Now conference through Saturday afternoon on Twitter via the #diginow hashtag.