On the basis of this observation, association staff members developed a periodic survey to find out how these business leaders viewed the economy—were they optimistic or pessimistic? The business group was the Conference Board, and the survey became the Consumer Confidence Index—a benchmark that has a profound impact on the stock markets as well as national fiscal and economic policies. The association’s staff members discovered a competitive advantage that they had been sitting on all along, but until then had never imagined its use in this way.

In this era of rapid economic, technical, social, and political change, nonprofits are entering a season where the inefficient and irrelevant are being winnowed out. In this Darwinian selection process, what factors determine which associations survive?

The organizations that are doing best are those that have adopted a market-focused approach in defining their strategies and structuring their operations. But what has this done to the more traditional “member-focused” strategy that has always constituted the core element of association thinking?

Although the “high touch,” personal approach is still important--and technology is providing the means to track and serve the individual likes and dislikes of larger groups or people--the evidence shows this isn’t enough to resist the tide of diminishing loyalty that’s affecting virtually every membership-based organization around the world.

Contrary to this evidence, association leaders are spending fabulous amounts of time and financial resources trying to do just that. Some, in a desperate effort to avoid their fate, stake everything on member-get-a-member, sponsorship, and direct mailing tactics in attempts to rebuild their membership bases--with results two or three years later that show they indeed had only delayed the inevitable. They have failed to do what <who?> Tom Peters calls “re-imagining” their organization.

Adapting to the Environment

One method that some association leaders are using to take a new and critical look at their organizations is to imagine what it might mean for them to be truly “market-driven” instead of “member focused.” This might seem like blasphemy, but bear with me.

The classic “member-focused,” relationship-based association defines itself according to the members it serves. A market-focused, performance-based organization defines itself according to its competitive advantages.

The difference is striking. Members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for example, have undergone a fact-based re-imagining of their organization. Although ASME is among the largest and most sophisticated engineering societies in the world, it’s serving an ever-diminishing pool of U.S. mechanical engineers. The pool is shrinking because many of the lower order engineering jobs are moving offshore, and the “mechanical” of mechanical engineering has been re-imagined by engineers in totally new fields of engineering such as nanotech and biotech.

Rather than shrinking along with the definition of its historic membership base, ASME determined it would be market-driven and that it would mobilize its vast skills and resources to serve the field as it has evolved into global markets and new fields of technology. Such a market-focused approach inserts marketing into a new strategic role--one that for associations could well spell the difference between survival and the alternative.

Steven M. Worth is president of Plexus Consulting Group, Washington, D.C. E-mail: steve_worth@plexusconsulting.com