The Revenue Hiding in Your Annual Event
Association members will pay 17% more, trust you 25% more, and engage 21% more when you give them what matters most. Here's what one CEO did with that.
Every association leader has the same problem. The board wants growth. The members hate price increases. And every year, the obvious answer (raise dues) is also the worst possible answer. Here's why.
The Valuegraphics study we did for ASAE proves that the single biggest reason people walk away from joining a professional association is Poor Affordability and Value. Fifty percent of members cite it. So when you raise fees to fix a revenue problem, you're running full steam ahead into a brick wall.
The money has to come from somewhere else. And there's a place it's been hiding all along. It's your annual event.
Not because your event is bad. Most annual events are perfectly fine, in fact. The invisible problem is that much of what happens at an annual event is driven by demographics. Demographic profiling has led to conversations about persona this, age-cohort that, gendered messaging tailored to the women in their 30s and the men in their 50s.
We've all been part of these conversations. You know exactly what this is like. But somewhere deep inside, you know that these demographic ideas about people just aren't true. I mean, after all, you don't match your demographic stereotypes – are you the same as everybody else who is your age and earns the amount of money you earn? Of course not, so why would it be true for anyone else?
Here's the thing about demographics. People in the same demographic group are only about 10.5% similar to each other. Flip that stat on its head, and what's staring you in the face is that people who are the same demographically are 89.5% not like each other. Why would you do anything for a group of people that are so dissimilar to each other that they don't agree on very much of anything at all?
But when you put people into groups based on what matters most to them, in other words, what they value, cohort similarity jumps to 89%. Once you build your event around shared values, the financial picture changes.
We measure the change. We call it Return on Values. For association members specifically, here's what it looks like. They'll pay 17% more for something that's aligned with what matters most to them. They'll trust the source of that something 25% more. And they'll engage with it 21% more deeply. Those are the stats from the research.
So what actually matters most to people who join professional associations in the United States? Here’s the data.
The Valuegraphics study for ASAE gives you the answer. It is not what you'd predict from a demographic chart. Now, keep in mind that this is for all association members across the entire country. It's statistically accurate, but that's a very broad group of people. When we work with a particular association, different values rise to the top because its members are not the same as the members of every other association. It just makes sense. But for this broad study for ASAE, here are a few things we found.
The first thing you find is Loyalty. 70% of association members rank Loyalty as a primary driver. Only 47% of the general population does. That's a serious gap.
The second one is Personal Responsibility. 66% of members are driven by anything that gives them more Personal Responsibility compared to 42% of everyone else.
The third one is the showstopper. Independence. 58% of association members have Independence as a driving force in their lives, while only 19% of the general public do. That’s a thirty-nine-point gap on a single value. We almost never see numbers like that.
Stop and think about what those three values mean for an annual event.
People who care this much about Loyalty want to be with people they already know and share history with. People who care this much about Personal Responsibility want to leave with something they can actually use on Monday morning. People who care this much about Independence do not want to be herded through a packed schedule of mandatory plenaries and force-fed networking receptions. They want choices.
The same study tells you what they hate, in their own words. 42% of association members say what they hate most about associations is superficial relationships. Networking without purpose. The handshake, the business card, like so many empty calories. And 52% wish for the opposite: enhanced networking. Meaningful connections that actually go somewhere.
That's a wide-open opportunity. The unmet demand is sitting right there in the data, asking your event to deliver it.
A real example. Lori Anderson, who's been CEO of the International Sign Association for two decades, took her organization's Valuegraphics study, identified the values her members cared about most, and rebuilt their annual trade show around them. Her members ranked high on the value of Community, so her organization designed small interest-based meetups so people could find their people in a hall of 20,000. She created hands-on learning experiences rather than more passive sessions because the specific kind of Personal Responsibility her members value aligned with these programming decisions.
These are early days as her organization works to implement additional strategies informed by the values we uncovered among her event attendees.
Even so, the most recent show (just a few weeks ago) drew the strongest attendee feedback in ISA's history. People kept telling her it felt different.
You can hear the whole story from Lori in the Association Advisor podcast episode that ran this month. It's worth listening to. She walks through the whole process and how it unfolded for her and her organization.
What she did is something any association can do. Find out what matters most to your members. Build your event so they get more of it. Watch the financial numbers move in the direction you need them to move, without ever sending out a fee increase.
Here's the way we talk about it: once you've identified what matters most to your attendees, then all you have to do is give them more of that. You're not selling anymore. You're not convincing anybody to do anything. You're giving them a gift; more of what matters most to them.
That makes your event an easy yes, and an obvious choice.
Two ways to take this further
Book a quick chat. If you'd like to talk about what this could look like for your association, grab twenty minutes on our calendar. No slide deck, no pitch. Just a conversation about what you're trying to grow and whether we can help.
Get the full study. If you'd like the complete Valuegraphics study on what matters most to professional association members across the United States and Canada, email us, and we'll send it your way.