Rebecca Rolfes is the executive director of Association Growth Partners, a consultancy that creates and executes content marketing programs that increase revenues for B2B associations. She is the author of The Competition Within: How Members Will Reinvent Associations.

About Rebecca Rolfes

My first experience working for an association was in Brussels as director of communications for The Conference Board Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The job was to oversee public relations, the annual report, one newsletter, and some speech writing. The staff was tiny, and I did pretty much anything that needed doing. In those four years, I launched other newsletters and tried, as much as the limitations of print permitted, to segment the messages—to make them relevant to the readers. It wasn’t a strategy so much as something that just seemed to make sense.

Fast forward to the mid 1990s: I was a founder of Imagination Publishing in the United States, and the company had just landed its first association client, the Illinois Bankers Association. Imagination was a start-up company, and it would produce anything for the IBA—publications, conference materials, print collateral. The IBA was small, but so were we, and we both learned a lot—they about the virtues and the challenges of outsourcing, we about working for a membership organization and how that differed from working for a for-profit.

Today, Imagination is the parent company of Association Growth Partners. I’ve worked with fourteen associations, most of them business-to-business (B2Bs). I’ve made every one of those new business presentations and figured out what those associations needed—not just what they asked for, but what they actually needed. And this is what I now know: associations now face competition, many of them for the first time, and they are not prepared for it. Association leaders have worried for years about competition from for-profits—conference organizers, for instance. But now competitive pressure is so intense that a siege mentality pervades many associations.

The most recent and most important competitive force is the association members themselves. Online communities provide a new, instantaneous way to associate with like-minded people. They operate around the clock and with no fees attached. People outside an association’s home country who don’t know or care about the carefully constructed brand. Young potential members who do most of their living, working, and communicating online. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs who see a market and know how to exploit it with new media and delivery systems. All of these groups are going after associations’ bread and butter.

The competition is not globalization, demographics, or technology. The competition is coming from within.