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The Heretic Retires
Posted by Rebecca Rolfes on June 18, 2008
Virgil Carter is retiring. The hackneyed “distinguished career” comes to mind but, in fact, the executive director of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers has had four careers, association management being only the most recent. And given that he’s been an architect, a college professor and a painter, he’ll probably reinvent himself into something new yet again. He has run four associations since 1999 and become something of a guru on the subject of association leadership—what he calls “the great strength and the great weakness” of associations, the dichotomy between professional association managers working with volunteer boards.
He has also, he says, become a heretic. Carter and ASME collaborated in the ASAE study that resulted in The Decision to Join but, he says, that the old model of membership is “the death knell of organizations.”
“They say that you’ve got to keep members engaged,” he says. “You’ve got to give them what they want. On the surface the logic is compelling. But look at it more deeply. You can’t be everything to everyone. You have to stand for something and you have to measure that in new ways.”
Professional Membership Organizations, where Carter has spent his association career, are under increasing competitive threat from all sides. For-profits look to copy the success of meetings and education, or research. Technology enables access to relevant timely information, competing for time and attention. Most explosively, social networks give members a community with no dues and fewer demands. Interest from global markets offers a tantalizing opportunity but doesn’t match the established membership model. In response, associations try to chop themselves up, to unbundle what they include with dues, selling individual products and services while trying to sustain an infrastructure built to support membership. The result, says Carter, is “the business model starts to come apart. The individual membership model is dead.”
Associations that are not reinventing themselves in the face of this are “either dead or dying,” he says. In many cases that reinvention will be impossible even were the association able to gather the consensus and momentum necessary. “A new start-up association is easier to create in response to something new than to reinvent the old model,” Carter says. “It’s very difficult for an organization like ours to change our spots.”
Carter makes an interesting distinction about scientific and engineering societies but the same could be true of most PMOs. “You can split us up—those that are about engineering and those that are about engineers,” he says. “The latter is talking about the individual motivations of each of those individuals. I’m not sure you can dismantle all of that—the infrastructure, the staffing, the products and services that support that. Once you set your brand, you’re stuck forever.”
Individuals will join and remain a part of an organization that gives them something in return. If the return is limited to finding the next job, for instance, the motivation is completely self-serving and unsustainable. Responding to each and every individual self-serving need is untenable for any organization. Organizations that stand for something, however, connect members to a purpose higher than the selfish. Using science to ensure that there is safe, abundant food for everyone, the value proposition of the Institute of Food Technologist, is something a member can stand behind—and will continue to stand behind job to job.
Associations need to be personal, as in finding people who are passionate about that cause and making sure that they feel personally connected to fulfilling it. This keeps associations out of the realm of product and service sellers. Non-profits are different in many ways from their competition. They won’t beat the competition by becoming more like them but by exploiting that special, personal difference.
Tagged with: asae, associations, competition, professional membership organizations
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