You Can't Sell Your Way to Relevance | SMS

When membership is flat, traditional revenue streams are under pressure or the conference is carrying too much of the financial load, the natural question is often: what else can we sell?

A new product, premium membership tier, webinar series, sponsored report or commercial partnership might create additional revenue, but adding more to the existing offer does not necessarily address the bigger issue.

For associations, sustainable revenue starts with relevance.

That means looking beyond what the organisation currently sells and asking what members, industries and professions will need five or ten years from now, which of those needs the association is genuinely positioned to address, and where its role might be to provide the solution, broker access to it or create the conditions for others to solve it.

In this article, Belinda Moore from Strategic Membership Solutions challenges associations to think differently about revenue, particularly as AI makes information and routine services increasingly abundant. The opportunity is to identify what will remain scarce and valuable, including trusted judgement, meaningful relationships, credible credentials, proprietary insight, professional identity and collective influence.

It shifts the conversation from “What else can we sell?” to “What value will only we be well positioned to create?”

Most conversations about association revenue start in the wrong place.

The board looks at the numbers, notices membership is flat and the conference is carrying more than its share, and asks: what else can we sell? Someone suggests a paid webinar series. Someone else suggests a sponsored report, or a premium tier. A list gets built. The list gets approved. Twelve months later, not much has changed.

The problem isn't the list. It's that the list was assembled by looking at the shelf rather than the horizon.

Shifting your revenue mix is not a merchandising exercise. It's a consequence of knowing what you want to be true in ten years, understanding the problems the people, organisations or causes you serve are heading towards, and working out how you connect them to the solutions. Revenue is what falls out of getting that right. It isn't the starting point.

Revenue follows scarcity

AI has collapsed the cost of producing information, answering routine questions and delivering standard services. The work hasn't disappeared. Its scarcity has. And scarcity is what people pay for.

Try sorting your income lines. On one side of the arrow, what is becoming abundant. On the other, what is becoming scarce (and what people will increasingly pay for).

• Content production → Trusted interpretation and practical application
• Technical reference material → Accountable specialist judgement, grounded in context
• Routine enquiries and basic advice → Help with exceptions, trade-offs and consequential decisions
• Generic training and recorded webinars → Applied learning and specialist mastery
• Certificates of attendance → Credentials backed by real assessment
• Passive conference content → Curated experiences and peer problem-solving
• Standard research summaries → Proprietary intelligence, benchmarks and foresight
• Static directories and broad networking → Trusted introductions and active communities
• Discounts and generic member benefits → Professional identity, recognition and belonging
• Policy news and legislative summaries → Collective voice, which requires mandate, legitimacy and relationships

If most of your revenue sits on the left of those arrows, no amount of repackaging will save it. A smarter bundle of the same thing is still the same thing.

The right of each line is where the money is going. Notice what those items have in common: every item requires judgement, accountability, relationships or standing. None of it can be generated on demand. All of it takes time to build, which is exactly why it stays scarce.

Direction sits above your strategic plan

A strategic plan tells you what you're doing for the next three years. It has a start date, an end date and a list of projects. Useful. Necessary. Not sufficient.

Direction is a different thing. It's the statement of what you want to be true in a decade, and it doesn't expire when the plan does. It's the reference point the plan is tested against.

The most practical way I've found to write it is as a set of statements you'd like to be able to make about the future. For example, “By 2035, we want to be able to say that quality professionals are visible, valued and connected to the people who need them. That government and regulators turn to us for evidence and leadership.”

These aren't targets. The world will keep moving and some of them will need to change. What they give you is a filter, and it's a filter that fits on one line: Are the choices we are making today making these things more likely to be true?

Most boards don't need more strategy. They need that question, applied consistently, to every significant decision in front of them.

Start with their problems, not your products

Once direction is clear, the revenue question changes shape. It stops being “what else can we sell?” and becomes a sequence.

Work through it in this order:

• What problems will the people, organisations or causes we serve be facing in five and ten years?
• What will solve those problems?
• Who is best placed to provide that solution - us, someone else, or us with someone else?
• How do those people find it? Does that happen naturally, or do we need to create the opportunity?
• How do we fund or monetise the delivery of that solution?

Most associations answer the first question well, the second reasonably, and then stop. The rest is where your financial sustainability is decided.

Solve it, broker it, or create the conditions for it

Not every problem your members face is one you should be solving yourself. There are three roles available, and they carry very different economics.

You can be the provider, building and delivering the solution directly. You can be the broker, connecting members to solutions that already exist and being trusted enough that your recommendation carries weight. Or you can be the convenor, creating the conditions - the room, the standard, the coalition, the shared dataset - in which solutions emerge that no single organisation could have produced.

Provider revenue is fee for service. Broker revenue is partnership, referral, licensing and curation. Convenor revenue is participation, and partner investment in shared outcomes.

Most associations are heavily over-invested in the first and barely present in the other two. Usually because the first is the only one that feels like “our work”. That instinct is expensive, and it gets more expensive as the provider work moves towards abundance and the returns on that work decline.

Four things that usually get missed

When going through this process, keep in mind:

New revenue has a lead time. The revenue that will fund you in 2033 needs to be started while your current revenue is still healthy enough to enable the transition. If you wait until the decline is obvious in the accounts, you'll be trying to build patient, trust-based income streams precisely when you can least afford to be patient.

Importance is not the same as willingness to pay. Members will rate advocacy as your most important function and decline to fund it directly. Both things can be true. Test importance, test effectiveness, and then test willingness to pay separately - including with non-members, lapsed members, and others who stand to benefit from your advocacy work. The people who gain most from that work are not always the people currently paying for it.

Nothing new starts unless something stops. Every board that approves a new revenue initiative without naming what will stop, pause or simplify to make room has approved a slower version of the same conversation next year. The trade-off is the decision. If nobody can name it, the initiative isn't funded, it's just hoped for.

Don't copy the association down the road. Uncertainty is making boards benchmark more, just when benchmarking is least useful. Someone returns from a conference impressed by what another association has done, and the next planning session quietly redirects towards replicating a model built for a different membership, in a different sector, with different capability. Start from your strengths, not someone else's highlights reel.

Questions to take to your next board meeting

If you want to move this from interesting to useful, these are the questions to put on the agenda.

• What do we want to be true in ten years, and would we all write it down the same way?
• Which of our revenue lines depend on something that is becoming abundant?
• What problems will our people face in five years that we are not currently equipped to solve?
• Where should we be the broker or the convenor rather than the provider of solutions?
• Would we still choose this work if the funding source changed?
• What will we stop to make room for what comes next?

None of that is a revenue strategy. It's the thinking that makes a revenue strategy possible, and it belongs to the board rather than the product team.

The associations that are still here and still mattering in 2035 won't be the ones that found clever new ways to sell what they already had. They'll be the ones that worked out what would be scarce in future, and started building it while they still had the time to do it well.

And that work needs to start now.

For associations, sustainable revenue is not simply about creating more products or finding more things to sell. It starts with remaining relevant to the people, professions and industries the organisation exists to serve.

That means understanding what will continue to matter as technology, member expectations and competitive alternatives change, and being clear about where the association can create value that is difficult for others to replicate.

For association leaders, there is a useful question to consider:

Which parts of our current value proposition are becoming easier for someone else to provide, and what are we building now that will remain valuable and distinctive?

If the answer is unclear, the opportunity may not be another product launch. It may be to step back, understand where future value will come from and decide which capabilities, relationships and assets the association needs to strengthen now.

The objective is not simply to diversify revenue, it is to build an organisation that remains relevant enough that members, customers and partners continue to see value in investing in it.

A big thank you to Belinda Moore and Strategic Membership Solutions for sharing this perspective and continuing to contribute practical thinking around relevance, revenue and the future of associations.

Read Belinda’s article here.

About Strategic Membership Solutions

Strategic Membership Solutions works with associations and membership organisations to strengthen membership, relevance, revenue and long-term sustainability through practical strategy, research and sector expertise. AFA is pleased to share their thinking and insights with the broader association community.