We Have Always Done It That Way

To reinvent eroding membership-centric business models, association leaders will need to answer a fundamental question:

What is the strategic relationship between membership and participation?

In answering this question, leaders also will need to confront the even more fundamental truth that dues payments do not create members. Instead, going forward, association membership must be based on a personal commitment to participate, irrespective of dues payments. The approach associations adopt in this area must be open and flexible enough to accommodate both the absolute need to fully engage the payers of dues and the non-dues paying participant’s choice to be active in the association. While the former will pay for membership in order to participate, the latter will use participation as a form of currency to “pay” for membership.

This type of business model innovation is made necessary by what is happening online. The ease and simplicity with which anyone can make immediate and passionate contributions using free and inexpensive Web 2.0 technologies highlights the lack of an equally clear and accessible “architecture of participation” in most associations. A phrase that originated with the Web 2.0 revolution itself, a useful definition of an architecture of participation as it pertains to organizations in our community is “the collaborative design of pathways for meaningful engagement in and substantive contribution to the association’s work.” Designing an architecture of participation is about much more than simply offering opportunities for involvement. It is about innovating our associations for the future.

Association professionals must begin experimenting right away with developing new architectures of participation. Some of those experiments will fail, while others will evolve to become integral elements of new business models built for sustainable growth. To facilitate these processes of experimentation, staff and volunteer leaders can use the following six design principles:

+Keep it simple—In developing wiki technology, creator Ward Cunningham kept asking an important question: what is the simplest thing that could possibly work? In designing a new architecture of participation that will attract your next contributors, you should be asking yourself the same question over and over again. Try to create the simplest possible participation experience for everyone who wants to contribute by looking carefully at the factors that make your current architecture of participation complicated and less satisfying for your stakeholders.

+Tear down the garden walls—It is impossible for any association today to possess all of the ideas, knowledge and talent it needs to succeed. Fortunately, those resources are quite abundant, connected and mobile in the current marketplace, but they will not be attracted to our organizations if we continue to put up obstacles to keep them out. Just like the Web itself, your new architecture of participation must fully embrace open networks as a tenet of a new business model, and sunset the idea of the association as a walled garden.

+Take down the ladder—The ladder is the most enduring symbol of association participation. Contributors spend years, and usually decades, climbing these ladders in pursuit of leadership opportunities with increasing responsibility and authority. But what if your next contributors aren’t interested in climbing your ladder? What if they are comfortable leading horizontally and don’t necessarily want or need vertical authority to accomplish their goals? To address these questions, your new architecture of participation must reconsider traditional structures and roles, and fully engage the self-organizing leadership talents and coordination capabilities your next contributors bring to the table.

+Be modular—If the ladder is no longer the appropriate metaphor for association involvement, what should replace it? Think Legos. To fully engage your next contributors, your association’s new architecture of participation needs to be as modular as Lego bricks, allowing individuals and groups to quickly assemble, disassemble and rebuild “pieces” of different shapes and sizes to create new experiences that easily connect and enable meaningful collaboration with globally-distributed peer networks on a near real time basis.

+Trust first—Associations use a combination of policies, guidelines, requirements and similar mechanisms to enforce “synthetic trust” within their contributor communities. But community on the Web, as well as the trust that bonds the members of those communities, is considerably more organic, and it is this more authentic way of being that associations must embrace going forward. Your new architecture of participation can energize its next contributors by first demonstrating real trust in them, without requiring prior proof of their fidelity to the association.

+Make success a shared responsibility—Associations are still more comfortable with concentrating responsibility for success in the organizational core at a time when most of the energy for future progress lives at or near the “edge” of our organizations. By distributing real responsibility away from the core, associations can challenge their next contributors to direct their efforts toward executing strategy, advancing mission and realizing vision. Your new
architecture of participation can energize contributors by offering them the opportunity to connect their passionate interests and commitments to the long-term growth and success of the association.

The continuing decline of the membership-centric association business model means the end of association membership as we’ve always known it. To flourish in the years ahead, associations will need to shift their focus away from the inertia of transactional relationships and toward dynamic approaches that can unleash the full potential of passionate engagement.

Tags: Strategy, The Way We Involve Others, Technology, Membership, Leadership, Innovation, We've Always Done It That Way //