Associations advance important missions that support professions and fields, but to ensure financial sustainability and relevance amid growing competition, it’s essential to focus on innovating and creating new revenue-generating opportunities.

Research from ASAE’s Association Insights Center (AIC) in partnership with McKinley Advisors highlights the challenges associations face around optimizing new revenue opportunities. These include legacy governance structures, loss-leader programs, and siloed functions and departments built for traditional activities rather than experimentation or product innovation.

Association executives identified three features that associations must build to be successful in identifying and developing new revenue opportunities. These include focusing on board and staff culture, creating an innovation process, and committing to feedback and renewal.

Create a Strong Cultural Foundation

• Cultivate a positive internal environment that encourages employee empowerment, experimentation, and continuous improvement. The challenge with this can be overcoming resistance to change and the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. To move past this, you can give staff a clear vision of what you’re building to reduce pushback.
• Engage and educate your board to shift their mindset toward a business-oriented approach, balancing risk and reward. It can be tough to keep the focus on the business goals over time but understand that the shift in culture takes constant work and reinforcement.
• Foster a culture of open communication, transparency, and collaboration to adapt to changing needs and encourage innovation. In order to navigate organizational politics, recognize that change management takes time, persistence, and consistency.

Implement an Innovation Process

• Implement a structured process for capturing, prioritizing, and developing new ideas and opportunities based on alignment with customer goals and the organization’s mission. You can utilize creative processes and facilitations to provide staff with examples of how to generate ideas (e.g., design sprints and generative sessions). The key to success is leading by example at the board and senior levels and being transparent when things don’t go as planned.
• Gather input from diverse perspectives, including staff, members, and industry partners, to inform decision-making. Dig deep to understand members’ and customers’ true needs and expectations. Surveys and focus groups can reveal what members want and need. Learn to say no to nonrevenue-generating “urgent” requests and utilize revenue goals as criteria for prioritizing revenue-generating activities.
• Align programs and services with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan. Ensure all programs have at least one strategic pillar they advance, and sunset programs that don’t align with the mission.
• Evaluate programs and services based on factors such as level of effort, impact, cost, and opportunity cost. Build pro forma and break-even analysis to articulate assumptions fully or use planning tools with strong criteria—for example, impact on net revenue and brand, level of effort, operational complexity, and cost of not doing the program.

Commit to Feedback and Renewal

• Emphasize data-driven decision-making, using tools such as SWOT analysis, scenario planning, and performance frameworks. Implement a process to ensure programs are regularly assessed and that appropriate investments or sunsetting occurs.
• Allocate true costs to events and programs to provide a clear picture of their financial impact. Ensure that assessments include all true costs and benefits of running the program. Consider direct and indirect costs (overhead) as well as intangible costs (e.g., the amount of mental bandwidth consumed by the program and the impact on volunteer burnout).
• Leverage successful programs and services to sunset underperforming areas. A challenge can be the emotional attachment to programs or services that may not be financially viable or impactful, but programs must either bring in considerable revenue or create substantial value, and everything else slows the organization down.

With an experimental culture, associations can further innovation through deliberate product innovation processes to guide new concept development. Assessment and evaluation ensure honest appraisal of program performance to optimize high performers and sunset underperformers. Collectively, these shifts in management and structure create building blocks for ongoing innovation for revenue opportunities to ensure relevance and high stakeholder impact.