Decision to Join

(bmart, here you go!)

So I just finished reading Decision to Join, the major research study into why people join associations, which updated a similar but much smaller study done in the eighties. As you can imagine, this was a really thrilling read, full of plot points and big surprises - oh wait, sorry, that was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (great book, btw, if you're into wizards and muggles and things.) Anyway I digress. I am not trying to minimize what I am sure is a very important study. I personally am not a big fan of data - which goes against what Seven Measures tells us about the most successful associations. To me, data is about the past, not the future. But I am happy to be proved wrong as I go along.

As I was reading, though, it struck me that a lot of the findings are very much in line with what my associations' members have told us. Granted, I am lucky in that we reorganized from a separate Society, Training Institute and Foundation into a Center which encompasses everything under its umbrella - so in the five years it took to undergo this reorganization, my members looked at all the issues about retention, purpose, value in the field, etc. that this study looks at. But looking at DTJ, I was bemused, in particular, by the big deal made of the "statistically significant" difference between members joining for personal benefit and members joining for the benefit of the field. On the one hand, I know nothing about statistics. So you tell me that the difference between 3.4 mean importance index (personal) and 3.6 mean importance index (field) is statistically significant, well, alright, if you say so; doesn't seem like that different to me, but you're the expert... But what I do know, is that our members have told us repeatedly that they join as much for helping to advance the field as for the social/professional/CE/direct benefits. So yes, I definitely agree with those findings, even if they don't seem like that much of a surprise.

There's a ton of common sense stuff in here, too. I think the point is that these things we think we know are now "proved" - at least statistically and for right now. So the finding that people at different stages of their career need different things from their associations; that members who are more involved are more likely to recommend the association to others; that people drop memberships when they don't feel they are getting value for money - these things are pretty obvious. No-one will be surprised to see them validated.

What I would have liked to have seen in the book is a lot more discourse - or even open-ended questions - about the small but interesting things that were NOT expected. For example - there's a question (4.17) about how important certain benefits are compared to others for members involved at the governance level, committee level, ad hoc level and not actively involved. There appears to be a large difference between the perceptions of those at the top than the rank-and-file. This disproves the idea that the governance level people can represent the rest of the membership and act for them - maybe they don't even know what the membership is really thinking. This definitely resonates with me, because there is definitely a perception that the group at the top of my association is a closed club (intensified by the hierarchical nature of any medical field), and we're very actively and publicly trying to figure out how to break down those perceived barriers. I would have liked to read more analysis of this question.

Another one (5.8) was about how apparently the youngest age group do NOT show themselves to prefer new technologies for getting information from their associations, ranking "magazines and journals" over e-newsletters, websites, internet etc. I think this question is hugely significant, since we're all wrestling with the question of how we balance print and online marketing, which vehicles are better for what, etc. We also want to know how to attract more new members - i.e. tap into the younger generations who maybe don't know about us yet. But there was barely a tiny paragraph about this in DTJ.

I'll leave it here. I'm sure I'll come back to this study, probably more than once, and I do plan to attend the DTJ conference (October 29) at which I hopefully will be able to ask some of these things of the authors, but bottom line, I actually think that the potential of this study is nowhere near realized yet. I think it will be when all or most of the associations who are members of ASAE choose to undertake the study with their own members and input their data back in, when the numbers of respondents swell from 16k to 100k+, and when we can leave aside the common sense stuff and really delve into some of the secondary issues, that this study will really be useful.