What’s your association’s core competency? It could be something like “supporting manufacturers in the widget industry” or “providing education and advocacy for doodad practitioners in California.” Whatever it is, plug it into a search engine: Is your association at the top of the results? Maybe. Are you the only result? Probably not.

Bruce Rosenthal, a partnership and sponsorship consultant, suggests this exercise to get at a key challenge for associations today: Groups that were once the sole resource for a particular community now have a lot more competition. In a recent white paper, The Value of Conducting an Association Competitive Analysis, he and Mary Byers, CAE, lay out some of the situations where associations might compete. It’s not just other associations: Education providers, AI-driven search tools, for-profit organizations, social media, and more all can siphon off member attention and dollars.

“People think that if a sponsor is not renewing, they must be cutting their marketing budget,” Rosenthal says. “You might ask those sponsors because my guess is they’re not cutting their marketing budget. They’re cutting you out of their marketing budget.”

And associations with “golden handcuffs” arrangements—where membership is essential for maintaining a credential or license—aren’t immune to this challenge. Mary Augsburger, CEO of the Ohio State Bar Association, notes that in the legal field, “there are specialty certifications that lawyers can get, but” recent rules changes mean that “the association is not the sole certifying provider in that space anymore.” 

What to do? A competitive analysis takes time and never really stops, Augsburger says, but it’s worth staff effort to create a process where they identify other ways members or potential members can access the support and information that associations once thought they managed exclusively. 

“We thought that we did a lot that was unique, but we found that there were many other offerings that people could turn to to find the information that we were providing,” she says. “We really had to do a deep dive into our own offerings and understand what it is that members are truly looking for from us. There was a lot of investment in market research to make that determination. What do they think of us when they think of the Ohio bar? What are they looking for us to provide, and where could we then prioritize resources?”

That process, Augsburger says, identified a number of places where OSBA couldn’t compete, or where it was prohibitively expensive to try to compete. (“We often ask ourselves, is the juice worth the squeeze?”) In light of that, OSBA has emphasized products and services that demonstrate knowledge of the state’s legal landscape, presented quickly and authoritatively. “For lawyers, time is money, so what they really look to us to provide is what they need to know, when they need to know it,” she says. “They don’t know if the information that they’re being given is trusted, so we’re spending a lot of time vetting and developing content that they can rely on, practice resources that they can rely on to make them better lawyers.”

Augsburger’s recommendation to association leaders is to do that research, but not to rush it. “Don’t try to do wholesale changes all at once,” she says. “Start to do some online research and understand what others are offering and for how much, and then start to build in some focus areas. Know where you want to go and take incremental steps towards change, and use data along the way.”