According to a new report, association professionals are entering 2025 feeling optimistic about membership and revenue, but are looking to improve their technological savvy to better engage with their audiences.

Marketing General Incorporated’s 2025 Association Outlook Report, published last month, is based on responses from nearly 300 association professionals surveyed last September. Overall, they see positives in the coming year, with 63 percent of respondents anticipating membership growth and 74 percent expecting increased member engagement.

But respondents expect to have to invest to earn those increases: A majority of professionals say they intend to spend more on member marketing (56 percent) and new technology (53 percent).

“Probably the biggest a-ha [from the report] is a real focus on technology and using that to increase operational efficiency,” said MGI Senior Vice President Tony Rossell. “The level of sophistication that is required by associations now to manage their marketing and membership is really exploding, from data analytics to digital marketing to artificial intelligence. There’s a big learning curve ahead for associations.”

For instance, Rossell said, associations can’t rely on email as much as they have in the past; email client providers like Google and Yahoo have set tighter restrictions on unopened emails that make it more likely for associations to be categorized as a spammer. In light of that, 37 percent of associations in the new survey said they “plan to supplement their email use with additional channels.” 

According to the report, only 3 percent say they currently use AI to improve member services.

“People are probably going to see more and more challenges with email, so they’re going to have to look at alternate ways of communicating with people,” Rossell said, noting the rising popularity of tools such as ringless voicemail and site retargeting, where web ads follow users as they surf, reminding them of an association’s products and services.

Even so, associations continue to demonstrate hesitance around AI adoption. According to the report, only 3 percent say they currently use AI “to improve member services,” and only 19 percent say they intend to in 2025. And even among those that do plan to use AI, the majority (68 percent) say they intend to use it for content creation, not member analytics. “I think that’s an indication of the late adoption tendency in associations, and also the ethical, privacy, legal issues that they’re probably wrestling with,” Rossell said.

Even more old-school behavior is evident in another finding: 43 percent of association professionals say they plan to emphasize publications and information resources in their member messaging, triple the percentage of the previous year’s survey. (Education, training, and networking remain the most common messaging subjects, consistent with past years.) That statistical outlier may speak to associations recognizing the need to create unique members-only content, Rossell said. 

“Clearly associations know that the lever to keep getting members is to provide relevance and content that they can’t get anywhere else,” he said. “A CEO one time told me, ‘Why do people need membership? They have Google.’ So I think that they realize that’s a critical element that they have to deliver to people.”

[istock/Boy Wirat]