Products and Purpose

In 2022, Jason Ernest, president and CEO of Insurance Agents & Brokers, led a planning session with his board in order to get the organization out of a rut. The association, which represents professionals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, was not in a crisis, but Ernest was concerned that its product portfolio was poorly aligned with IA&B’s overall strategy—and as a result, that the organization was poorly prepared to handle future challenges.

“We were throwing a lot of stuff against the wall in terms of ideas, but it wasn’t in a formal strategic plan format,” he says. “I’d seen some erosion of traditional revenue sources, and mergers and acquisitions within our industry just meant fewer membership opportunities. My point to the board was that we needed to explore nontraditional revenue sources so that we can be sustainable long-term.”

Many associations have boards that regularly generate strategic plans and develop plenty of ideas for products and services. But those ideas aren’t always in sync with the association’s strategy, which means the board risks getting blindsided by industry trends, or they end up sinking resources into irrelevant initiatives.

Kevin Hinton, CAE, executive vice president of Minding Your Business, an association consultancy, says associations should conduct a regular audit of their offerings through a strategy lens before rushing into product-development mode.

“Look at how current programs and offerings are performing both from a member-value standpoint and also financially,” he says. “You’re getting a sense of what’s working, and maybe where there’s an opportunity to consider improving the quality or engagement or the value of current offerings.”

That experience, Hinton says, will help clarify strategy discussions. But again, before rushing into standing up a new program, boards should look at their organization’s overall growth vision. “We’re not even getting into the specifics of what those kinds of programs are. The questions are, what do we need to do more or less of based on what we learned about our members? What is it that we’re really trying to accomplish?”

A New Program

At IA&B, what emerged from those board conversations was a rethink about the workforce in its industry, which led to expanding ways to draw people to it from nontraditional routes. The board made a plan to develop an “insurance school” designed to attract people in high-stress and thinning industries—banking and teaching, for instance—to attract them to the insurance world and prepare them to change careers.