Two facts. One obvious problem. And it's costing you.
Email is still the workhorse for associations. It's how we promote events, recruit members, push renewals, share advocacy updates, and keep people engaged. But email only works if you can actually reach the person on the other end.
That sounds obvious, but most association databases are full of contacts who changed jobs, switched companies, got promoted, moved to a different department, or just retired. The CRM still has the record, so it feels like the person is still reachable. They may not be.
That creates a bigger problem than a bounced email. If a prospective member changes jobs and lands at a company that should belong to your association, that is a missed recruitment opportunity. If a member contact leaves and nobody updates the account, that is a retention risk.
Associations spend a lot of time thinking about messaging, campaigns, subject lines, and segmentation. All of that matters. But if the underlying contact information is wrong, the best campaign in the world is still going nowhere.
This is the part of the growth conversation that gets skipped. We talk about recruitment and retention like they are mostly marketing problems. Sometimes they are. But sometimes the problem is much simpler.
You can't recruit people you can't reach.
This is part two of a three-part series based on two membership reports: the 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report from Marketing General and the 2026 Association Survey from GrowthZone.