Two membership reports released in the last year tell the same basic story. But when read together, the blind spots are hard to ignore.
The 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report from Marketing General. 17 years running. Over 400 association professionals surveyed on recruitment, engagement, and retention.
The 2026 Association Survey from GrowthZone. 518 associations surveyed at the end of 2025. Similar questions, different angle.
Over the next three weeks I'm going to unpack three fault lines that can't be ignored.
- Week one: It costs 5x more to recruit a new member than to win back a lapsed one. So why do 79% of associations have no plan to go get them back?
- Week two: 82% of associations depend on email to recruit new members. The number one growth challenge those same associations report is difficulty reaching prospective members. Nobody's connecting those two facts.
- Week three: Gen Z is only 11% of association membership. Everyone knows why. Here's the conversation nobody's having.
See you next week.