Not many associations can say they went from 2,800 members to 105,000 members in just five years.
You might think an association with such a boom in membership wouldn't be focused on non-dues revenue. After gaining 37 times the number of members, aren't they covered?
But there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to association financials anymore. Gone are the days of solely depending on membership fees to keep your association financially stable.
Jon Lindberg, the Executive Director at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) has fully embraced this shift. While ACRM did achieve the incredible membership growth mentioned above, they don't depend on membership fees to carry them through.
About ACRM: The American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine's mission is to improve the lives of those with disabling conditions through interdisciplinary rehabilitation research – such chronic conditions as Brain Injury, Spinal Cord Injury, Stroke, Neurodegenerative Diseases, Pain, Cancer, Neuroplasticity and more.
Lindberg attributes ACRM’s rise in membership to the introduction of iMIS® and then the upgrade to the iMIS Engagement Management System in the cloud. In 2019, ACRM had 2,800 members. According to Lindberg, consolidating multiple databases representing different segments of the industry, facilitated by iMIS, allowed the association to reach 10,000 members. Then the iMIS Engagement Management System (EMS) brought ACRM up to 86,000 members.
Going forward, ACRM consistently began adding 500-1,000 members week-in and week-out. For an association with a 100-year history, this continues to be a crowning achievement.
Such membership success makes Lindberg’s cautionary comment about depending heavily on dues revenue in the future even more intriguing.
Leadership means seeing the future. Asked how he reached his conclusion, Lindberg made a demographic argument. He confessed that while you can never be entirely sure about anything, and remaining flexible is always key, he noted that in years to come the membership community will grow from people increasingly younger now and more and more of its constituents will have been raised with free memberships from Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube to TikTok. So, expectations have been set.
This trend is further confirmed by how the streaming services have begun to offer hybrid business models – free membership with advertising.
It’s not as if membership fees are going away, but why not actively leverage the revenue value in the targeted focus associations have to offer?
This kind of thinking coincides completely with ASI’s unique decision to invest in delivering advertising and sponsorship management natively from within the iMIS Engagement Management System – the only membership system to do so. As iMIS Advertising Product Manager, I’ve long encouraged associations to recognize their privileged place in the media world, all of which has to do with targeting which advertisers covet. It’s not only about functionality, which streamlines:
It’s also about the mindset that comes with the software – guiding associations who want to increase advertising and sponsorships or add them where they do not already exist, increasing revenue and engagement, plus the benefits of advertising as yet another way to present the association to the world.
ACRM is also a great example of another positive aspect of what associations have to offer advertisers and their audiences – the sense of a mission. What content could be more uplifting than a stream of news about how medical advances make routine previously unimaginable recovery from devastating injuries? Whatever the industry, the expression of the mission makes a welcome home for the advertiser’s message.
Jon Lindberg himself is a great proponent of ACRM and the “good people” who move it forward. He is a prolific poster on LinkedIn, but the focus is never on himself, only on those all around him.