Every organization surveys its people. Member associations survey members. Nonprofits survey donors. Trade groups poll their exhibitors. The results feel reassuring because the people who answer are the people who already chose you.

Christine Saunders and her team at Halmyre recently published growth strategy benchmarking research across North American professional and trade associations. One number should stop every executive director in the industry: 61 percent of associations reported never conducting research with nonmembers, or doing it less than once every five years.

Think about what that means operationally. If you run a trade association with 2,000 members and a potential market of 8,000, you have 6,000 people who made a decision about you and you have no idea what drove it. You are building strategy from inside a room where everyone already agrees with you.

Saunders found that associations who connect with nonmembers at least every three years are nearly twice as likely to report significant membership growth: 39 percent versus 20 percent. The act of asking the people outside the room changes the growth trajectory more than anything you do for the people already inside it.

Most associations already have contact information for hundreds of people who almost joined, used to belong, or attended an event without converting. Lapsed members. Conference attendees who never renewed. Newsletter subscribers sitting in a CRM field nobody filters on. The 61 percent who never do nonmember research are not lacking resources or budget. They are avoiding a conversation they suspect will be uncomfortable. That avoidance is the most expensive line item that never shows up in a budget.

The mechanism is not complicated. When staff, board members, and volunteers believe they know what members need because they are members, they are working from inside a bubble. Even regular member research does not break it. Surveying members and hearing from the engaged few is its own echo chamber. You end up with something that looks like research but functions as a mirror.

Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error, and it shows up far beyond membership organizations.

I remember a case from my grad school days that illustrates this. In 1982, General Motors closed its assembly plant in Fremont, California. By every internal measure it was the worst plant in the system. Absenteeism ran above 20 percent. Workers drank on the job. Some slipped Coke bottles inside door panels so the finished cars would rattle on the way home. When GM management talked about Fremont, they talked about character. “Those people” was the phrase they used.

Two years later the plant reopened as NUMMI, a joint venture with Toyota. Toyota rehired the same workers. More than 85 percent of the starting workforce came from the group GM had laid off, including many with the worst records. Within a year, Fremont was building cars at quality levels near the top of the GM system. Absenteeism fell to low single digits.

Where GM looked at the workers and saw a character problem, Toyota looked at the system those workers operated inside and found the leverage there.
In 1977, the Stanford psychologist Lee Ross gave it that name. We explain other people’s behavior by their character and discount the situation they stand in. The driver who cuts you off is reckless. You do not stop to wonder whether he is racing someone to the hospital. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

The membership version of this error runs through every annual survey. Your most engaged members show up, respond, volunteer, and renew. You attribute that to the value you provide. Meanwhile the people who drift away, or never join, are invisible. You cannot attribute their absence to anything because you never asked them about it.

Tatia Zuolaga, in the same ASAE issue, made a related argument. When a small percentage of members generate most of the activity, you have built a loyal core but not an engaged membership. Everyone else is watching from the margins, and your metrics cannot distinguish between “satisfied and passive” and “one email away from lapsing.”

That concentrated engagement is the structural shape of the bubble Saunders measured. The people who answer, attend, serve, and renew are a self-selecting sample. They tell you what the committed think. They cannot tell you what the uncommitted need to hear.

KEY TAKEAWAY: The question is not "are our members satisfied?" It is "what do the people who should be here, but aren’t, know about us that we don’t?"

Saunders’s research identified where future members live. Most of them have already touched your organization in some way: lapsed members, students who did not convert, nonmembers who attended an event, people in adjacent roles who follow your work from outside.

Start there.

Audit your own database. Most organizations sit on contact information for people who almost joined, used to belong, or showed up once. Lapsed members. Event attendees who never converted. Newsletter subscribers who are not members. Before spending on external research, ask the people you already have a way to reach: what would it take?

Count the concentration. Pull the numbers on what share of your engagement comes from the top 10 percent of members. If the answer is most of it, you are measuring a loyal core, not a healthy membership. That concentration number is the outline of your bubble, and until you measure it, you cannot talk about engagement honestly.

Replace one member survey with five nonmember conversations. You do not need statistical validity to start. Five interviews with people who chose not to join, or chose to leave, will surface patterns your member survey cannot reach by design. Saunders’s data confirms the constraint: nonmembers are harder to find. But your members work alongside them, your partners know them, and the return on the effort shows up at nearly double the growth rate.

Ask lapsed members the uncomfortable question. Not “why did you leave,” which invites polite deflection. Ask “what would have to be true for you to come back?” That version surfaces the gap between what you think you deliver and what they actually experienced.

List the last three times you asked a nonmember why not. If you cannot, that is the finding.

Written by Travis Wright | ETL Advisory

Leadership and strategy for the people who lead aviation and the organizations that serve it.

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