A telephone survey conducted by Atlantic Business Magazine shows that approximately half of Atlantic Canada’s business association members receive little to no new business as a result of their association memberships. Most seemed surprised that we had even asked the question, as though they had never stopped to evaluate the net return for the cost of their membership fees. Which begs the question: why did so many respondents say they wouldn’t hesitate to rejoin?
The idea for this investigative report originated in our own internal discussions about various business memberships that had come up for renewal. What did we get out of them? Which offered the best value? Was there a compelling reason to rejoin? The more we pondered these types of questions, the more we realized how difficult it was for us to evaluate the returns on our membership investments. And we wondered if other companies faced similar challenges.
We began by defining the parameters of our research study. The focus was narrowed from business associations in general to non-industry specific organizations because it would have consumed an entire magazine if we included every membership-based professional and industry organization in the region. The other yardstick was that they had to charge membership fees.
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