You buy a mystery jigsaw puzzle with 1000 pieces. About 200 are hidden in the couch. 500 are "somewhere" in the basement. And 300 have been chewed to annihilation by your puppy. 

This is pretty much how it goes when associations run off of disparate data and martech stacks. All clues remain a mystery. All insights into their members, their prospects, and their futures are lost. They have disjointed pictures and unintelligible stories about their audiences.

Consolidating data and finding that single source of truth can be tricky. Luckily Spark has a solid and evolving solution to mapping your data across your entire stack.

Every year, associations and nonprofits clamor to reinvent their marketing, programming, and member experience strategies. And while the table always turns with new technologies and approaches, in 2023 and beyond, new audiences are also entering the mix. 

That's right. Gen Z is slowly working its way into the workplace and the buying market. In fact, according to World Economic Forum, by 2025, it's expected that Gen Z will be taking up 27% of this space.

There's no question that individual and societal experiences have shaped Gen Z. Significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and recent advocacy movements like Black Lives Matter, gun reform, and climate change have formulated the values of this new generation. 

Their social consciousness, thrifty, and tech-savvy priorities are attributes that associations need to take into account when building plans to drum up new membership, increase engagement, and even recruit their own new employees.

It's a given that the "one-size-fits-all" approach isn't applicable here. Organizations need tailored approaches and tools that deliver the right content in the right way to this high impact group. 

In a recent presentation at the Marketing Membership and Communications Convention (MMCC) hosted by the ASAE Center for Association Leadership, two of HighRoad's very own senior digital advisors, Nicole Crilley and Emily Nash, spoke on the topic of optimizing marketing campaigns for results. 

They presented to a captive audience of association marketers, program managers, and other professionals, looking to modernize the way they connect with their members and search for new ones. Here's a summary of their presentation. 

Marketing planning can be exciting. It's often the time where new ideas get thrown on the table, innovative and analytical thinking converge, and rough concepts get fully baked. 

What's not fun—seeing campaigns and approaches flop, particularly when so much thought, creativity, and goal intention went into them.

One of the obvious and most critical objectives of any association is to retain membership. Retention is a key performance indicator that impacts brand reputation, member satisfaction, and conclusively—financial statements.

The issue, however, is that generational and cultural landscapes are constantly evolving—yielding new consumer-buying behaviors, content-consumption preferences, and desired communication channels. 

As market demand is rewired, businesses are all seeing a natural need for remodeling, restructuring, and/or rebranding so that they're lock in step with audience expectations and needs.

Associations, and certainly memberships, are no different. Naturally, member-based organizations have to be extraordinarily proactive when it comes to identifying and dissuading member exits.