When Donna Dunn, CAE, took the helm of the Association of YMCA Professionals in 2009, the AYP member magazine was losing about $100,000 a year.

She approached the AYP board with the startling statistics, and the directors' first reaction was to suggest pushing all of the magazine content online.

"That might be the right decision," Dunn remembers telling the board. "But we don't have the research telling us it's the right decision."

The board agreed and contracted with a firm to perform a communications audit of the magazine. "The research involved a lot of open-ended questions, and about 900 people responded," Dunn says. "So, there was a lot of qualitative analysis that had to be done based on all of those fill-in-the-blanks, but it was very revealing."

The findings were revealing and in some ways shocking, which was why Dunn asked the firm's consultant to come in and explain the audit results to the board.

"Sometimes you get the right combination of culture of the board and the right consultant, who connects and can say things that others can't say—and that I certainly wasn't going to say," Dunn says.

Without mincing words, the consultant came in and said something to the extent of: "So, about your magazine. Nobody likes it."

It turned out that although AYP members strongly wanted a print magazine, they didn’t want the one that AYP was publishing. The consultant then laid out a vision for a new magazine and communications strategy, and within one three-hour meeting the board adopted all of the changes, including plans for a new, revamped print magazine.

It became a welcome feature of membership—rather than 'Gee, one more thing I'm going to stick in a pile that I might read later.'—Donna Dunn, CAE, Association of YMCA Professionals

AYP scrapped its existing magazine and went back to the drawing board. It outsourced the magazine to a new company, and it went from a monthly to bimonthly publishing schedule. It traded the old editorial content, which was composed of lengthy, member-contributed articles and a journal-type format for a newly designed magazine with two to three feature articles per issue and an array of new departments that offered advice- and service-type content. There was a new focus on personal and professional development, as well, Dunn says.

In order to make all of these changes, AYP needed a four-month break between the final edition of the previous magazine and the first issue of the new one. It was very telling that, although no members received magazines for four months, not one of them bothered contacting AYP about it.

"It’s kind of frightening," Dunn says. "When you don’t publish for four months and nobody even misses it."

After it debuted the new and approved AYP magazine, Dunn says: "The magazine then became very popular—people commented on it positively. It became a welcome feature of membership, rather than 'Gee, one more thing I’m going to stick in a pile that I might read later.'"

And in the second and third year, the magazine started making money rather than losing tremendous amounts of it. "It took a little while because it was essentially a new publication," Dunn says, because it had to build-up circulation numbers in order to attract advertisers.

To sum it all up, Dunn says the experience clarified a few lessons for her:

1. It's important to take the time to perform the research in order to see what's really happening.
2. You have to actually crunch the numbers to see if a decision (like going all online) is a financially sound choice.
3. You have to consider that there might be a disconnect between your members' wants and needs and your bottom line.

AYP could have just shoved the magazine content online, and it could have saved the magazine printing and shipping costs, but there would still be other costs associated with the creation of an online magazine. Dunn says that, after crunching all of the numbers, AYP figured out it wouldn't even save 50 percent of the costs of the magazine by moving it all online. And besides, she says, as the audit proved, "[An online magazine] was not what our members wanted. What they wanted was something we weren’t even giving them at the time."

A good print magazine.

But now they are.