Association communities are centered on established trust and shared values. An often underutilized way to access value for members is to tap into this trust in order to gather highly confidential data, which can be used to report out industry insights.

Detailed, or even custom, reports can be provided to members who choose to participate in such a study. Meanwhile, more summary-level reports can be sold to nonmembers and nonparticipating members, at a member discount, to generate nondues revenue. At the same time, the association may be able to use some of this data for advocacy or public relations efforts, to enhance the intrinsic value of membership.

It’s certainly true that for-profit companies can independently conduct valuable surveys for industries or professions. But associations have a critical advantage over for-profit companies because of established trusted relationships with members that stretch back years or even decades.

Companies and individuals feel much more comfortable providing confidential data on sales, compensation, financial ratios, cycle times, best practices, or other sensitive information to their association for the benefit of the industry or profession than they do sharing the same information with a for-profit company that will likely try to sell it. This can be true even if the association outsources the research and reporting process to a professional, third-party research firm because, in most cases, the association retains ownership of the data.

The value of this community of trust can be real and it can be immense. Let me share a specific example from my experience. In this real-life example, and in many others I have seen, there are staggering differences between data collection costs for an association and costs of similar efforts conducted by a for-profit research firm.

Associations that tap into their members’ trust can collect confidential data in a secure and sensitive manner to benefit their entire profession or industry.

I collected data for a trade association that represented a fairly concentrated industry. The organization’s member companies accounted for close to 90 percent of the market. Not surprisingly, these companies safeguarded sales data tightly. A for-profit survey firm served this industry, but the firm made its money by selling market-share estimates and other company-specific data, which was used by competitors who subscribed to the firm’s data services.

The association’s members were not willing to share their sales information with this firm. This meant that the firm had to survey the industry’s customers, many of whom were small businesses and individuals—a much more time-, cost-, and effort-intensive process than surveying member companies.

The level of participation in the customer surveys was much lower than that of an association-sponsored survey. Partly because of this, the sales data collected on behalf of the association was considered much more reliable.

And the price differential was huge. The association’s total cost to collect data through a third-party professional research firm on its members’ behalf was $40,000 per year. The total cost to all of the subscribers of the data collected for the same sector by the for-profit research firm was more than $3 million per year.

This is just one of many examples of how associations can drive immense value through research enabled by a values-based community. Associations that tap into their members’ trust can collect confidential data in a secure and sensitive manner to benefit their entire profession or industry and enhance the association’s value proposition.