What’s the top priority for associations this year? According to McKinley Advisors’ 2021 Association Viewpoint research study, it’s generating nondues revenue.

Why is generating nondues revenue so important at the moment, and how can product development and management help? In general, associations often face challenges in diversifying revenue—along with understanding audience needs and developing or pivoting products, programs, and services to meet them. Right now, the broad and continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced associations to urgently address these issues.

Top Challenges

McKinley conducted one-on-one interviews with association executives about their recent top challenges. Four key issues emerged:

• Recovering annual meeting revenue lost due to the pandemic, and continuing to engage their audience.
• Addressing declining member spending with a strong value proposition.
• Creating a path towards growth and enhanced revenue generation.
• Empathizing for success—continuing to improve and manage products in response to customer needs.

Given that these are the top challenges for associations, there is a product development methodology that associations can use to help get them started. It is designed to be deployed quickly and iteratively without getting bogged down in the details.

Look and listen: research and analysis. Associations need to answer three questions: What problem are you trying to solve? Why? What research and analysis will best support your understanding of market needs?

Begin by establishing a problem statement about the challenge to be solved. Then conduct in-depth interviews and listen to the customer. You may find that your assumptions about what they need are wrong. Through listening to the customer, you’ll narrow in on what is truly needed to fill any gaps in the market.

Develop low-fidelity mockups to test against your hypothesis to see if the idea meets your customers’ needs. Focus groups or interviews with target audiences are helpful here to get real-time feedback and adjust the concepts.

Learn and ideate. Think about what ways you can deliver a better solution. Ideate and co-create with empathy. Developing personas can help you better understand their needs. Traditionally, associations relied on historical engagement metrics to predict future success. But what a member or customer needed in 2019 may not be what they need in 2022. Brainstorm during this phase to bring as many ideas forward as possible.

Plan and roadmap. Develop concepts to market test. Consider low-fidelity prototypes and minimum viable product (MVP) versions. Now it’s time to test your ideas. Develop low-fidelity mockups to test against your hypothesis to see if the idea meets your customers’ needs. Focus groups or interviews with target audiences are helpful here to get real-time feedback and adjust the concepts.

Deliver and iterate. Test the MVP with the market. What did you learn? Are there ways to improve it? Don’t let perfection hold back progress. The MVP approach means going to market with ideas that are good enough, but not perfect. Try it, learn from what the market tells you, and adapt. Prototyping and pilot testing can help your team fail fast and bring you closer to the product that is going to stick.

The Process in Action

To see how this might work in practice, here’s a brief look at how the Construction Specifications Institute used this approach.

Crosswalk, an application programming interface that networks traditional paper-based CSI’s standards with third-party products for the benefits of end users, was developed by asking, “How can we respond to and change the way our members work?” Pursuing this approach opened new markets, enabled CSI to think more about customer use cases. It took about 18 months to solidify the idea, secure funding, and work through an MVP. Licensing revenue quadrupled within 18 months of launch—slightly slowed because of COVID's impact on businesses and budgets—and the trend continues.