Professionals across disciplines, trades, and crafts rely on post-education training to stay current with best practices, contemporary standards, essential resources, and emerging trends. Associations are uniquely positioned to meet this need as preeminent purveyors of continuing education programs that are evidence-based, expert-led, and practical. This is not a new role; many organizations have long operated robust infrastructures designed to deliver a broad portfolio of offerings. In many cases, education programs and meetings have also served as financial anchors that support the broader enterprise and advance the mission. After years of success with this model, however, many associations are now encountering critical—and in some cases existential—headwinds that challenge both their authority and their business model.

We are navigating a liminal period in association management, especially continuing professional education. Emerging learner needs and expectations increasingly diverge from what traditional portfolios were built to deliver. While each organization will chart its own course toward ongoing relevance, resonance, and economic sustainability, the following collection of concepts and considerations can serve as a guide.

Target Audience and Total Addressable Market

Who is your target audience, and how many of these consumers exist? On the surface, these questions may seem simple, even obvious. In practice, however, achieving organizational focus and developing evidence-based business intelligence is far from trivial. This work starts at the top: leadership (both staff and elected/appointed) must clearly define and consistently articulate the intended constituents or consumers within the field. Equally important, that North Star must be socialized across the entire organization so everyone is calibrated and working toward serving the same audience.

You’ll notice the term member isn’t used here—and that’s intentional. Instead, we use consumer, and it’s more than semantics; it reflects a philosophy. Adopting a consumer mindset expands your potential audience and your pipeline of learners, which is increasingly important as traditional notions of membership and organizational affiliation continue to wane.

Because associations operate with finite resources, it is essential to design, produce, and market education programs tailored to your intended audience. Understanding how many consumers exist in the global marketplace should influence topic prioritization, program development, performance benchmarks, and realistic growth projections. If you don’t yet know your total addressable market (TAM), don’t let that be a barrier. Combine what you already have like member lists, event attendance, survey data, and public workforce figures to build a simple estimate. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s establishing a baseline to guide decisions and track growth.

Consumer Needs and Behaviors

The pace of change is accelerating, and this must be factored into how organizations evaluate their education portfolios. Consumers now have markedly different professional (and personal) needs, motivations, concerns, challenges, and goals than they did even a year ago. The question is no longer simply “Are we meeting learner needs?” but “Is our portfolio keeping pace with the cadence of change?”

For years, associations have relied on episodic needs assessments to gauge gaps and trends. While useful, these periodic snapshots rarely capture real-time shifts in consumer behavior, market pressures, or emerging skill demands. Today’s environment demands a more agile approach, one that blends traditional needs assessments with ongoing feedback loops, sentiment analysis, behavioral data, and marketplace intelligence. The goal is not just to understand what consumers need now, but to anticipate what they will need next.

Tip: Don’t overlook secondary literature and data from credible nonprofits such as think tanks, credentialing organizations, research institutes, and universities. Valuable insights already exist, so seek them out.

Product Lifespan and Innovation

Education products have a natural arc—early growth, a productive peak, and an inevitable taper. Understanding where a program sits on that curve is essential for smart decision-making. What’s more, every product in your portfolio should also have its own key performance indicators and a scoring rubric that measures progress toward mission alignment, organizational objectives, departmental goals, and revenue expectations. This scorecard doesn’t need to be complicated, but it must be effective in helping you determine whether a program is fulfilling its intended purpose.

These business-intelligence inputs should directly inform decisions about the future of each offering—whether to enhance it, evolve it, or retire it. It’s not uncommon for education portfolios to include programs that have gradually drifted from their original purpose and no longer contribute as intended. Allocating finite resources to maintain a program that no longer resonates with your consumers represents a significant opportunity cost, and may even drive them elsewhere.

Financial Stewardship and Economic Growth

Education and meeting units are usually responsible for delivering significant net-revenue contributions to their organization’s bottom line, and many associations are placing an even stronger reliance on earnings from these programs due to stagnant or attenuating member-dues revenue. This shift elevates the strategic importance of education portfolios not just as mission-advancing functions, but as critical economic engines.

Understanding consumers’ willingness to pay, their price sensitivities, and the value they assign to your education offerings is essential. These insights clarify the true return on investment each program can command, rather than defaulting to a perfunctory ROI target or cost-coverage model to set prices. It’s not atypical to discover some of your programs currently stand above or fall below commensurate pricing. How would you operate differently if you had this business intelligence for each program?

A clear understanding of your division’s financial expectations, paired with vigilant performance monitoring and timely course corrections, is table stakes. High performing education and meetings units are lockstep with their finance, as well as marketing, counterparts. Functioning as a choreographed trifecta, there should be no ambiguity about net revenue projections and actuals. Anecdotally, associations are acknowledging general contraction in the sales of programs, products, and services. It’s important to recognize that we are operating in a period of profound disruption, where emerging iconoclasts are suggesting that some of our most cherished institutions, including associations, are becoming anachronistic. This makes the prospect of growth more complex, but not impossible for enterprising organizations up to the task. It’s our clarion call to transform the way we approach, design, and facilitate learning experiences to demonstrate and safeguard our inimitable value.

Vendor Partners (Services and Technologies)

Vendor-partners play an essential role in expanding our capacity and capability to deliver topflight education programs. Their people, services, and edtech platforms/tools become an extension of your own brand equity, which makes selecting them one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the accelerating role of AI, especially as new tools are emerging to expand our bench strength. These technologies are no longer experimental novelties; they are practical, efficient utilities that reduce the time and effort required to complete both routine and highly sophisticated tasks.

At the Endocrine Society, for instance, we now use AI-powered authoring tools to support the development of our case-based vignettes. Historically, building these learning experiences was a heavy lift: detailed storyboards, paid actors, and extensive rounds of SME and staff involvement. Today, what once took weeks can be completed in days. Quality has remained high, arguably even improved, and the shift has allowed SMEs and staff to spend more time on creativity and innovation, and less time on logistical stress. AI hasn’t replaced the human touch … it has elevated it.

Closing Thoughts (Futures Thinking)

None of us were gifted with a sixth sense of prescience, yet we are responsible for shaping a future we cannot fully see. The signals for what comes next are already present in our data, our consumers’ behaviors, and the shifting forces around us. Our job is to interpret those signals, test assumptions, and prepare multiple pathways forward. Scenario-based planning, agile decision-making, and disciplined experimentation are no longer optional competencies, they are the price of ongoing relevance, resonance, and economic sustainability.

Associations that embrace change with intention, that evolve their education portfolios to meet the marketplace where it’s heading (not where it has been), and that invest in innovation while showing fiscal discipline will not only endure, they will lead. The future is not something that happens to us; it’s something we have the opportunity, and the obligation, to design.