Increasing Value to Association Members

ORI helps a business association address membership challenges by exploring how to adapt the products and services they offer.

The 30-year-old association had experienced several years of declining membership accompanied by low utilization of member benefits, products and services. Its senior management wanted to know how they might repackage existing offerings to better appeal to members, as well as identify new membership features, ancillary products and services, and/or pricing adjustments that could reverse this troubling trend.

When they contacted ORI, the association had no clear measures of how well their current products and services appealed to members or how their overall value proposition was perceived. They also needed specific feedback to effectively prioritize new products and services and find ways to engage members. ORI conducted a series of online bulletin board focus groups with association members and prospective members to document product and price point preferences. The results helped the association to identify the combination of products and services that would be most attractive to their target audience, and identified an effective pricing model that included both membership dues and charges for additional services.