In a previous blog I focused on the message, “Prepare Yourself Well; There is Plenty of Room at the Top, It’s the Bottom that’s Full.” In this segment I’d like to how membership associations help professionals build a lifelong commitment to preparation and improvement.
I believe one must shift the concept of membership and dues from a transaction based perspective to an investment perspective. If lifelong learning, preparation, and improvement are goals, you simply cannot treat investing in that in the same way as you do a vanilla latte at Starbucks. When I paid tuition in both undergraduate and graduate schools, I viewed it as an investment in my future—preparation, not a transaction that had to meet immediate gratification of “value” tests. At the end of the day, dues represents lifelong tuition for learning.
Of course, we all ask the “what am I going to get out of it” questions when we spend money. However, I didn’t expect my tuition on any given class to give me an immediate return that semester. In fact, some courses built on one another, so that it took cumulative experiences for the benefit to accrue. The goal of lifelong learning requires a mindset shift from transaction based purchase valuation to one of investment for longer-term goals. The investment (whether in professional knowledge or experience, or literally for retirement) may have some latency before gratification comes. But failure to invest in learning and improvement, in a world that isn’t standing still, means you fall behind. And if you are measuring membership dues with a “transaction” based model, you may already be losing ground.
So what aspects of lifelong learning did I get in my university experiences that are an inherent component of membership and engagement in associations? I see four: access to a meaningful network, a hotbed for emerging content, a laboratory to experiment, practice, and grow, and a platform from which to launch. And no one is good enough to build and maintain all four on his/her own. It takes a structured plan, process, and group to ensure those aspects are grown and developed over time.p
Executive Director's Toolkit 