Associations NOW Presents

Beyond Accessibility: Building Neuroinclusive Association Communities

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Catherine Galli, MPH, digital content writer at the International Coaching Federation, sits down with Wendy-Jo Toyama, MBA, FASAE, CAE, chief executive officer of the American Epilepsy Society, and Megan Henshall, chief impact officer of The Neu Project, to explore findings from the ASAE Foundation and MPI Foundation report, “Enhancing Neuroinclusive Practices in Association.” The conversation examines how associations can create more inclusive environments for neurodivergent staff, members, and event attendees by moving beyond accessibility checklists toward intentional belonging. Toyama and Henshall discuss persistent stigma surrounding neurodivergence, gaps in awareness and implementation across organizations, and the importance of making neuroinclusive efforts visible and actionable. They also share practical strategies such as quiet and resilient spaces at events, inclusive facilitation techniques, clearer accommodation pathways, and ongoing feedback mechanisms, while emphasizing curiosity, co-creation, and intersectionality as essential components of meaningful neuroinclusion.
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Transcript
Catherine Galli: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Catherine Galli, digital content writer at the International Coaching Federation. Today, we're excited to welcome Wendy-Jo Toyama, CEO of the American Epilepsy Society, and Megan Henshall, chief impact officer at The Neu Project.
Welcome, Wendy-Jo and Megan. Today, we're discussing the joint report through the ASAE Foundation and MPI Foundation, “Enhancing Neuroinclusive Practices in Association,” of course, which was done in partnership with Ferguson and The Neu Project. For those who may be new to the term, let's just dive right in.
How do you define neuroinclusion, and why is it especially relevant for associations right now? 
Megan Henshall: I can jump in first, and then I would actually love to hear your answer, too. So at The Neu Project, we define neurodiversity as all of us, right? We all have a [00:01:00] brain. Some brains are, quote, unquote, "neurotypical," some brains are neurodivergent, but there are billions of neurotypes and combinations of different ways of thinking and cognitive function.
And so neurodiversity really speaks to, to all of us, and I think we're gonna dig into sort of the neurodivergent experience in this conversation today. But it really is important to note that it is speaking to brain health across everyone and how we support people with cognitive functioning, sensory processing, regardless of their neurotype 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah, and then taking it to the next step, neuroinclusion then would be creating that sense of belonging so that everyone can feel seen and heard.
So creating an environment that really embraces that neurological difference. And I think it's particularly important because, as Meg said, it cuts across all aspects of associations, and so we have members who are [00:02:00] affected by practices that are either barriers or neuroinclusive. We have staff. So it's really important to build this to be able to be effective and welcoming and create a sense of belonging for everyone.
Catherine Galli: Thank you. That's a great explanation, and I think it really centers everybody into the topic today. So in the association industry, this report on neuroinclusion is a first. What are some of the most surprising or unexpected findings that emerged from the data? 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: I will just start by saying I think associations have a long way to go on being a welcoming environment around disabilities in general.
And so I think what surprised me is that there are some things that are going well or strengths we can build on. Like, I think it was not as bleak as I thought it was maybe going to be. For me, there are places where things are happening that we can build on. So that was one surprise to me. 
Megan Henshall: One of the things that jumped out to me when we did the individual interviews, and we [00:03:00] interviewed samples across the entire association population, but in a, a particular interview with a senior leader, so executive, there was a comment made of, "I don't think this affects my particular organization.
Everyone in my organization is very high-functioning." And so it's not- 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: There's  that as well, yes. 
Megan Henshall: I hear it all the time 'cause I travel constantly and talk with a bunch of different types of organizations and in different industries about neurodiversity, neuroinclusion, neuro-informed design, and I hear it a lot.
There is still a lot of misunderstanding and stigma around what a neurodivergent person is and how they present. So I think one of the biggest sort of aha moments from any of these conversations, not just the brilliant work that we've done with ASAE and MPI, is that there are neurodivergent people in every rank, and a lot of this is completely invisible.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yes. 
Megan Henshall: And so it's really important to know that, and until that sort of awareness exists in your body, it's really hard to [00:04:00] support it, accommodate and advocate for it. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah, that was shocking when I read that finding. The other place that I was surprised about, and I think we probably need to dig in a little bit more, is there's a pretty big gap between member perceptions and staff perceptions.
That came out, and it will need more exploration, I think. 
Megan Henshall: Yeah. 
Catherine Galli: It's interesting that you note visibility in there, and Wendy-Jo, you mentioned the connection to inclusive design and making things inclusive for people with different disabilities, and I think you've also tied it into inclusion in other topics within associations.
I love that this study really tries to look at all of the different levels and how that fits within members, their experiences at different events, and then also for staff themselves. And you mentioned this gap between staff and members. When you compare those perspectives, [00:05:00] where do you see the biggest disconnects in how neuroinclusion is experienced?
Wendy-Jo Toyama: The one area that I noted a disconnect was around communication, in that the scores are very good about creating design the way it's formatted and looks pretty effectively. But where it is-- where there is a gap is in the actual messaging and the content itself. So not being explicit about being inclusive and thoughtful and intentional around neuroinclusion was one big gap 
Megan Henshall: This is a constant thing too.
What we saw in the ASAE research is no different than most other organizations who are on a journey to try to implement a neuroinclusive practice. I think a lot of times we educate ourselves, we build an awareness, then we start to implement practices or tactics, and yet we don't story tell around those things, and we don't co-create with the people that we're building for.
This is a real challenge across [00:06:00] all design practices, not just this one. But I think a lot of times people, especially event people, who are all heart, right? We care so much about others. We're doing these things in service of others, yet we're not talking about the real intention and thought and care behind those things, and we're not asking for feedback and conversation and dialogue around them when we do try them.
So it's really hard to learn, and it's really hard to iterate and get better. But it's interesting because staff are like, "No, we're doing the thing." It's really hard to make it as impactful as possible unless we're inviting the people that it's for into the conversation and iterating, co-creating, evolving with them.
So it's really interesting to watch how that's always a part of any journey with this work. But it's a really critical part of the journey. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: And Meg, I think when I look at the page that really calls out this gap [00:07:00] between leaders and members, members perceive us being further along than the staff do. And I think it's related to the journey.
I think where it is closest is things around being supportive, creating intention. But where the gaps are the largest are like when you put it into action. So I think allocating resources to support neuroinclusive initiatives. There's a huge gap between what members think and what staff think on that front.
There's a huge gap between development programs and training around neurodiversity awareness and understanding. There's a gap around actively involving neuroinclusive initiatives into your plan. So I think it's a journey gap, if you will. 
Catherine Galli: It's interesting to hear both you, Wendy-Jo, and Meg, you've mentioned that there's this communication gap as well of we're trying to implement these neuroinclusive practices, and yet nobody knows that they're being [00:08:00] implemented, or perhaps members are not able to find the information they need.
Can you explain that gap a little bit more? 
Megan Henshall: I can speak to our experience working with companies and also my own experience advocating for myself. So I got diagnosed with autism at 40 after my son was diagnosed at three, so this has been a professional journey for me, but also a very personal one. But I think there's a lot of fear around work like this, and there's a lot of hesitation to lean in because what if we get it wrong or what if we try something that actually isn't helpful?
And I think that is why a lot of organizations or just people hesitate or struggle to openly and transparently communicate around what they're doing and why. I also think there's this cancel culture and asking a question and it not being the right question has created a lot of harm in work like this, and I think that's one of the cultural and societal issues with [00:09:00] this.
And I hear leaders say it all the time, "I really wanna do something about this. I'm afraid of getting it wrong and it ac- and actually making things worse." But the truth of the matter is, if you approach this sort of work with humility and you're honest and transparent about what you're doing, people are grateful.
They're grateful every time. Now, you might get some critical feedback or you might get feedback that you weren't expecting at all, but that just makes us all better. And so in my opinion, at a macro level, I think this is one thing that impacts people's ability to communicate effectively is just this hesitation that, what if I use the wrong word?
Or what if I'm not knowledgeable enough? No one is an expert in neuroinclusion. It is a real-time dynamic practice. We are learning more about the human brain every day. We're learning more about how that brain is evolving in real time, so you can't possibly be an expert. We're all learning. We should be [00:10:00] learning openly and together.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: I want to build on that and say when I became a CEO, I had a strong membership background. I had an MBA. I was pretty comfortable with finance. I didn't know meetings so well, and I certainly didn't know publishing. But that didn't mean that I didn't do those things because I didn't know and I was afraid of making a mistake.
So I think that then you think about what did I do? I reached out to someone I knew who was our editor at the place I worked before. I gained knowledge. I engaged consultants. These are all things you can do around neuroinclusion, and you can certainly start by looking at the research. There's some good articles in there.
But saying, "I'm afraid of making a mistake," is not an excuse for equipping yourself to being able to create a welcoming environment around this. The other thing I would say is something that I noticed when I was reading the report. There's a lot in here around intention, and so again, [00:11:00] not just creating a pathway for people to get an accommodation if they need it, but to actually designate somebody who may be an ambassador or someone that you can put out that folks can proactively reach out to.
So again, shifting from a compliance culture, sure, if you ask, we'll do it, to one that says, "Hey, are there accommodations you need around neurodiversity? And if there are, here's the pathway for that." That's huge, and really the implementation is the same. You'll still make the accommodation. It's all about the front end and how you make it visible, easy, and begin to take away the stigma around it, right?
Catherine Galli: So for association leaders who are wanting to begin this journey, I like that you're starting to mention the skills transferability of leaders are always having to learn new things, and they're always having to apply new things. Just to give our listeners some examples, what are a few simple [00:12:00] high-impact changes that event planners can make to create more neuroinclusive environments?
Wendy-Jo Toyama: So I just attended a large 11,000-person meeting. I was there all day. I do not identify as neurodivergent, and yet when I got home, I'm a little introverted. When I got home, I was just done. And so I know some meetings, ours included, are trying to create a quiet place, a space where people during the meeting can go and take a break, and it's quiet.
It's away from the hubbub. It's created with intention though, not just, "Here's a room." So I think that's one, one thing I would say I am beginning to see implemented at meetings, and I think it's very good. 
Megan Henshall: I couldn't agree more about resilient spaces. I'll give you a funny anecdote. We were at a large culture festival in Texas.
I'll let you do with that what you will. And they had resilient spaces, and my [00:13:00] partner in this work, Rachel Lowenstein, and I walked in just to check it out. We're, like, so curious, and it was, like, an inflatable, almost a kids' bounce house in- Oh. ... its room. And so you had the fan going, which is, like- Oh my God, immediate sensory nightmare. The touch of the rubber thing. It was just so not it. So I think there's a lot of, for resilient spaces, I think there's a lot of mental mapping we've done that they need to be juvenile and they're for children, but adults need these spaces in many ways more than kids do.
Because we, we don't take care of ourselves, and we largely just, like, we don't take care of each other as much as we should, and that was just a really funny example of, ooh, maybe not the gr- the best way. Yeah. It was a funny moment. I also think, like, there's this- Mindset in the event industry and experience design industry at large, that the flashier, the louder activation.
Megan Henshall: [00:14:00] The brighter, the more colorful this thing is, the more you're gonna capture and keep people's attention. And like we know based on neuroscience, that is not at all true. Where you have high highs, you need low lows. People can't sustain high energy all day. They actually can't sustain attention. We have-- The human attention span is actually now less than a goldfish.
Thank you, social media. 
Catherine Galli: Yeah. 
Megan Henshall: So, like we really need to give people breaks. We need to facilitate transitions and give them permission and alibis to go and process and regulate and restore, and sometimes that can be as simple as just giving longer breaks. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Longer, yeah. 
Megan Henshall: They can find their own way. I think giving intentionally designed spaces is really beautiful.
Understanding budget constraints and things, like just give them more time to process between things. And think about how we attenuate and amplify at the right time. If you wanna do the [00:15:00] loud music and the flashing lights, like cool, choose your moment for that and know that you also need to provide an alternative, a counterpoint to that at another point in time, because people need both.
If you want the most out of them, you need to make sure that you're supporting how their brain works. 
Catherine Galli: And that's not even a neurodivergent challenge. That's just a people challenge. I remember going to a three-day conference that was basically a rave for three straight days. Um, leaving and being very overwhelmed.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. And that speaks to universal design, right? The idea that a lot of times these considerations that get put in place for one purpose end up benefiting everybody. So yeah, better meeting overall. 
Megan Henshall: I planned for conferences for decades, and I would come home from running an event, and I would go non-verbal, and I would be in bed for two days.
And at the time, I thought, I'm just exhausted. No, I was actually having a full- 
 
Megan Henshall: Yeah ...autistic shutdown, [00:16:00] and now I know how to moderate. But there's a lot of things that I go to because I have to for work, or I need to be there to speak, and they're really untenable for me and a lot of people 
Catherine Galli: So you mentioned some of the things that are supportive in events for being able to be more accessible, not just for neurodivergent individuals, but for everyone.
What are some of the ways that associations can better support their neurodivergent members, whether that's volunteering, leadership roles, or even committee participation? 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: We recently had a strategic planning session, and I really appreciated our consultant who we brought in to facilitate that because she did very thoughtful things around this.
It would be typical that they might throw out a question to a group, talk about how X is affecting the field. But she also included, "I want everybody to think for the next two minutes. Let's not talk. [00:17:00] Let's just think. Take out a piece of paper and write down how the external environment is affecting your association."
And I really appreciated that. It gave folks who are not think talkers the chance to gather their thoughts. I think there's little things like that we can do. I think that that was really helpful for a group that I'm sure included neurodivergent folks. 
Megan Henshall: I think one of the reasons I loved the approach to this project we did with ASAE and MPI is it started with curiosity and listening, and I really believe- 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yes
Megan Henshall: Curiosity is a dying human practice because now we can Gemini or ChatGPT anything, and we don't talk to one another anymore. And I think any organization that really wants to get this right, they have to start with listening and a really deep spirit of curiosity to understand the [00:18:00] experience of the people that ultimately they serve or, or building for or designing for.
And I'm always really proud to be a part of a project that-- or a journey that starts that way. So I think it's as simple as asking people on your team, "How do you best like to see, receive information? What is your communication style, and how can I accommodate the ways that you learn or you process information?"
Cool. Tell me a little bit about your chronotype. What are the parts of your day where you're peak creative, and how can we lean into that? I think this idea of job crafting and things in the future, learning strengths-based work and, and just building together, collaboration is gonna be more important than ever in a post-AI world.
And curiosity is not something that AI can replace. Bravery to ask the question is not something that AI can ever [00:19:00] replace. And so these are the human things. This is very human work, right? These are the human things that we need to recultivate, and guess what? They're free, and they're simple. So I, I really do think that's the best first step for anyone who wants to get into this work.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: So interesting to hear you talk about it, Meg, because at the organization I'm at, the American Epilepsy Society, our members are really curious, no surprise. And so we bring a lot of curiosity into our association and into our work. We also talk about neurodivergence at the board table as well as with staff.
And I think, again, normalizing it, bringing curiosity helps us think about how to curate and design a meeting or a day in a way that takes that into account and doesn't make it something that's odd or stigmatized or negative. 
Megan Henshall: Yeah. We're not robots, right? We all have different needs, and it's so important.
And once you throw it out there, people are like, "Oh." 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. 
Megan Henshall: And it creates such rich conversation. It's a beautiful thing. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. There's no IEP for adulthood. 
Megan Henshall: 100. Don't I know [00:20:00] it. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. So we have to figure out how we carry on that, creating an environment where everyone can bring their best self. 
Catherine Galli: That's wonderful.
And even just framing it within curiosity takes away some of the fear for people who are trying to jump into this space to say that, "Okay, I'm going to get it wrong, but I want to learn, and I can learn with the people that I work with and the people that I serve together." That's wonderful. So we've talked about this idea of stepping into starting these practices.
I like that the research kind of sets a baseline for neuroinclusive practice and associations. Going off of that, what guidance would you offer to leaders to measure and improve neuroinclusion in their organizations? 
Megan Henshall: I can jump in. I think when you're doing, again, very deeply human work like neuroinformed design and neuroinclusive practice, I think [00:21:00] understanding sentiment is one of the most important things, because again, this isn't data on a spreadsheet.
This is lived experience, and this is like human beings' everyday lives. And so I think, again, creating a really robust feedback channel that is open and transparent is critical for this sort of work. As you implement, you ask, "How did that land? How did that feel? Was that helpful? How could it be more helpful?"
And I know we're all survey fatigued, but it doesn't have to be a survey, right? It can be an individual conversation. It can be observational audit, right? Just to see how people are engaging with the thing that you tried. We've done this a multitude of ways in the new project. At one point, we brought in behavioral and organizational scientists, and they did an observational audit and helped us iterate and improve.
So I think there are a lot of different ways that you can do this that aren't as potentially annoying or invasive as a survey. [00:22:00] But the feedback loop, people seeing you responding to their feedback and then coming back to them is, it's just so kind, and it's just one of the most impactful things that you can do.
It is very hard to boil this down to two KPIs, but once you have that feedback loop in place, the story writes itself, and then I think you can plug out certain data points or positive or negative side effects of various interventions, so you can build from there. But that feedback channel is really important.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: I love your answer because it is very personal and actionable. I will also say, I do think you could use proxies, right? So I do think that ideally, if you are being inclusive of all your employees and neuro inclusive, you might see employee engagement scores go up. You might see your employee retention go up.
You might see your member retention or your net promoter score go up. [00:23:00] So I think there are other proxies you can look at. You may not be able to draw a straight line, and of course, these kinds of efforts take time. So that's why I like augmenting proxies with what you're talking about. I love the experience audit idea.
I also think there are questions we can ask. Does everyone feel like they belong? Do you feel like you can express your opinion? Do you feel heard? I think there are questions that sometimes feel like soft questions, but they really aren't anymore, right? We're learning that what leaders need is shifting and evolving, and these are essential skills.
But there are qu- there are questions you could incorporate into something else you're doing, right? To your point, Meg, there's... People are tired of surveys, but so I think figuring out what you're currently doing and how you can just tweak it a little to get a little information could be helpful. 
Megan Henshall: Yeah.
I'll give a really tangible example. Based on feedback and sentiment, we heard we're partnering with an organization, we heard we need [00:24:00] something intentional and designed to lower stress and anxiety in this particular environment. And so we created an intervention based on the feedback, we implemented it, and then we actually tracked some biometric data.
Oh. We had a user experience team come in and conduct interviews, and started with feedback, did this intervention, and actually ended up with this incredible data around how this intervention had lowered stress and anxiety rates by 60%. 
Megan Henshall: Uh ... so amazing. The teams felt more creative post-intervention, and they actually felt more productive for up to four hours afterwards.
And so it was really interesting. We didn't know exactly what we would learn, but we knew we were solving a real problem that we had heard from the people we cared about. And so this is just a very tangible example of how that can manifest. You don't always know exactly what KPI you're gonna end up with, but if you're doing the right thing with the right intention, you'll prove yourself right with the [00:25:00] data.
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Right. And here's what I heard. I didn't hear, "Oh my gosh, I have to bring in a behavioral health scientist to measure this." What I heard is, "Oh, she listened to her audience, made changes, and it was effective." That's the part of your answer that I heard that feels very implementable, right? Because, again, we don't wanna not do it because I can't have someone come in and measure it.
I don't have the money to do that, so I'm not- Right ... gonna do it at all. You can still do it, and guess what? You'll still get a result even if you're not measuring it. 
Megan Henshall: Yeah. I think sometimes we get so hamstrung. We're in a prison of date, of data necessity. I love it. And we... There's this really great saying, "The same hammer can build a cathedral or a prison," and I think a lot of times we wield data that way.
Yeah. Boxed ourselves in. Just do something 'cause you know it's the right thing to do and it's needed, and I guarantee you the data will come. Yeah. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: It's incredible. It's like being at the conference the other day, and I didn't have my watch on, so I couldn't count my steps. I'm like, "Oh my gosh." You know?
Yeah, but I guess I'm still taking [00:26:00] them all, so it still counts whether or not I measured it. 
Megan Henshall: Uh, I have the Oura Ring, and sometimes it's a very self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm like, "Oh, I'm not well today."
Catherine Galli: So then for organizations considering getting involved or sponsoring this type of research, what's the real value both for the organization and the broader community?
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Ultimately, creating a sense of belonging is going to be beneficial on so many different fronts, from including all voices, different voices, people wanting to be a part of your association, working or as members. So many different benefits. 
Megan Henshall: Yeah. As someone who regularly says that my autistic special interest is people, I'm often completely befuddled by this mindset of, "We wanna sell you something.
We wanna get something from you, yet [00:27:00] we're not gonna take the time to understand you and meet you where you are." Yeah. And I think we talk about neuroinclusion as, and it's not just the right thing to do, it's also a strategic imperative. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. 
Megan Henshall: There was a really interesting study that came out last year from our friends at understood.org.
Like 52% of Gen Z, decent sample size, identify as neurodivergent. 
Catherine Galli: Sure. 
Megan Henshall: And so it's just really interesting to think there's this whole swath of people that most organizations know very little about, not only how to support them and accommodate them, but also how to get the most out of them, how to help them meet their potential, or how to sell them something even, right?
And so I think it's really important that when you're designing or you're looking to target people, that you do everything you can to understand them, because that's gonna help you get the messaging right. That's gonna help you create the right design interventions, and ultimately, it creates a really virtuous cycle, right?
I understand you, I do the right thing for you to give [00:28:00] back. It creates reciprocity, and it's not as extractive. So I, I just think it's a really important part of business, like good business practice. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: It's essential. 
Catherine Galli: Yeah. I love that, and I love hearing just this idea that, one, it's about being a good steward of resources and being a good steward of people, treating people with respect and kindness, and inviting them to engage on all these different levels.
But also just a strategic imperative- It is ... that the future of work demands that associations or really any organization be prepared for these changes that are happening, and be able to work with future staff and future members who may identify as neurodivergent. So I really like that this research is coming in now because I think it's a great place to spark those conversations and to prepare associations for a future like that, and for people right now who are navigating these different events and [00:29:00] leadership positions, committee participation, and wanting to show up as their best selves.
Mm. And then I had a question about- We talked about the research, we talked about ways to make events a little bit more inviting. That first step can be really challenging. If an association wanted to get started with neuroinclusion today but didn't know where to begin, what's the first step you recommend they take?
Wendy-Jo Toyama: I wouldn't boil the ocean. And I think if you haven't stated an intention, I think that's a place to start. But you do need to follow it with action. You don't wanna be performative in this space. I think one of the things that you could do is begin a conversation with your staff about this. You may not know who identifies as neurodivergent, and if somebody steps [00:30:00] forward, then that might be someone you could co-create with.
So that might be a way to start by bringing it into the room, having the conversation, having by us, for us kind of discussion, and identifying something that would be meaningful and doable and sustainable. 
Megan Henshall: I love that answer. Yeah, look around where you are and invite neurodivergent people. They're there.
They are. Invite them to the process. 
Catherine Galli: Yeah. 
Megan Henshall: So I said earlier, start with listening. I think listening to people in your own organization is a beautiful way to get started there. I will counter, so here's what not to do. Oh, 
Catherine Galli: yeah. 
Megan Henshall: Do not hire a neurodivergent speaker, especially if you're not compensating them fairly.
Have them come talk about their lived experience, and then do nothing afterwards. That is so icky. I see it happening all the time, and people are like, "We did it. We checked the box. We educated people." A 30-minute keynote at a conference where someone is talking about their [00:31:00] disability is not it. Don't do that.
But I, I actually don't think there's any wrong way to start as long as you're doing it from- Start ... an honest, honest place and you're curious. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. 
Catherine Galli: Yeah. Love that. And is there anything else you want our listeners to know about enhancing neuro inclusion in their practices and associations? 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: One of the things we haven't talked about that I do wanna mention is intersectionality.
And I do think that if you are someone who identifies as a person of color or female in a male environment, male in a female environment, you might closet your neurodivergence. And so again, I think it's important for leaders to understand that this is happening. That when you say, "I don't have anyone neurodivergent on my staff," you probably do.
They are probably, there's probably intersectionality happening there, and they don't wanna be an Asian woman and neurodivergent. [00:32:00] So I think that's really important to be aware of. And again, I think what Meg's been talking about, being curious and listening, I think those are some of the ways that you can try to tease this out.
But it's a real- anxiety, stressful-producing situation to be in as an individual if you feel you have to hide part of who you are because, oh gosh, I have this other stuff going on. So I, I just think it's important that people are aware of that. I'm not actually sure what to tell you to do about that, but be aware of it and continue to be curious and listen.
Megan Henshall: Yeah. Less than 30%, I think it's 27% is the latest stat, of people disclose that they're neurodivergent at work or in mixed spaces, right, where they don't have really trusted people around. And a lot of people are undiagnosed. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Sure. 
Megan Henshall: They need this work, and they just don't know they need it. So yeah, I just- I'll give a quick plug.
We have free resources on The Neu Project website. It's just The Neu Project, N-E-U project.com. There [00:33:00] are free resources there specifically for event planners because we know events are one of the most stressful things for neurodivergent people. A lot of them don't go, and so they're missing out on professional opportunities and networking opportunities that matter to them, and their careers, and their growth, and their ability to contribute.
Go check that out. We'll- those will always be free. And I think, while I can't speak for Wendy-Jo, but if you have questions and you just wanna unpack things with a safe person, I'm always open. So you can contact the team at The Neu Project through the website. And yeah, stay curious. 
Wendy-Jo Toyama: Yeah. And  the resource with MPI and ASAE has practical actions in it.
It has links to articles in it, and I believe toolkits will be coming out as well. Again, I think now that you've heard about neuroinclusion and neurodiversity, you're probably gonna find a number of places you can turn. It wasn't on your radar screen maybe before, but now it is. So there are [00:34:00] resources out 
Catherine Galli: there.
That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Meg and Wendy-Jo. Thanks to everybody listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents. Join us each month to explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US, and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And for more information on topics impacting the association space, visit Associations Now online at associationsnow.com.

The Impact of Second-Tier Destinations on Association Meetings and Events

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, guest host Sharon Pare of HighRoad Solutions is joined by Stephanie Alexander-Priakos, director of meetings and conferences at Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; Myha Gallagher, vice president of brand at Future Partners; and Jill Stone, site selection manager with HelmsBriscoe, for a conversation about the evolving meetings and events landscape and the growing appeal of second-tier destinations like St. Pete-Clearwater, Florida. Drawing on industry research and firsthand planning experience, the guests discuss how planners are increasingly prioritizing affordability, accessibility, safety, and unique experiences when selecting destinations, while also navigating rising costs, convention center fatigue, and growing political considerations tied to location decisions. The conversation also explores emerging trends shaping the future of meetings, including the rise of “bleisure” travel, the importance of walkability and outdoor gathering spaces, and how AI is beginning to influence sourcing and attendee personalization. Alexander-Priakos highlights what continues to drive interest in St. Pete-Clearwater, from its award-winning beaches and walkable downtown to expanding meeting infrastructure, wellness-focused properties, and cultural attractions such as the Dalí and Chihuly museums. The episode also examines the role destination organizations play in supporting planners through site visits, logistics, and creating memorable attendee experiences that extend beyond the convention center.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/dQzqtjc_2N0
 
This episode is sponsored by Visit St. Pete-Clearwater.
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Sharon Pare: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Series, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Sharon Pare, partnerships director at High Road, a HubSpot agency, and your host of this series throughout the year. This episode is sponsored by Visit St. Pete-Clearwater. 
Today, I'm joined by three fantastic guests. First, I wanna introduce Myha Gallagher, vice president of brand at Future Partners, where she helps bring meeting and travel industry research to life through data-driven storytelling and insights. Stephanie Alexander-Priakos, director of meetings and conferences at Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, who's passionate about showcasing the destination's award-winning beaches, culture, hospitality, and group experiences. And Jill Stone, site selection manager with HelmsBriscoe
 
 and co-host of the In the [00:01:00] Genes podcast, who brings more than 35 years of experience helping planners create successful meetings and events throughout the world.
Today, we're talking about trends shaping the meetings and events industries, meeting and events industry, and why more planners and associations are looking beyond traditional convention destinations toward places like St. Pete-Clearwater. So I'm gonna put a little disclaimer here, 'cause as a Florida girl born and raised, and I think I mentioned this to you ladies before, I have to say it's been really fun watching the west coast of Florida evolve. 20-plus years ago. I don't wanna date myself here, but in college a lot of us on the east side of Central Florida, we just didn't head west all that often. And now here in the 2020s, 2026, I think St. Pete-Clearwater has become one of the most talked about destinations, right? Meetings, events, food, maybe sports, and maybe just the overall experience.
So I'm really excited to dig into all of this today. So Myha, I really wanna kick off your work [00:02:00] with the research, because I think it will frame this entire conversation. So Future Partners, which I know you're very heavily involved with that survey, every year you do a survey of meeting planners to understand the trends that are impacting the meetings industry.
So what would you say are some of the top emerging trends as it relates to St. PeteyClearwater? 
Myha Gallagher : Yeah, I'm happy to share that, Sharon. Thank you so much for having us on. The first and probably the biggest trend that we see coming out of our latest survey is the rise in interest among meeting planners in sourcing second-tier destinations.
In fact, nearly 81% of planners that we surveyed agreed that second-tier destinations are growing in popularity for events, and this is really being driven by the demand for new experiences, a perception that second-tier cities are much safer than first-tier cities, and then cost savings in sourcing smaller destinations as well.
And then we're also hearing from planners that their attendees are having [00:03:00] convention center fatigue. Just being stuck in the four concrete walls of a convention center can really drain your energy, and so planners are sharing with us that they are looking for more differentiated experiences and, of course, beautiful scenery to keep their attendees engaged and energized.
And then lastly, unfortunately, there's been a considerable rise in agreement among planners that politics are having an effect on the destinations that they're sourcing. In fact, 61% of planners said they have had to reconsider a destination due to controversial issues in the past 12 months alone. And in subsequent conversations with planners, they've shared with us that, of course, they're planning events for large groups, many diverse attendees, and they wanna make sure that the destinations that they select will be safe and welcoming for their groups.
And this is an area where St. Pete Clearwater has done a fantastic job crafting each message and ad campaign to [00:04:00] really showcase how welcoming a destination they are. 
Sharon Pare: So I wanted to dig in a little bit more. You mentioned this convention center fatigue, this attendee fatigue, right? And like you said, a lot of the attendees say don't wanna be within that traditional sense in those four walls of the convention center now, right?
And perhaps we're gonna dig into this a little bit more in the conversation, but can you touch on that a little bit about are planners now looking for destinations where the city itself becomes part of the entire event experience? 
Myha Gallagher : Oh, absolutely. I think the traditional sense of conventions and convention centers, especially with younger attendees coming into the mix now with Gen Z, planners are really looking for ways to engage that younger audience, and we know there are different tools that need to be used to activate our younger convention attendees.
And one tactic is definitely sourcing more unique spaces, making sure you're in a really [00:05:00] beautiful environment to keep the energy up. And that's not to say convention centers are going away at all. They serve a very specific and vital part of the meetings industry. But for planners who are hosting smaller groups, not citywides, they are definitely looking towards more unconventional and more unique spaces to host their events.
Sharon Pare: And to add to that, what right now are planners ... And don't worry, Jill, I'll be getting to you soon. But what are they asking for that maybe three or four years ago they weren't asking for? Is there anything different? Is there a shift that you've seen? 
Myha Gallagher : Yeah. The top trend around that, I think it comes as no surprise to anyone in the room, is the use of AI.
Many planners are using AI to help with their sourcing decisions, and they're also thinking about ways that AI can be integrated into the meeting environment to [00:06:00] personalize meeting agendas for their attendees. And like every other industry, AI is making its impact, and, and it'll be interesting to see how planners continue to leverage the tool to evolve their meetings.
Sharon Pare: I'm gonna bring it over to Jill. And it's really interesting, Miha, to hear about the research side of things because again, I think it's really reshaping how the planners are thinking about some of these things today, and how they're planning their meetings. So Jill, after decades, I don't wanna say many, but after decades working directly, well, it just shows your expertise and your wisdom around really knowing your stuff.
But after working with these directors and planners and clients after all this time, are you seeing those shifts play out in real time? And maybe you can tell us about a recent experience you had with Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, and tell us a little bit more about that. 
Jill Stone: Sure. Miya took most of my answers, I gotta say.
But I got a few left I think that maybe I can share. She's right. Clients are looking for [00:07:00] lots of different things. Mainly, there's, the safety issue's huge. Politics is huge unfortunately. And I've had clients leave a particular hotel or destination, or just totally discount it altogether because of that.
And then there's other things that happen, laws that are passed, et cetera, that maybe they can't either agree with or get on board with. But yes, I just had a client at the Wyndham Clearwater Beach, and St. Pete was great. They offer free things for clients, and I'm sure Stephanie's gonna get into all the things that they offer and the things that they can do.
But they also help when I'm looking for a destination, and maybe I have forgotten one. They're quick to tell me, "Hey, look at this one, too." And- What I found, especially when I interviewed Stephanie for our podcast, is that they have some great hotels and resorts of all various sizes. So if a client has a large size meeting, let's say 4- or 500 people, that can be done, but also some of the smaller meetings can be at some of the more boutique style hotels or those [00:08:00] kinds of things.
But, and one other thing they're looking for is walkability to things, ease of getting to the destination. Affordability is huge. Second tier destinations like St. Pete/Clearwater are very affordable. And yes, I agree with Miha on the convention center fatigue. If they can get outside to the beach, and more beach, that makes them happy.
And outside venue spaces are key for lunches, breaks, et cetera. So if they can find a meeting space that has an outdoor terrace or a lawn or someplace where they can be outside in a great, warm destination, then they will be signing on the dotted line pretty quickly for that. But also, St. Pete has the
The Renaissance Vinoy is one of my favorite hotels, and it is located in a really cool area, maybe not so much beach, but they've got shops and restaurants and museums and things that are so walkable and people wanna get to and experience. So there's all kinds of things you can experience in their destination.
All of it, [00:09:00] actually. You can have a city experience or you can have more of a beach experience. And a lot of planners are looking for that now. They've got attendees who want, we call it bleisure. They wanna expand and they wanna go someplace they wanna go. And so it's on their bucket list to get to. So those are the kinda things that my clients are looking for.
And another thing that's easy for them is if they are just using one hotel, one contract and one contact makes their whole life a whole lot easier, too. So anything we can do to help the planners find what they want with ease and make it easier for them, that's my job to do, and I try to do that. Try to do that every day.
Sharon Pare: It sounds like Visit St. Pete-Clearwater definitely gets you outside of those four walls because it has so much to offer. You mentioned having the boutique hotels, obviously, and I know this too, some of the most beautiful beaches. Bleisure, this is my first time ever hearing of business and leisure just put into one, right?
What are some of your clients prioritizing the most right now when they're selecting destinations? I know you talked about [00:10:00] walkability and some of the other things. Is there anything else that the clients or your clients are really looking for, too? 
Jill Stone: With the way the economic things are happening right now, affordability is one of the key things.
Which it does, second tier destinations do tend to be more affordable. It's easy to get into their airports, which are smaller, so their attendees don't feel like they're lost in a huge Airport, and at, and typically where they're going is very close to the airport. No one wants to be hours and hours away from the airport.
So those destinations tend to have ... In St. Pete, I know, I know Stephanie will talk about all those things too, but they do have all those things. You, depending on where you wanna be in their area, you're very close to things. And yes, walkability. The Wyndham, for example, there was a pier and lots of restaurants just within walking distance.
And so it was perfect for both. They got both experiences, the beach, and a little bit of the city experience too. So for my client, that was very much ... They're, the, and they're, the, and they [00:11:00] also we have to think about not only do the attendees, because they're s- pretty much in meeting rooms all day, their spouses wanna come and bring their kids sometimes.
And so this was perfect destination for that, and the kids got to be outside flashing around and, uh, running around in the sand. 
Sharon Pare: Jill, I, I think that's such a good setup for Stephanie, 'cause now we've talked about what the planners are looking for. And Stephanie, I, you're from the Visit St. Pete-Clearwater side.
So I wanna talk about really what makes the destination work so well for groups. Why is St. Pete-Clearwater a great place to have a meeting or conference? 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: First of all, m- going from what Jill had said over here, we do have award-winning beaches. That's what we're famous for with Clearwater Beach and St.
Pete Beach. They've had accolades. I've lived here 19 years now, and they've been having accolades of the best beaches in America for as long as I've been here, and I think it's an awful lot longer than that too. But the weather. This is why I moved here. [00:12:00] Coming from the UK where it rains a lot, it's very gray, it's windy.
I'd had enough of it. I needed some blue sky and sunshine. And I've, I've been lucky that I've been in this industry all of my life as well, and I must have traveled to over 80 different countries now, and I've lived in six different countries. And there is nowhere else in the world that I would rather live and work than St.
Pete-Clearwater. For me, it has everything that I can possibly want, and I don't think I'm alone because we get a lot of meetings that are held over in this destination. One of course, like you said, because of the weather. We actually hold a Guinness World Record, St. Pete does, and it is for the most consecutive days of sunshine in the world at 768 consecutive days of sunshine.
We have all year round great weather. I love it. The groups are really busy in January and February when it's really [00:13:00] cold and snowy up in Chicago or Boston or Cleveland. So we get a lot of people coming down at that time of year just to get a break from the cold weather too But our hotels are so different.
Each and every one has its own unique selling point. Everything from downtown St. Petersburg, which really has that vibrant arts and culinary feel to it. We have four restaurants in downtown St. Pete that are in the Michelin Guide. Every single restaurant in downtown St. Pete except two is independently owned and operated as well.
Very proud of that. And like Jill said, everything is walking distance. I will make one correction on the Vinoy, though. It's no longer The Renaissance. It is the Vinoy Marriott Autograph Collection. Oh, sorry about that. That's okay. And the Vinoy is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. They went through a major renovation.
The hotel is just... It's fabulous. Very Spanish style. [00:14:00] Lot of history to it. They have great meeting space. Their largest meeting room is 12,000 square feet, and they have a total of 35,400. So it's a great option in downtown St. Pete. And like Jill said, everything's walkable. It really is. And they have a marina right opposite the hotel, so you have the choice of doing your deep sea fishing charters.
Go and see some dolphins. It's just about guaranteed every time you go on the water you're gonna see some dolphins. We get a lot of people that asking for natural light in their meetings now. When you'd mentioned- Yes, that's so important ... yep, and Mihad mentioned this convention, they, they don't want to be in those four walls where they don't know what's going on outside.
Sharon Pare: Or those basements sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes you end up in, in a cave, and you haven't seen the light of day for 72 hours, and then by the time you get out of it, it's dark, right? Yeah. 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: Yep. So, okay. Right. That's good to know. Yeah, so a lot of hotels with, with meeting space, space with [00:15:00] natural light. We have up and down the beaches, too, and in downtown St.
Pete. And I think that's really important, but our hotels are smart because they do have the option to bring down those blinds if they do need to st- If people are looking outside and watching the dolphins too much in the middle of the meeting, we do have options. We can fix that, so it's all good. That sounds sad- I would be-
but, you know, that makes sense. Go ahead, Jill.
Jill Stone: I would be watching the dolphins. That would be a whole... probably more fun than whatever's on the screen. But no, I like that idea, too. And you can see outside when you want to. And like I said, they like to get outside, so if there's a way to do that, too, they're happy there.
And I know there's... You, Stephanie, you have a lot of hotels with that capability. A lot of people 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: are bringing in the wellness tourism into their meetings as well. The wellness... We've got three properties that are recognized by the Wellness Tourism Association, which is The Vinoy. We also have the Don CeSar on St.
Pete Beach and the JW Marriott on Clearwater Beach. So we're seeing that groups are looking for different experiences as well, and [00:16:00] incorporating that wellness into their agenda.
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Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: I want to go back to the Don CeSar Hotel, which is another iconic property that we have on St. Pete Beach. [00:17:00] They are 98 years old, and are gonna be celebrating their 100th anniversary soon. Mm. And both properties have really great history to it, because both of them were actually used as hospitals during World War II, and they've been renovated, and they just look amazing.
They look fantastic. The Don CeSar just opened a brand-new ballroom with 7,400 square feet, so they have some really good meeting space, too. Our newest hotel is the Opal Sol, part of the Opal Collection. That's up in Clearwater Beach. Very nice. As they have a connecting walkway across the street to their sister property, the Opal Sands Hotel.
So we got really excited because c- the two- Mm-hmm ... properties, it's almost 500 guest rooms and 80,000 square feet of meeting space. So even though we are a tier two destination, we still can host some of those larger groups.
Sharon Pare: I was just about to ask that, so thank you for segueing yourself into that. Okay, good to know.
Okay. 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: Yeah. So again, like we said, between the Opal [00:18:00] Sol and Opal Sands, up to 500 guest rooms. TradeWinds is our largest hotel on St. Pete Beach with 768 guest rooms. They can also be very creative because they can put tents on the beach, too, as does the Sheraton Sand Key up in Clearwater Beach. And TradeWinds actually held an event over there with 4,000 people.
It's rare that we do something like that, but the ca- capabilities are there. I think the maximum that Sheraton Sand Key has done has been about 1,200 utilizing those tents out on the beach. And that's the wonderful thing about this destination, is that they can utilize different things, meeting all day and then go have their reception or their dinner on the beach with their toes in the sand and a drink in their hand, perhaps.
And also, one of the other things that a lot of the groups seem to really enjoy in our destination is that they get the hotels to themselves. So I- I've heard the phrase they like to be a big [00:19:00] fish in a little pond So rather than being in one of those hotels that may have five, six, seven plus meetings going on at the same time, they literally have the whole hotel to themselves.
And that's one thing that they really enjoy doing. And then we're also renowned for the different things that we have available in our destination. So we do a lot of, uh, pre/post room nights for the groups because of that bleisure like Jill was talking about. They do like to stay at the end of their conference or at the beginning of the conference.
They'll have their family with them or just wanna relax for the weekend after the conference has finished. And we have different places like Tarpon Springs is our Greek sponge docks, and that actually is known for the world's largest Epiphany celebration. And they go out and they will dive for the sponges, which are natural.
And oh my God, the food is amazing. It really is . We love our food over here, too. And then we've got Dunedin, which is our little [00:20:00] Scottish village over there, and every April they host the Highland Games. We just had the Valspar tournament up at Innisbrook, which is another r- resort of ours, and we had golfers like Jordan Spieth, Brooks Koepka, and Justin Thomas that were playing there.
We have had Tiger Woods play there as well. We just closed up our Sugar Sand Festival on Clearwater Beach. That's 17 days of celebrating Clearwater Beach's most natural assets, the sugar sand and the sunsets. And there was over 1,000 tons of sand and 24,000 square feet of art exhibits. We also just had our Firestone Grand Prix in Downtown St.
Petersburg. A little bit like Monaco, they close off the streets of Downtown St. Pete and have the race over there. They literally close down the streets and they build that racetrack in Downtown St. Pete. It goes past the Dali Museum. We did actually get 1.6 million viewers at the Firestone Grand Prix. [00:21:00] So yeah, we have some really cool things that go on down here, and I'm gonna just segue into the Dali Museum because that's one of, one of the other things that we are famous for.
We have nine museums in Downtown St. Pete, including the Dali Museum, and Salvador Dali chose Downtown St. Petersburg for the only museum that he has outside of Spain. We also have the Chihuly Museum. Chihuly Museum is the only one outside of Seattle, which is where Dale Chihuly lives. And if you're not familiar with the Chihuly Museum, if you've ever been to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, it's where all the glass art is just everywhere.
Beautiful, too. Yes, these are really good. And we have 600 art murals in Downtown St. Pete right now. It's very much a vibrant, just an amazing destination. But you can't beat the beaches, like I said. So you have so many different choices of options, places that you can be I've done site tours with so many clients, and the more I get to know them and feel [00:22:00] what they're looking for, I'm gonna be, "Okay, downtown St.
Pete is gonna be for you, St. Pete Beach is gonna be for you, or Clearwater Beach is going to be for you." And that's another thing that we do at Visit St. Pete Clearwater. We live here. We know our destination, so we can help planners like Jill, if she's not quite sure what's gonna be the right fit, we can make recommendations for them.
We really can put the two things together. We can help our meeting planners as well find offsite venues. We've got some great offsite venues from sunset dinner cruises. We have some really cool boats that we can take up to 350 people for a dinner cruise right now at Starlight Cruises. We just had St.
Pete Athletic Club opened up, and that is pickleball. But their meeting space, believe it or not, is phenomenal. They literally have 18,000 square feet of meeting space in a pickleball venue. So again, we've got restaurants that we can do offsite venues. Clearwater [00:23:00] Marine Aquarium, oh my goodness me. They call it the Wall of Wonder because you can actually place your tables and your chairs in this particular area, and then you havethe whole glass aquarium where you can see the dolphins swimming past while you're having entertainment, while you're having, again, food and beverage for your group.
So we have some very cool venues. We can help the planners select everything like that. We highly encourage site visits for everybody. We want them to come down and see the destination. Our planners know their clients, and we know the destination, so you put the two together and it's a perfect combination.
And we will assist. We will arrange private transportation from the airport for the clients. We arrange all the accommodations, and we arrange the whole itinerary. And one of our amazing team members will literally take your client from A to B to C to D and be with them for the whole time and answer any questions that they may have.
And then like Jill was [00:24:00] talking about as well, we do have a lot of complimentary services available. One of the things that we have is a welcome sign at Tampa International Airport, so it can be "Welcome such and such group." And that's gonna be the first thing that they see when they arrive into our destination.
And there are 80 direct nonstop flights into Tampa within the domestic United States, and there's 20 direct nonstop international flights. So Tampa, again, a really easy airport to fly into. Voted the number two airport in the United States. We're very proud of that too. And you are literally 25, 35 minutes to get from the airport to the beaches.
And just coming from a couple of conferences myself in Los Angeles and San Diego, boy, that traffic's bad. You're not wrong. So it's a lot easier and a lot faster to get to our beaches, that's for sure. And then the other thing we do with the complimentary services, we have a lot of media and videos available.
We even send [00:25:00] out postcards if people want to go to the clients saying, "Save the date. Can't wait to see you in Clearwater. Can't wait to see you in St. Petersburg." Not many people get nice things in the mail anymore, but you can get a really great picture of the St. Pete or the beaches in our destination.
And we do have a few incentives available. So if it helps secure the group in our destination, reach out. That's what we're here for. We want our hotels to secure the business. We're there to help both the hotels and the planners. So anything that we can do, we're here for you. 
Sharon Pare: That's awesome, Stephanie. So thank you so much for that.
I wanted to shift over to a little fun section. A few things I wanted to ask about St. Pete Clearwater, and basically give our listeners a cheat sheet for some of the things they should do. Stephanie, you gave us a wealth of knowledge around the things to see, the Guinness Book of World Records, the new hotels.
Even Jill didn't know about one, and you gave her the news today, right? You heard it here [00:26:00] today. So Jill and Mihai, I want you guys to participate as well, but I wanna have a little bit of a fun time with this. And Stephanie, I know you've been in St. Pete Clearwater for about 19 years, so you might be our expert on this, but I'd love Jill and Mihai's take as well.
So beaches, if you all had to pick one, one at a time, which one would you go to? I- 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: I'm gonna jump in real quick over here. Like I said, I've been to so many different countries, and this is absolutely my favorite because of the beautiful white pure sand that we have. We have 35 miles of it, so I can't pick exactly which part.
You've gotta pick one, though, Stephanie. Gotta pick one. We g- we need to see a cheat sheet. 35 miles of beaches from St. Pete to Clearwater. How's that? Okay. All right. Jill, what about you?
Jill Stone: I like the Gulf areas of Florida 'cause their sand is beautiful. When I actually did take a few minutes last year with my client being at the Wyndham Clearwater, I had five minutes.
Yeah, and it was beautiful. And so I gotta say [00:27:00] Clearwater. It really does- That's Clearwater Beach ... and it's not painful to walk on- Right ... when you're trying to get to the water. 
Sharon Pare: How about you, Mihai? Your eyes lit up earlier when I said, "What is that one beach?" 
Myha Gallagher : Yes, that one beach absolutely is Clearwater Beach.
I am a California girl, grew up in SoCal. And so I never made my way out to Florida until we started working with St. Pete Clearwater. I went out for a meeting, stepped out onto Clearwater Beach, and I was like, "I get it. This is why everyone loves this place so much." Yeah. The sugar sand, that is such a perfect description for it.
It is ethereal, soft, amazing. Can't wait to go back. 
Sharon Pare: And the sunsets too, right? Everyone forgets, like, y- you can't catch that sunset on the east side of Florida, but just make your way out west, you'll watch a dolphin- jumping through on the, in the water and watching that sunset all at the same time, right?
Okay, next. Rooftop. Is there a rooftop, a hidden gem rooftop that you would recommend? [00:28:00] 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: The Canopy at The Birchwood, Downtown St. Pete. There we go. Start. All right. Canopy at The Birchwood. All right. Meha, how about 
Sharon Pare: you? 
Myha Gallagher : You know, I haven't been on a ton of rooftops in St. Pete/Clearwater also, but someone from the Visit St. Pete team did take me to this speakeasy where you had to walk through... It looked like a laundromat, and then you had to walk behind the laundromat, and you go into this- That's cool ... beautiful speakeasy. I don't remember the name, so if you're listening to this and you wanna go, hit up the Visit St.
Pete/Clearwater team. 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: It's actually called Dirty Laundry, and it's a really cool place because it looks like a laundromat, but they have a secret door that takes you into the speakeasy. So another great place that we have in Downtown St. Pete. 
Sharon Pare: That is very cool. That's why it's a speakeasy. Favorite local coffee shop.
Stephanie, looks like this one's for you. 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: Kahwa. It's K-A-H-W-A. 
Sharon Pare: Beautiful local really tasty coffee. [00:29:00] Okay. Awesome. All right. Famous landmark. Stephanie, I know you mentioned the Dali Museum. If you had to pick a number two, any other famous landmarks that people should be looking at while they're there?
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: Oh my goodness me, you're gonna ask me to pick one. Hang on a second. Just one. Just one. First come to mind. I'm gonna say the pier on St. Petersburg. It's relatively new. It's absolutely stunning. There's so many restaurants over there, just so many different things to do on our pier.
And again, you can hold a meeting there as well. They actually have 10,000 square feet of space at the pier that you're surrounded by water again- Yep ... on the Tampa Bay Area. Stunning. How about you, Jill? The Don 
Jill Stone: CeSar. Mm, you see that- Don CeSar ... pink building and you know where you are. Uh, and I, yeah, I was j- like I said, I was just there last year and as soon as we saw it, I was like, "Oh, I know where we are."
So again, yeah, [00:30:00] my, one of my favorite landmark anyway. Okay. 
Myha Gallagher : Meha? I would say the Chihuly. The glass art pieces are incredible and otherworldly and, like Stephanie said, the only other place to see them is either at the Bellagio or in Seattle. And yeah, it's a can't-miss if you go to St. Pete/-Clearwater. 
Sharon Pare: All right. This one's gonna be a tough one for all of you. Your favorite restaurant. Meha, I'm gonna start with you this time Oh gosh We'll leave Stephanie for last. 
Myha Gallagher : Um, I gotta say, every restaurant I've eaten at in St. Pete/Clearwater has been fantastic. But the most memorable dining experience I had was actually, it was outside of the Sandpearl Hotel.
They had set up those outside tents, and we were dining on this seafood buffet out on the beach, and it was just so incredible. My CEO and I talk about it [00:31:00] all the time because we're big seafood fans, and it was just so special. So any restaurant, and then also dining on seafood on the beach. 
Jill Stone: Okay. Jill? You can't beat the beach and the seafood.
I, uh, actually, the Wyndham's restaurant was really good. I know it sounds crazy to eat in a hotel. But some ... But it was ... They also have a, a patio that is right on the beach. And so we got a chance to do a little bit of both. So I really liked that restaurant. 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: Stephanie? One of my personal favorites is Caretta's on the Gulf, and it is actually inside the Sandpearl Hotel.
But I love their buffets that they do. They do a brunch. They'll do a Thanksgiving. They do a Christmas over there. And the attention to detail and just the standard of their food is superb. 
Sharon Pare: All right. We're about coming up on time. But what I wanted to ... Some final thoughts, right? So if an association planner listening today is considering [00:32:00] trying a secondary market for the first time, what would you want them to know about St. Pete-Clearwater? 
Stephanie Alexander-Priakos: I would just tell them to just come down and see for themselves. Jill, Meha, anything from 
Jill Stone: you two? Stephanie's right. They should see it. They should also really consider that because what they've been spending, maybe in some of the larger cities, they could get so much more in a smaller destination.
So they really should. And again, the beach. Can't beat it. 
Myha Gallagher : I'd say St. Pete/Clearwater is a slice of heaven. It turned a California girl into a Florida lover, and I can't say that there's any harder task than that. Thank you all. 
Sharon Pare: Jill, Meha, Stephanie, this has been such a fun conversation. I appreciate you all joining today and sharing your perspectives.
And honestly, it's really exciting to see St. Pete-Clearwater make a name for itself on the map and become a major player [00:33:00] in the meetings and events space. So thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOWw Presents: Industry Partners Series. Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US, and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts And for more information on topics impacting the association space, visit Associations Now online at associationsnow.com.

From Data to Decisions: Helping Associations Better Understand Members

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, guest host Sharon Pare of HighRoad Solutions sits down with Georgina Donahue, Director of Community Innovation and Strategy at Higher Logic, and Rachel Mace, CAE, Director of IT and Database at the National Pest Management Association, to discuss how associations can better understand members and use that insight to drive smarter strategy. They explain how most organizations have plenty of data but little usable intelligence because systems don’t integrate and staff lack a unified, individual-level view across programs, leading to decisions based on gut instinct and missed warning signs like “silent churners.” The guests distinguish reports from behavioral signals and patterns that predict engagement and renewal, share examples of targeted outreach and pandemic-era webinars boosting recruitment and retention, and discuss using engagement scoring, dashboards, and guidance to act at scale. They recommend auditing where data lives, focusing on high-signal sources, and making incremental improvements rather than chasing perfect data.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/QCQXIDc_cYI
 
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Sharon Pare: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Series, an original podcast from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Sharon Pare, Partnerships Director at Highroad, and your host of this series throughout the year. This episode is sponsored by Higher Logic. 
Today, we're excited to welcome Georgina Donahue, Director of Community Innovation and Strategy at Higher Logic, along with Rachel Mace, CAE, Director of IT and Database at the National Pest Management Association.
Our conversation today is about how associations can better understand their members and turn that insight into smarter strategy. Georgina, Rachel, welcome to the show. 
So I think this is something a lot of associations are quietly dealing with, so why don't we jump in? So let's start with something most associations don't want to say out loud. Most of them are making decisions about their members based on very [00:01:00] little actual insight. Why is that, and how common is it? 
Georgina Donahue: I think that most associations have more data than they've ever had, right? They have data coming in from all over the place. They have their AMS records, their event history. They have a community platform.
They have email opens, right? So they have this huge bulk of data, but the problem is that almost none of it actually talks to each other, so they end up flying blind even though they have this embarrassment of riches, but they can't access it. They don't know which members are thriving and which ones are drifting, which ones are gonna silently churn in a couple months from now.
And the problem actually is not just small organizations who don't have the resources to wrangle the data. It's large, sophisticated tech stacks see this problem as well because the data exists, but it's just really siloed 
Rachel Mace, CAE: Yeah, I would have to echo that. There's a lot of silos. [00:02:00] Almost every time I start a job at an association or even at a vendor that services associations, the first thing we have to deal with is untangle the glut of information that they have, what they want to actually access and use.
And then we also have to talk through, okay, once we decide what we're gonna use, how are we gonna get it there? Integrations remain such a huge problem with most associations. We find that our data lives in completely separate places, and that data doesn't pipe into new places very easily. So that's been a big issue, and it's not the association staff's fault.
We are not integration engineers. We are not high-level data scientists. We came here to work in the nonprofit industry and serve our members. We don't have a background in that expertise. So that data mess exists everywhere, large associations or small associations, and we find that more and more association professionals, whether they like to admit it or not, are starting to realize that they can't make decisions based on the gut anymore, which is how we were making decisions.[00:03:00] 
I can even recall way back in the 20-teens encountering a situation where an association professional said, "I have an idea. We're gonna use the power of social credit, so to speak, to get people to reach out to each other and encourage them to join the association." But the problem was this professional was working in a trade association environment, so the other member associations or prospect member associations were competitors, and it's very hard to convince a competitor to join the same association as you.
But their gut said, "I've seen referral campaigns work throughout the private sector or in professional societies where it's the individual that's the member." So they went with their gut, and that campaign didn't work out, and they thought this is a personal failure. It's not. It's just you didn't have access to the insights and data that you needed to safely feel you could experiment with those types of campaigns in a way that's a bit more controlled with a bit more information behind it 
Georgina Donahue: Yeah.
I think the other thing that we're seeing in the space is that [00:04:00] as our industry standards for social interaction and for engagement with for-profit brands, for social brands, anything, it rises, right? We're used to having the Netflix algorithm know exactly what show we want to watch next. We're used to logging into a new platform and selecting our content preferences immediately, and then having really sophisticated algorithms understand who we are, know who we are.
So at the same time that our association professionals are trying to sort through this, sometimes relying on that gut instinct, the base of members, their standards are rising because they're used to it in other areas, right? And so that gut instinct is becoming less and less effective for them because there was some grace, there was some buffer there, right?
And now members, because of what they're experiencing in the consumer space, do not have [00:05:00] that grace that they're willing to offer. They're a little bit more frustrated, and they expect us to know who they are, and they expect us to tailor and segment our message specifically to their journey 
Sharon Pare: I wanna dig into the gut instinct part a little bit later, but you, Georgina, talked about something you call the silent churner.
Can you explain what that is? Is that like the quiet quitter? I- is that a little bit similar? Tell us a little bit about that.
Georgina Donahue: It kind of is. It is. It's the most dangerous member that you have, because everybody has the members that are squeaky wheels, that maybe they're frustrated, maybe there's some dissatisfaction, and they are telling you the areas that they would like to see improvement.
While sometimes a sassy email might be difficult to receive in the moment, they are giving you very clear instructions about what they need in order to continue to receive value from the association. The silent churner is the most dangerous. They just go quiet, and then by the time they don't renew, they've already made the decision not to renew three or [00:06:00] four months ago, and they've already been quietly stepping away, so they stop attending events, they stop posting in the community, they stop sending sassy emails asking for their hopes and dreams to be fulfilled, right?
And many associations don't find out that a member has churned until the renewal doesn't come through, and it's way too late to make a change because there's already a history of taking a step back and looking for other resources for support. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: And this is an area where I feel like associations, their gut actually is probably correct.
They already know who's not gonna renew inside. We know that if you're a new member and you don't do enough with us in that first year, you're probably not going to renew. We know if you're an existing member and your engagement falls off, we know you're not going to renew. We know if you're nearing retirement, you're not gonna renew.
So we in our guts understand and know who isn't going to renew, but the challenge is identifying them proactively and being able to do something about it six months before that renewal cycle [00:07:00] hits. Because once you get to the renewal cycle, it's a little too late to ask someone to open up their wallet and invest in membership again.
So we really need intelligence to tell us, "Hey, I've flagged these bottom 20% of engagers. I need those people to do something, anything." And what they really need, I've always told this to people, is you need to put them in a low barrier to access activity, not something that's gonna require a huge outlay of cash.
If I'm new to ASAE, I'm not gonna tell you to go to the ASAE Annual Conference. That's a huge outlay of cash. But I might say, "Hey, why don't you go into ASAE Collaborate and ask a burning question? It's a private, safe space where you can ask something that maybe you wouldn't wanna ask on LinkedIn or publicly."
It's a great way to get me engaged, give me something sticky to do, and maybe I will think about that as I renew next year. It's not the big ask, it's the ask that's practical and reasonable for me, a low engager. But we as association professionals, [00:08:00] we know that the low engagers, those are the ones who are gonna silently churn, if anyone 
Sharon Pare: I want to unpack this a little bit more, and I know you started to dig into this a little bit too, Rachel, but what's actually causing this?
Why can't most associations see the full picture of their members? 
Georgina Donahue: I think the reason why it's so endemic across the entire sector is not because association professionals don't want to have a better view, or it hasn't occurred to them that a better view would be advantageous. I think that they're really, they really want this.
But the tools that they use were never designed to talk to each other by default, right? And a lot of times you're making really the decisions about your technology choices, about your technology s- stack. You are choosing best-in-class tools, right? And the best events platform and the best member management platform and the best education platform, but they weren't designed together.
They were designed separately. And so it means that [00:09:00] no single staff member has a unified view of the individual member, right? The membership team sees one thing, the education team sees another thing, the events team has a different perspective. It's all broken up, and it's organized by program, right? I can see which events had the most attendees, but it's not broken out by the individual human, by the person.
I don't necessarily just want to see, okay, which event topic was the most popular. I want to see, okay, who are my bottom 20% and which events did they say no to or yes to, and what kinds of conversations in the community pulled them in, and what kind of emails were most valuable to them? It's this lack of a unified view by individuals across programs is just really elusive.
Rachel Mace, CAE: Yeah, and it's not a problem with the association staff, although they often take the blame and feel guilty when they talk about this issue, but the actual issue is [00:10:00] an architecture problem. These platforms are sold to you, and one of the things that they're trying to give you is the best possible user experience.
So they want you to have the best possible user experience. So their investment when they deliver these tools to you, these best-in-class tools, is often on that user experience. Integrations is often a place where th- we forget, hey, we have to integrate this data, or we have to pull this data into some sort of central mechanism where we can see the whole picture of the whole member, and that's often thrown by the wayside because we wanna make sure that, A, member-facing things are good, and B, association staff user experience is good.
But when I worked in the vendor space, a lot of times integrations were the most frustrating things we had ever had conversations about because we had everything we needed to give the association staff what, what they were asking for, but then we would get held up by simple things like, "Oh, we can't integrate that data because that data doesn't really exist there.
It's a calculated column." And I'm like, "We can't get that calculated column?" And they're like, "No, we have to create a new [00:11:00] table." And you would go down these rabbit holes of these crazy blockers, and you're like, "Wow, how is it 2020 whatever, and I still cannot integrate my data relatively seamlessly?" And it's something that I'm not even seeing AI do a good job of addressing.
These integrations still continue to be a challenge. And I know that when I worked at American Bankers Association, when I first got there, I thought, "Well, I will have so many more resources to integrate the data and see that big picture of the member." And I remember walking in there at that big association with all the investment they can make in technology, and it's worse.
They have more systems, more layers, more silos. I'm like, "Wait, I can't even figure out who's engaging with each other in the community, and I work in membership." So I-- it can be even worse at big associations because you have layers of silos of people that are like, "I'm not gonna make you an admin in my system," or, "That's my system, and I don't really wanna pipe that data back there."
So we have this huge problem, and it's compounded by [00:12:00] silos. It's compounded by architecture. It's compounded by integrations. So even in 2026, where we expect AI will solve all our problems, this is something that I'm not sure that AI at this point can solve. 
Sharon Pare: So it really sounds more less a people problem and more of a systems architecture problem, right?
So I guess let's build on that. There's a difference between having data and having insight. What does member intelligence actually mean in practice, and how is it different from just pulling a report? 
Georgina Donahue: The data points that you gather are just the stuff that your systems log, right? The logins, the registrations, the email opens, all of that, right?
The signals and the insights are the story that multiple of those data points together paint for you, right? And you need to be able to pull from many different mediums in order to see the story that those data points are telling you. So behavioral signals are what actually predicts [00:13:00] engagement and renewal, and that's the narrative insight that you're really looking for.
So the signals that matter most aren't demographics or clicks or logins or sessions or anything like that. They're the patterns, right? The login frequency, the types of content that's being consumed. And so that's the difference between data and intelligence. It's the context. So a login, if you tell me a login to an online community, I can't really do very much with that.
But if you show me a member who logged in every single week for six months and then stopped logging in at all three months ago, that's a signal. Did the email go dead? Did you get a new job? Are you starting to feel like this is not the right place for you? Are you feeling boxed out? Is there a clique going on that you don't wanna enter into, right?
Things like that. And so those are the types of insights that we're looking for. I'll give an example, and I know Rachel has a really good example of [00:14:00] this too that she'll share. So I previously worked for an education organization, and we provided educational sessions and training, and there was an online community for all of the alumni of that program.
And we had resources about each of the courses in the community, and we were able to manually, mind you, because the architecture wasn't supporting us either, we were able to pull a list of everyone who had reviewed community library content on topic A, and then we cross-referenced it with everybody who had taken the course on topic A.
And we found about 50% of the people who were viewing those library resources hadn't taken the course, and we wanted to drive education. So we created a targeted outreach campaign and said, "Hey, I can see that you're really interested in this topic. I would love to support your development and ongoing education.
I have a course for you. It was so successful, Sharon. It was crazy. We were all [00:15:00] delighted. We had a 50% close rate and success rate on that course, and people were genuinely grateful and so happy. And so that is a story that we built from the data, and then a success-driving approach that we used to bring something really personal that came from that, that we never would've gotten from just how many people viewed library documents, right?
I know that Rachel has examples of this as well, when we finally wrangled the data enough to paint that picture. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: Yeah, and I'll lead with the example. So I had the privilege of working with American Bankers during the pandemic, and I say privilege because what I witnessed in terms of how they came together to serve their members was nothing short of jaw-dropping.
So as we went into the beginnings of the pandemic, we had some staff members become subject matter experts on what was going on with the virus, just general stuff from the CDC, and really being thoughtful about how they delivered that messaging. It was a [00:16:00] source of comfort for the staff and a source of kind of that predictable, what's the next step?
Where are we going from here? Is there a plan? And that person and the people supporting that person realized that this was so beneficial to the staff. The staff were giving a lot of good feedback. They took that feedback and said, "Maybe we should be offering this to our members." And they started these webinars offering that to that m- to those members.
And as we're seeing these members hop on these calls, we're also seeing that non-members are hopping on the calls, 'cause we didn't feel, at that point, it was a crisis, we didn't feel we should be exclusionary. What happened was a lot of these non-members getting on the call saw our commitment to delivering timely, relevant, and good information to our members.
They became members. We saw a jump in our retention rate and a jump in our recruitment rate as a result immediately during and following the pandemic because they were like, "Look, this is an organization that's going to support us even through the worst of times." And because we were [00:17:00] providing these resources and being intentional in how we evaluated that data, are we getting non-members coming?
Are we getting members coming? Okay, these five non-members came. Can someone give them a call? Because we were taking action and being very agile in what we were doing with that data, we were able to break records that I don't think even the highest level of management thought were possible, and that's because data is not about reporting.
It is not about sending a metric to your boss and saying, "Okay, we're up 200 members this year." Great. Awesome. It's about informing. We're up 200 members this year because it appears people really love the webinar series we did about the state of the industry. That's the story. That's the why. And if you cannot isolate these things to the why, and you're just reporting, you'll never move to that next step of growing.
And associations do need to grow because there's a lot of competition out there. And Georgina said earlier, the expectation is that you're listening to your members' behaviors. You're watching [00:18:00] what they do with you and adjusting your strategy to match that energy of what they're expressing to you via behaviors what they want.
Sharon Pare: Let's take a quick break for a word from our episode sponsor, Higher Logic. Higher Logic unifies your community, marketing, learning, events, and more into one connected engagement platform so every member touchpoint feels personal. With AI-powered campaigns and vibrant online communities, your members feel seen, supported, and excited to engage every day.
Because everything works together, your team spends less time managing technology and more time advancing your mission. Plus, you get built-in strategic guidance and hands-on support to boost retention and turn passive members into passionate advocates. See how Higher Logic is revolutionizing engagement by booking your demo at higherlogic.com.
So we talk about that bottom 20%, [00:19:00] so let's flip that for a second. On the flip side of the at-risk members, you also talk about power users, your most engaged members. Are most associations actually leveraging those people? 
Georgina Donahue: Yes, many are, but many wish that they were able to do so to a greater capacity, right?
Because engagement data is not just gonna tell you about who to save, and we've talked a lot about mitigating risks so far in this conversation. But engagement data is not just about who to save. It tells you who to invest in further, who to really give extra love and care and development to because they are really ready for it, and there's a benefit to your member, and there's a benefit to the organization as well, right?
And so the real heart and the real strength of any association is absolutely its members. And so everybody wants to find a way to leverage members for advocacy, for mentorship, for volunteer pipelines, for peer-to-peer recruitment, for board [00:20:00] leadership positions, anything, right? And that's where the real strength and kind of flywheel of success comes from.
So when you can identify the top 5%, 10% of engaged members, it's really likely that you are looking at a list of your next committee chairs, of your conference speakers, of your community moderators, right? And so if we can find a way to identify them and then throw more and more engagement opportunities to help level them up in their engagement maturity, then that is a win-win for everybody.
It feels really good to members to be recognized for your investment and for your desires to grow alongside an association, and it strengthens the organization to have more insight, more knowledge directly coming from the member base. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: And we at the National Pest Management Association do something I actually don't see at associations very often, but it's modeled a little bit after [00:21:00] DELP.
But I don't want to say modeled after DELP, because I don't want to not give them credit. They have done this phenomenal thing, and this is where they identify people who are relatively engaged, and they put them into a program that prepares them for leadership in a board or volunteer leadership in general.
It moves them to the next step educationally so that they always have an incoming class of people who are ready to be the leaders of that industry for the next generation. So one of the things that you wanna look for when you're looking for who might fit well isn't, "I've checked all the boxes." That's a big thing, especially at Association Linux, we would get clients that say, "I'll look for someone who's done a little bit of everything."
That doesn't necessarily mean that your pool of volunteers should come from there. Sometimes your pool of volunteers comes from somebody who attends the annual meeting many times. Sometimes that pool of volunteers comes from somebody who always attends your legislative day. You don't wanna misinterpret that the fact that someone's not engaging in all [00:22:00] the pieces of the pie as some sort of signal that they're not ready to engage as a volunteer leader.
It's a very big problem I think we have, because we're used to wanting to see parts of a whole, and we're like, "Okay, if you complete all five things, you're ready to go." Mm. But you need to meet people where they are. So when you look into your data, you wanna discover patterns. Rachel Mace goes to annual meeting every year, and sometimes she pops into MMCT, but she doesn't always go on to Collaborate, or she doesn't always attend webinars.
Does that mean that she can't be an effective board member? No, it means that maybe she values more in-person encounters than digital connection. So it's very important when you're looking through engagement data to realize that there's always going to be some level of interpretation here. Am I looking for somebody who checks all the boxes?
Probably not. You're looking for somebody who's engaged, and engaged in the way that fits best for them. And that's how you'll discover, when you go through this process, you're gonna have a hidden gem pile, where you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, [00:23:00] this person, we would have never considered as a volunteer, but they really should be a volunteer because they are participating in a meaningful way.
It's just maybe they're an introvert, and they're the inverse of Rachel, and they only want to participate digitally." They can still be an effective leader, even if they're more of a digital participator than an in-person participator. So it's very important as you look at your engagement data not to get too, I call it perfectionist.
Like, with your, with, check all the boxes and do all the things. No. Look for those hidden gems. Look for those insights where somebody is almost all digital. Think about different ways to look at that data, not just, you did an annual meeting, you did the Collaborate, you did this, you did that. Think of it more of, is somebody clustering their engagement in a certain modality?
Are they clustering their engagement in a certain season? Because they could still be an amazing and effective volunteer or a highly engaged member that helps build your membership further. 
Sharon Pare: So you've described a data problem that's really an architecture problem. Everything is siloed, right? We've talked about that at the beginning of [00:24:00] this podcast. What does it actually take to fix that?
Where does that technology come in? 
Georgina Donahue: It's a really good question. It's one that I am really excited about and think a lot about. We've talked a lot about how most associations, the reason that they're data dark isn't a lack of motivation, it's architecture, right? These tools are not designed to share information.
You can have five great platforms, and you still have a zero unified view of who your member is, right? And so it can be very tempting to be like, "Okay, my tools aren't talking to each other. I need different tools," right? The fix is not to replace everything. The fix is not to rip out all of your tools and try to slot in new ones.
It's convergence. It's creating a single space where all the signals from your existing systems can really come together so that then you do have the ability for an individual staff person to look at one screen and see the full member picture, right? And so at Higher Logic, we [00:25:00] know this is the path that is required, creating that converged space for existing tools, because we've invested so deeply in customer partnerships.
So at Higher Logic, we spearhead something, a group that's called the Customer Innovation Lab, and we have enlisted our members, our association members and customers, to really deeply co-create with us so that we're building exactly what they need, right? And so at any software organization, you need to know exactly what the problems are and exactly where the sticking points are in order to provide a solution that is actually going to create meaningful change.
One of the most exciting things about my role and the way that I interact with associations is by participating in this Customer Innovation Lab and co-creating alongside, right? And because of the fact that we haven't just assumed what's necessary, we're using feedback and ideation sessions that are fueling Higher Logic to [00:26:00] develop a new product.
We are creating a 360-degree view of your member, so a single source of truth that pulls together all of your members' activities across Higher Logic tools and systems, and every other system that your association uses, right? So you pull in the data from your AMS, from your email platform, your event tools, anywhere that you are gathering data and any surface area where those interactions are happening with your members.
We have built this tool with integrations at the center and visibility at the center. So for the first time- You can come in and you can look at one record, and you can see the complete picture of that member. And so you can finally know your member as well as they expect you to and as well as you want them to.
So you have your community behavior, your event history, content consumption, all of it in a single place. So I'm really excited to have [00:27:00] worked so closely with our customers and with association professionals to craft this solution and offer it back to the people that are doing such important work. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: And with that being said, you're giving us something new to work with, but the onus is on the association.
We're seeing this shift where vendors are like, "We want to give you what you're looking for." Then when we get what we're looking for, we as association professionals have a big job to do, and that first job is to make sure that our staff, 'cause architecture is a problem, but silos are, too. Our staff need to understand, hey, here is this new tool.
We don't need to silo our Higher Logic or our AMS. We don't need to silo these tools. We need to encourage staff members to get into these tools and start using that data. And if you sit in a role like I do, information technology and database, which is a big many hat role actually, your job also is to serve just like you would serve a member, is to serve your [00:28:00] staff and say, "Look, here is a tool you can use.
Here's what you can get from it. Let me know where the gaps exist," and encourage them to take some experimental leaps into these tools and start making informed decisions. Because a lot of times you'll deliver a tool to someone, and I know this from the vendor side, and they'll say, "Okay, now what?" The “now what” is you, and we need to find a way to come together as association staff.
It's not, "This is my member data over here" anymore. It's, "This is our member. How can we each make a difference serving them?" So part of the role of an IT professional in the association space is to socialize using that data, starting to experiment with that data, and making informed decisions using that data.
It- the onus has to be on someone. Someone has to take ownership of that, or that data will just sit there. You'll have an amazing tool, and that data will just sit there. So it's ex- incredibly important that as we get tools like this, not only do we [00:29:00] use them in the roles that are like the community manager, but we encourage the rest of the staff at large to take part in using these tools.
And then as we get using these tools, if there are deficits, rather than stop using the tool, it's important to relay back to our partners, like Higher Logic or other partners in the space, "Hey, you've built this tool. I really like this tool, but here's where it's not serving me." Because if you don't give that feedback to these vendors, they can't possibly know what you want.
They'll just know that you stopped using it, but they won't know the why. So it is on us also to give data back to them and say, "Okay, I'm having a hard time getting my membership and meetings team using this data because..." and then you answer that question. 
Sharon Pare: So now you have a unified member view, but most asso- associations have thousands of members, sometimes maybe tens of thousands.
How do you actually act on all that data at scale? How do you go from visibility to strategy? 
Rachel Mace, CAE: So this is something that frustrates me as an association professional because [00:30:00] a lot of tools will get you right to that point. I've even worked with several very brilliant people on a predictive tool, and it hands you on a silver platter the data.
It says, "Oh, these are the people that are likely to renew. These are the people not likely to renew." You get that, and then your customer said, "Okay, now what?" You're like, "Well, do something with it." They're like, "What do I do?" And this is because association professionals have a very unfair lot in life because they are expected to be data scientists, strategic professionals, executives.
They're expected to be so many roles, all those hats we always talk about. But at the same time, when you get all this data, you're like, "I don't want to put anything at risk by making a decision I shouldn't make, and this is a little outside of my normal purview." So you have this discomfort with what do I even do with this information?
Georgina Donahue: And I completely agree with Rachel that visibility is step one, but then what are you supposed to do with [00:31:00] it after? Once you have the information, what's the next step? And so the answer there is really surfacing and support. And we, as a vendor that supports associations, think a lot about that. Not just how do I hand the data over, but how do I fully support this group of professionals and help guide them through the best choices based on the data that we have, right?
So one of the things that we've been working on, and that I have the honor of working on directly, is using dashboards and engagement scoring to let the data tell you where to focus. So you shouldn't have to dig through every single record. The system should show you. The system should say, "Here's your at-risk members, here's your power users, here's your enga- engagement that's trending, and here's the next step.
Here's what most people tend to do when they have these types of results. Here are the best practices for how you fix this problem. Here [00:32:00] is the triaging phase," right? "Your data shows this. Here's the diagnosis. Here's the most likely approach that is going to create a positive outcome for you." So that's one of the things that we're building with Higher Logic's new suite of dashboards, specifically for the community product, is really surfacing all of the engagement signals that matter across your full community member base and pairing them with the actions and next steps, right?
We don't just want to give people a chart. We want to give them a pathway, guidance on how to interpret your data, validated recommendations for next steps based on years of community data from our user group, HUG, right? All of the next steps, the signals, the things that point you towards the areas to focus next.
And that way you can really support your membership base without burning out your staff, asking them to do 200 different jobs at an A+ level 100% of the time. Of course, support is [00:33:00] required. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: And I'm very excited about this development because a lot of associations, even big ones, don't have a really big community staff looking at that data, working with that data, fostering the engagement in the platform.
So having this is like having an unpaid assistant on your staff. Now you have somebody kind of serving up this information to you so that you can just be action-oriented. More actions, more experimentation, more work, as opposed to more chasing numbers or reporting numbers. So I'm extremely enthusiastic to see what comes out of this.
Sharon Pare: Because visibility alone isn't enough, right? You want to actually do something with it. All right, so let's make this real. Rachel, let's turn this to you. Let's talk about what actually changes day to day for association staff when they have this kind of member intelligence. How does a job look different?
Rachel Mace, CAE: So one of the things that we were working on in Association Analytics, myself and Heather were talking through what do we inform people about what their job will look like? Because a lot of [00:34:00] times there's a little bit of fear. Okay, I have all these tools now that are doing part of my day-to-day. It's painful work.
No one loves doing VLOOKUPs all day, but at the same time, you're like, "What am I going to do next?" I want to give you hope. This means that you get to use the whole part of your brain. Your job is no longer reacting to data, reacting to numbers. Now you're proactive. Now you get to be strategic. You get to grow, you get to experiment.
You get to actually move the needle on what members want and value. And if something doesn't, you can factor in, "If this doesn't work out, we'll pivot to this." Factor in your pivots. This will make your career so much more robust. Now you're becoming an expert in these types of decisions, as opposed to a reactor who reports numbers.
And if you really want to grow as a professional, it's important for you to get ahead of reaction and start thinking proactively about doing something new. One of the things that really attracted me to NPMA was that even though they have data challenges, they're extremely proactive. They're like, "Let's get [00:35:00] ahead of this.
Members seem to be talking about this. I see enthusiasm behind this." They look out at the marketplace, and they react to those inputs, even though they have to do a lot of it manually, because they are essentially a member-driven decision engine, not a member-driven reporting engine. And they spend less of their time digging and sifting through numbers, and now that they've hired me, I can dig and sift a little bit for them so that they can actually get some validation behind these programs.
But they run on all cylinders member facing. Member facing is the ultimate and first priority, and I would love to see more of that in the association space, because a lot of times we get stuck in our job or we're just reporting internally. We're almost invisible. But once you get out there, your entire staff is fostering relationships with the members that they serve, you're going to see that your members become obsessed with your association.
They're like, "This is somewhere I want to be. I want to be a part of this." Naturally, just by you engaging in that way with your members, your membership will start becoming more sticky. [00:36:00] Your meetings will have a feel of authenticity and enthusiasm that they didn't have before. So it's important to embrace that part of that slugging through reports may be a p- a thing of the past.
Embrace these tools and get out there and start producing things that your members can see and give you feedback on, ultimately value. 
Sharon Pare: For an association that's still flying blind right now, no unified views, decisions based on that gut instinct we talked about earlier, what's the one thing you'd tell them to do first?
Georgina Donahue: I think they're gonna take this advice, Sharon, because the picture and the beautiful vision of the future that Rachel just painted is so exciting, and I'm betting that folks are gonna be really galvanized by that. I would say that the first step is do an overview, take an-- Start with an audit of where your member data actually lives today.
And I'm not talking about the kind of hopeful interpretation of where it should be or the vision of the [00:37:00] future just yet. Where is it actually? And list every system that knows something about a member that you use to make decisions about serving your members, right? And then ask which of those systems has the richest signal source.
Where are you getting the insights from? Where does the story start to jump out at you from in terms of those systems? For most associations, it's community behavior that is the m- that is the richest, the logins, the posts, the replies, and also event data, what people are attending, because those signals are reflecting active engagement more than passive receipt, right?
So that tends to be where it will come from. But of course, look at what makes sense for you. It might be different in your association, so look at that. And then, of course, I also recommend keep an eye on us. Keep an eye on Higher Logic. This is gonna be a really exciting second half of this year, and I am so jazzed to bring this to the space, [00:38:00] because that unified view of your member that is deeply built on visibility, highly sophisticated integrations that you're supported through, as well as dashboards and data that walks you through the next steps, is gonna be an incredible game changer.
And there's all sorts of, of kind of fun and really powerful features that are in there. Dynamic list building, show me everyone who this story applies to, those types of things, as well as automations. And of course, there's a little AI mixed in there, too, as every new product has. And so I'm really excited to see what types of changes happen there.
But for today, start with where the data actually lives. Look for the systems that are giving you the richest signals and the most compelling stories. 
Rachel Mace, CAE: I totally agree, and I will add a piece of advice that I have said for years and I wish that more people would take to heart. And I'm talking to myself first because this was a hard point for me to change in my own personal professional journey.
[00:39:00] I am the culprit of this more than probably anyone else, but stop chasing perfection in data to make decisions. The longer you slug over validating data, the longer you go through the process of, is this the right data? Is it perfect? Most people also are fighting over the last 5% of data and then not making decisions because the last 5% isn't correct.
Instead, enough for a trend, that's all you need to start making decisions. Stop chasing perfection. Get good enough to make an incremental improvement and make those incremental improvements, observe, and then improve more. I have a prioritization board right now, and it's all based on incrementalism. I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel with our tech stack overnight.
It's let's use this one feature. In fact, I'll be finding people at Higher Logic Super Forum to ask a couple of questions to make the user experience for our staff members better on the Higher Logic side because I want incremental improvements so we can continue progressing how we use these tools. [00:40:00] So today you could go look at your members up for renewal if that's the time of year for you, or if this is the time of year where you're opening up registration for a major conference in the fall, look for one incremental improvement you might be able to make to that process.
Can I send a better letter to my members before I even invoice them? Can I send them a quick survey or some sort of communication? Can I normalize talking about what we've done throughout the association throughout the year before I send out the invoice so they know, hey, I'm not just asking you for money, I have delivered for you this year.
Do one thing, monitor it, look at it. Don't wait for perfect data and say, "Look, data's pointing to this being pretty effective. Let's expand on that." Incrementalism, stop chasing perfection, and I think you will see a huge payoff from that effort. 
Sharon Pare: Rachel, Georgina, this has been a really incredible conversation.
I know we could talk more about it, and I know you've got a big conference next week to be able to really [00:41:00] dig into this with your users and of course your clients as well. There's a lot of really practical insight here for associations, so again, thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents Industry Partner Series. Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US, and the world.
We want to give a big thanks again to our episode sponsor, Higher Logic. For more information or to book a demo, visit higherlogic.com. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And for more information on topics impacting the association space, visit Associations Now online at [00:42:00] associationsnow.com.

What geopolitical disruption means for associations

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP, CEO of the Risk and Insurance Management Society, is joined by Francisco Gómez, Founder and CEO of Factum Global, and Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE, Senior Director of Data and Insights at YPO, for a timely conversation on how geopolitical disruption is reshaping the association landscape. They explore the slowdown of trade globalization, increasing travel and visa challenges impacting events and engagement, and the growing tension between taking action and staying silent as political issues intersect with mission-driven work. The discussion emphasizes the importance of clear, grounded communication with boards, along with practical strategies like scenario planning and tabletop exercises to prepare for uncertainty. The group also examines how associations can stay agile without compromising their core mission, including the role of AI in monitoring trusted information sources and the value of incorporating diverse global perspectives. As the conversation unfolds, they point to a more fragmented, multipolar world, rising cyber and data risks, and evolving member expectations—offering insight into how association leaders can navigate what comes next.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/hc8BmpdGDhw
 
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Gary LaBranche, Chief Executive Officer of RIMS, the Risk and Insurance Management Society. I am delighted to be joined on this podcast with Francisco Gómez, founder and CEO of Factum Global, a boutique consulting firm specializing in international expansion, market analysis, and strategic growth. Also, joining us is Pietro Macchiarella, senior director, data and Insights at YPO, the world's largest community of chief executives that come together to become better leaders and better people. I've said a little bit about each of you, but if you could tell us a little bit more, starting with you, Francisco.
Francisco Gómez: Thank you, Gary. Pleasure to be here with you and Pietro. As you said, I founded Factum Global, a firm that [00:01:00] specializes in helping both for-profit companies as well as associations and nonprofits expanding internationally. We focus on truly helping organizations understand where to go, how to do it, and how to sustain that growth, and doing this for the last 20 years or so, and delighted to be here.
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Excellent, Pietro. 
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: Thank you Gary. I'm Pietro. Good to be here with both of you. As you said, Gary, I work for YPO, which is the largest organization of CEOs. We have 37,000 member members in hundred 40 countries, so as international as it gets. And myself, I am very international. I've grown up in Europe, I've lived in three different countries in Europe and then moved to the US about 20 years ago. I'm also the chair of the ASAE International Association Advisory Council, which right now is a great place to be because we are the center of, of the storm in a way, supporting associations in their international experience or trying to international.[00:02:00] 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Fantastic. Both of you obviously have a tremendous non-North American experience, and I'm just curious. Currently the world is experiencing what we, in the risk management community, call geopolitical disruption, which is a fancy way of saying chaos is abounding in the our current world today and associations and corporations.
Consumers and people in business have to try to navigate all of that, and that's uncharted territory to say the least. Pietro is, your group is international as it gets. What does geopolitical disruption mean? How are you in seeing it impact YPO? 
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: So first of all, disclaimer from the lawyers: These are my personal opinions and not the ones of my employer.
I will say the one, some of the assumptions that we are taking for granted up until now are gone. If you look at it as being a constant. Since the, at least the 1990s, uh, I think the, [00:03:00] there is an index, I think it's the World Bank has an index that shows the trade ness where you look basically at the imports and export globally.
And you divided by the, the GDP, the global GDP and the index has been growing like crazy. In fact, I think it's being twice as fast as, as a global GDP growth in the past 20 years. And so. We went from, again, trade being about 30% of global GDP to being 60% or more. And then suddenly this has come to a halt.
Everything is being questioned again. And so obviously there's a, this has an impact on any membership organization. In fact, I feel like we are actually more impacted than our members. Uh, because if you think about the, the true political uncertainty affects the, the members themselves. So their companies, if you're a trade organization or in our case a business organization affects the way you operate the, the association and also affects all the members interact with each other.
So it's a, it's a triple head and [00:04:00] obviously that that impacts everything that you do. At the same time, I'm the eternal optimist and one thing that I do say is the problems are often opportunities and if very often we are. Nice to have for members, all of us in the association space. But when there is a crisis, we become actually a must have if we are relevant and if we are relevant to what they need at the moment.
So I do think that right now what I see is actually a bigger relevance for organizations like ours because we are, we are helping members when they need us. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: That's interesting. So if you are truly valuable, uh, and relevant, you'll be more valuable and relevant in times of poly crisis or chaos, or when the world is not going according to what we had thought it would.
Francisco respond to that. Are you seeing that in your practice? 
Francisco Gómez: Yes, of course. I do think that the main thing, however, is that for associations, your political disruption is truly no longer [00:05:00] something that is happening out there. I think we used to see that as a side thing where we're gonna keep this in scenario planning and we're gonna think about the what ifs, but it was not as real and it is now showing up in a very practical ways.
When you think about travel decisions, event planning, member expectations, partner relationships, sanctions, they are privacy concerns. Reputation, right? So it's all over the place. And what makes it especially difficult is that associations have traditionally tried to stay away from politics. But today I think that this is much harder because there is risk not only in taking action, but also in not taking action.
And that creates tension because associations want to focus on policy and not politics, but in a lot of cases it are now intertwined. So the real challenge is not just whether to speak. But how do we speak in a way that is consistent with mission and values? In the past, many associations tried to stay away and above [00:06:00] politics, but today's silence can be read as a statement too, right?
So that's something that I think most associations are wrestling with right now. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: So you touched on two, I think, very important pieces there. One. One is that external issues really are internal, even down to when and how we travel. That's a pretty internal, pretty internal issue. And then secondly, the whole idea that you, by not engaging, you are saying something by not speaking out, by not engaging with the chaotic world as it is that can be read, can be viewed as negatively as if you said something.
And I think that's especially true the more. That the association presents to the world, the more engaged with the world. So I was thinking as you were talking, I was thinking for RIMS, one of the ways that we primarily relate to the world is through our certification program, which is growing more rapidly outside of North America than inside North America.
Uh, but also through our convention, which we call Risk World, we bring about [00:07:00] 11,000 people together every year. And Risk World just isn't an educational conference. It's a commercial marketplace. It is the world's largest commercial insurance B2B marketplace, and people from all over the world come there to place their insurance, to buy insurance, the commercial insurance.
So it's actually a very critical part of the whole value proposition to the commercial insurance world. But this year we're seeing a definite impact on some people not being able to get. A visas or not being able to get visas in time to come to the convention in, in Chicago, uh, in Philadelphia also, one of our students, we student groups, we have a, with our partner, Spencer Educational Foundation, we provide a platform for, uh, international student competition in risk management and one of the universities from Africa.
I'm not able to get a visa so far. So we're trying to work through those issues, but this, this constant chaos that we're seeing, the changes [00:08:00] of rules, regulations, consumer preference in, in the case of Canada, we're also seeing significant pullback from our Canadian friends who just don't want to deal with the American economy right now.
How are you communicating those kinds of risks to your stakeholders, to your leaders and board members and others that are important to your organizations? 
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: So I think that there is a difference between maybe concern and panic, and I think panic happens when there's no plan. My, my opinion of that's when leadership to step in, when, particularly when talking to the board, it's really about transparency and having a plan.
So do some scenario planning. Look at what we know, what we don't know, what potentially the consequences of things will be. These are, I think this is the way you moderate some of the risks. Uh, otherwise, again, panic kicks in and that's never a good thing because usually decisions made under panic are not ideal.[00:09:00] 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: That's interesting. Uh, Francisco? 
Francisco Gómez: Yeah, I think I agree with everything. Uh, Piera is saying, I think the key is to communicate in a way that is candid but not alarming. The boards are, and the stakeholders in general do not need drama. They need context. They need scenario thinking. You were talking about that piera and clarity about what the organization is watching.
I usually think in terms of three questions, what is the risk? What is the potential impact? What are we doing about it? It really, that is the conversation you wanna have with the board. And within that question of what is the risk for those watching that may know me, I talk extensively about the risk of inaction, right?
And is related to what we spoke about earlier, is acting has a risk, but not acting has also a risk. And in many cases, that risk could be greater for certain organizations. That helps turn uncertainty into management, and it also helps people understand that risk is not always a reason to stop. In 2025, I saw a lot of organizations stopping.
[00:10:00] Sometimes they were just thinking that things are gonna get back to normal, or let's see what happens in 2026. I see the same organizations realizing this chaos that Gary, you were talking about earlier, is just the world we live in, and we need to learn to live with that and figure out how to proceed more carefully.
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but the goal is to make it manageable. Those of us that have been dealing in international business for years and have been working in countries that are less sophisticated in terms of rules and regulations and those types of things, we're used to that kind of chaos.
So we need to bring that thinking to everything that is happening now and understand this is really not new. It's new in this context, but it is nothing that we haven't faced before. I like the fact that I'm seeing that mentality shift in executives in the association world, and I see them taking action, which I think is very important.
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: As you were speaking, I was reminded of a [00:11:00] quote by Peter Drucker, one of the greatest writers on management theory and management practice, Peter Drucker. He said The danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence. It's. Thinking and acting with yesterday's logic in mind, right? So we have to retrain, relearn our approaches because we can't solve the problems of tomorrow the same way we helped create those problems yesterday.
So that turbulence is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about turbulence or don't think about turbulence. 
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: Yeah, no, I love what you both said. I was gonna add that I think there is, there's one thing that is non-negotiable, which is the mission. That's what we do. That should not change no matter what the crisis is or whatever the context is, how we do it, that changes and that's the flexibility that I think becomes much more important under the current circumstances.
And I think that's what sort of where I see that the majority of the impact is really now we do things and for example, you were talking about [00:12:00] the having an annual event where. It becomes much more difficult to get, and these, for example, from different parts of the world. So maybe the next step is to regionalize some of these events.
And I've seen some organizations associations actually do that. So maybe duplicate that one big event in the us, one in Europe and suddenly you're not dependent on one big event anymore, but you have now the option for members to attend either one. And so again, that how we do it is where you can actually, the biggest impact.
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Hey, I was wondering, as you're talking and I'm listening and processing what you're saying, I'm curious, have you ever done a desktop exercise with your stakeholders, your board members, your management team, desktop exercises for, or our listeners? Uh, our scenarios that you make up in advance, you craft a scenario in advance.
I just used chat GPT yesterday to create one on geopolitical shock plus supply chain and market disruption. It spit back out to me. [00:13:00] Scenario overview with some key stress points and then some exercise objectives, and that it takes you through a 60 to 90 minute process, including things that you drop into the exercise as shockers or stressors to the systems, things like that.
Different timed injections where key decisions have to be made. Have you ever worked with any of those type processes? 
Francisco Gómez: Yes, we do it all the time. As consultant, helping organizations expand internationally. You can imagine the scenario planning is a huge part of it and it keeps evolving though, and in an environment like this, the thinking also needs to be evolve.
It used to be that we would sit down with boards and try to come up with a five year strategy, and it would be a beautiful, shiny piece of paper that boards and executives would use to communicate this is what we're gonna do in the next five years. That is no longer as useful as it used to be. Yes, you have to have a north, you have to have a vision, understand where you want to be in the next [00:14:00] several years, but the pathways to get there are very different, and you need to understand in advance what happens if, right?
So what happens if we go into our preferred pathway and A or C happens then? Where are we going next? Are we going to the V pathway? Are we gonna run some pilots in parallel? How do we start testing some of these avenues to make sure that our strategy is resilient to those changes? So it's not about, and we said this earlier, it's not about avoiding the chaos, we're avoiding the changes that are happening around us, but is how do we build an organization that is adaptable and nimble so that when things start to show up, we're monitoring.
We can see where things are starting to, to look like they're gonna come our way, and we have a plan to navigate those things because we have discussed those possibilities. It's impossible to predict everything that may happen, but I think you can predict certain things. [00:15:00] And what happens if there's a war?
What happens if there's another pandemic? What happens if all of a sudden our number one source of revenue goes away? We have several associations in 2025. That loss substantial revenue when the U-S-A-I-D agency will disappear, they, the appendant is on the contracts in that organization and they found themselves in a situation that they were not anticipating.
So what happens? They could have anticipated that, right? We have X percentage of revenue attached to a single source. What happens if that source goes away? So we could anticipate U-S-A-I-D was going to be disappearing, but we could have anticipated that something could have happened that would jeopardize that source of revenue and we should have been preparing to navigate and try to diversify and get away from that dependency etra.
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: Yeah, likewise, I work for an organization that objectively is extremely healthy. We have [00:16:00] 95% renewal rate, 96% we have, we grow very healthy and everything is great. But the good thing is also I work for some business leaders. So they are used to being paranoid a little bit and what could happen potentially will disrupt our model.
So this is basically my daily life. But it's very interesting how we are gonna see also from, from like how the external environment potentially can impact competition. So what competition potentially can come out of nowhere that we are not expecting. So this is an exercise for example, that we're doing right now where we are looking at how, again, the external environment.
Potentially creates new competitors. So that's, so that's something that is very interesting and I, in fact, I advise anybody who's listening to, to think about that, even if things are going great, just think about potentially what are your, your core competitive advantages and which ones are also the ones that can be disrupted more easily by existing or a new incoming competitors.
And [00:17:00] just see how you can evolve to protect them. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: So I work for. Bunch of risk managers. Professional risk managers, so risk awareness is front and center in, in all things at all times. Although I, I always, when people say, oh, it must be terrible working for people who are just always worried about risk, it's, it's much more nuanced and strategic than just worrying about.
Bad things that can happen. It's, it really is thinking through the different scenarios and looking for the opportunities and meshing that into our overall strategy. We have a formalized enterprise risk management process where we're constantly and certainly annually, a, a deep dive, but. Continuously evaluating our potential risks and how we might mitigate those or transfer those risks or reduce their potential impact to us.
So it's been fascinating working with them, and I've always been amazed at how willing they are to take thought through [00:18:00] strategic risks, because anybody in the risk management will tell you, but part of the reason that companies and hospital systems and university systems engage in risk management is to grow.
So getting back to this opportunity for where can we find the growth opportunity in these times of chaos, I think is important. Before I forget, I did wanna throw in a couple of things for our listeners. There's a lot written out there about risk, trend, trends and risk and that sort of thing, and we just wanna point out a couple every January, the World Economic Forum.
Publishes an annual global risk report or risk survey, and this year it was issued on January 14th, 2026, about six weeks before the current war in Iran began. And interestingly, the number one expected issue was. Geopolitical confrontation, which was seen more as an economic issue, tie it back more to the [00:19:00] tariffs and that sort of thing.
This, but the number five of the 10 expected risks for 2026 was in fact. State-based armed conflict or war as we think of it today. Very interesting that in January, and this is a survey of hundreds and hundreds of, uh, risks in business professionals, that geopolitical risk, geopolitical conflict was very high on the list.
They also asked what are the longer term risks 10 years out, and almost all of them. Were, or the bulk of them were environmental related, major weather risks, that sort of thing. And only one or two, one or two were, uh, social issues, inequality and that sort of thing. And a few more were technological, but none.
Geopolitical or armed conflict, which I found to be very interesting. Short term, a lot more potential conflict, longer term, more climate change kinds of issues. So there's a number of these indexes. Aon, [00:20:00] the insurance broker publishes one BlackRock. Publishes a geopolitical index and that sort of thing.
Mark on your calendar at the end of the fourth quarter every year, just start doing Anu some searches and get an AI agent out there looking for some of these and maybe provide you with a summary report of what the consensus views are of, are there out there, where do you guys go for your, uh, information?
What sources do you go to manage your way of thinking to guide your analysis? 
Francisco Gómez: Have, one of the things that we advise our clients is to stay on top of technology, and I have to try to leave the same principles that I preach. I build some agents with AI to help me stay on top of, rather than new them, strict guidelines as to which kinds of sources.
You mentioned a Capital World Economic Forum, United Nations, certain news outlets that I trust and it, it feeds me the information on what's. [00:21:00] Happening and then I can go and follow up and try to see what else is out there. So today it's very easy to stay on top of this. It used to be the this thing of trying to look for things, but now you have a way to serve, very easily build agents for information that is gonna be coming to you at the right proper time.
So I highly recommend doing that. I also wanted to mention very quickly, since you were talking about some of these resources, I am part of the A SAE. Executive Management advisory Council, and they recently put out, and I'm talking about in the last two weeks, my colleagues developed a discussion guide on navigating politicized issues.
I highly recommend it. I think it's a 11 or 12 page document. That is helping associations think through this. You can find it on my own LinkedIn. I shared it on ASAE Collaborate or simply reach out to ASAE. I'm sure they'll guide you to the right place to get the guide, but I think it's association leaders helping other association leaders think [00:22:00] about some of the issues that we're discussing right now.
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: Yeah, very cool. Francisco. I can add something like that as well because we, as the International Association's Advisory Council, we actually provide a lot of content to members as well. So we have almost a, pretty much a monthly webinar on hot topics. So if anybody's interested in anything international and associations, please keep an eye on our webinars because there is a lot of content.
In fact, we just did one on. When to speak up, for example, when it was extremely hot topic. But going back to your original question, Gary, one thing I love what Francisco said about basically having AI gather, gathered some uh, news sources for you. One thing I also to do is to look at different perspectives on news.
So one of my daily routine is actually when I wake up, I look at European newspapers when I'm still in bed, I read different, luckily I speak different languages so I can see how they tackle some of the issues and then. In the evening, I usually read Wall Street [00:23:00] Journal or some American media just to see the different perception of, and the relatively importance of different issues that maybe for us are not as as important.
So I also recommend if you can look at the international perspective a little bit, see how other countries are reacting to different pieces of. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Get out of your own bubble, then get out of your own echo chamber and look for those diverse sources and resources that you know might not stumble over in the normal course of events.
Francisco Gómez: A hundred percent. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Interesting. Francisco, do you have something to add? 
Francisco Gómez: No, I just say that that's critical because it's harder and harder to just get the news these days. They come with opinions. So 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: yeah, 
Francisco Gómez: we have to make sure that we look at different sources to try to get our own idea of what's actually happening.
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Thinking about that for a second, thinking about the longer term, as we start to bring this podcast to an a conclusion, think about another, a different time horizon of say 24 months or thereabouts. Where's your head at [00:24:00] and where would you suggest other association professionals ought to start thinking about the next series of trends or the continuation or cascade effect of these trends?
What do you see in the future that we should be thinking about today? 
Francisco Gómez: There are a few, right? Obviously, one is the direction of US policy and trade, whether we like it or not, that is impacting the world. This serve continued geopolitical instability is something that we have to think about. You were mentioning Gary travel and vision friction.
I think those issues are going to continue to be increasing with everything that is happening. But I, I do wanna say that. A lot of economists out there for years. Were talking about de-globalization and everybody just going inward and staying away from the world, and we have disagreed from the very beginning.
I don't think that's happening. I don't think that will happen. What we're seeing is a reconfiguration of how we do global business. We see new alliances and partnerships and [00:25:00] trade. Routes that are emerging, and so this global trade will always be there, but we have to take a look at those frictions that we're looking at.
Aside from that, I think obviously cyber and data risks are huge and how AI is changing member expectations and operating models, and this is something that should be at the forefront of any association thinking is not whether we like it or not, is when will your. Operating model, be truly impacted by all of this, and how do you anticipate it and take advantage of those things.
And more broadly, I think leader should prepare for a more fragmented world. Fortunately, like I said, we're gonna see some of these alliances happening. That's gonna create a lot of opportunity, but it's not going to be as easy to navigate as it one was. It's not about being pessimistic, it means being ready.
The organizations that do well. We'll be the ones I think that can adapt quickly without losing sight of who they are. [00:26:00] Pietro was talking about mission. I think that's critical. I think the future will reward associations that are globally aware, strategically selective, and operationally resilient, which I think is very important, is how do we go from strategy to execution and how do we do that properly?
Pietro Macchiarella, MBA, CAE: Francisco, I think you've said it so well. I don't know if I can add anything more so eloquently, but I will say that I also see, I think the sort of polarization of the world, the creation of different regional interest areas, and I think that's part of the thing that will impact how you, you do business around the world.
I also think that there is probably some economic pressures that will happen depending on the different. World economies go and people know. I tend to be still optimistic about the US economy, not so much about maybe Europe. I think that the interesting thing about Asia is that is probably being affected at least short term by oil right now.
And so I don't know what will be the long term impact of that. [00:27:00] Of course, I think you mentioned Francisco technology. I think AI is also sort of, it's an opportunity. It's a great opportunity, but it's also a concern. I was on a call yesterday where as an alman was one of the speakers, and I could see actually in the executives, so AI executives, even some concerns from themselves, meaning this can be a.
Thing from Manco, but it can also be potentially a threat if we don't manage it well. And so that obviously has an impact also on associations and how we manage it for our members and in the interaction with members. Yeah, I think these are my main points. 
Gary LaBranche, FASAE, CAE, AAiP: Thank you. You've both touched on something that's been on my mind and on my radar, and that goes back to the, the, the Trump administration's national Security Strategy white paper, which really explicitly said, we're no longer gonna be us in charge of everything, right?
We're gonna be in charge of our stuff, and you all be in charge of your stuff. So bringing to an end the era of a US [00:28:00] dominated world order, and going back to, I think both of you touched on the idea of multipolarity. In other words, there'll be different regions of influence around the world.
Engineer the way supply chains work, the way sourcing works, the way workflow proceeds, where migration patterns happen, all of those things and that, and also where knowledge flows. So that will be, I think, very interesting for those of us in the association space. So that multipolarity concept, to see where that takes us long term.
We've all, we've spoke, spoken about AI and I couldn't agree with you more I think. It, it's not, in my view, it's not a question of will AI impact us, but to what degree will AI reshape the world of work and reshape the kind of the relationships that we have as individuals and the synergy or collaboration or lack [00:29:00] thereof or lost thereof between organizations.
I think AI and now it's about the impacts of AI on all on, on all of that. And then think lastly, the, the idea of we as individual leaders. How are we adapting and changing to the challenges that are in front of us? Because going back to Drucker, the problem with turbulence is not turbulence. It's the way we think about turbulence and the idea that we have to change our mindset in order to keep up with this new deck of cards that we're being presented through.
Whether it's geopolitical, chaos, or the new world that we're looking at, I think it's gonna be especially true if GDP grows at 2% versus 3%. If US GDP grows at 3%, we have an entirely different, very optimistic forecast in front of us. If we grow at 2% or under it, things get a lot tougher, a lot quicker for a lot of people.
That's it [00:30:00] for us. We gotta wrap this up. So let me just say thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Association NOW Presents. Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today. And highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And for more information on topics impacting the association space, visit associations now online at associationsnow.com. Thank you all very much for listening, and thank you to my panelists, Pietro and Francesco.
Many thanks for your help in trying to decipher and discover where we're going in the future. Appreciate it. Thank you all. Have a good [00:31:00] day.
 

Why Associations Must Rethink Learning and Community Together

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, guest host Sharon Pare of HighRoad Solutions sits down with Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Forj, to explore how to connect learning, community, and member value into one cohesive experience. Drawing on member experience research, Kurt highlights a core insight—members join and stay for two primary reasons: to learn and to connect with peers. When those experiences are separated, engagement suffers. The conversation unpacks how expectations are shifting, particularly among early-career professionals who expect personalized, always-on access to content and community, not just isolated touchpoints like annual events or standalone courses. Kurt makes the case for rethinking how associations deliver value—moving away from fragmented systems toward unified, AI-enabled platforms that bring learning and community together. He shares real-world results from EcoAmerica and offers a clear takeaway for association leaders: start with the member experience, break down internal silos, and design for connection, not just content.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/J0QxOGuP6Ks
 
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
 
Sharon Pare: [00:00:00] Welcome to Association NOW Presents: Industry Partner Series, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Sharon Pare, director of Partnerships at High Road Solutions, a HubSpot Solutions and implementation partner, and your host of this series throughout the year.
Today, we're exploring how associations think about learning and how that connects to renewal. I'm joined by Kurt Heikkinen. Kurt has built and exited multiple SaaS companies, led mergers and acquisitions, and raised more than $150 million in venture and private equity capital. He's helped companies grow from startup to over $50 million in recurring revenue, and today he's focused on helping associations and organizations rethink how they serve and engage their members.
Kurt, welcome 
Kurt Heikkinen: Sharon. Thanks so much. Excited to spend this half hour with you and the audience. 
Sharon Pare: Absolutely, [00:01:00] and thank you so much, Kurt. You've spent much of your career building companies in fast moving markets. I'm curious what drew you to the association space? 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, great question, Sharon. As I entered the space and started to learn more about the mission driven nature of these organizations, I was just compelled to help.
After meeting with dozens and dozens of executives, I heard both. Their passion and mission, but also the challenges they face. And so after a couple decades serving the corporate space, I felt compelled to jump in and really help leaders of mission-driven organizations realize their full potential. 
Sharon Pare: Why don't we jump into it?
So when I hear association leaders talk about value, connection, and education, it always comes up. I think renewal conversations are still happening everywhere, and sometimes I think about it like Netflix versus Instagram, right? Netflix gives you a huge library of content and [00:02:00] then Instagram keeps you coming back for more because it feels dynamic.
It feels social, even though I think the influencer community might be dying a little bit. So I'm wondering if associations sometimes operate more like a content library than a living network. So my question for you, Kurtin, from where you sit, what truly keeps members coming back year after year and what do associations tend to overestimate?
Kurt Heikkinen: It's a really great question, and I think you can see some of the parallels from an experience standpoint between Netflix and Instagram. But when you think about the core of associations, many of them view themselves as the trusted place, the trusted resource for their members, as some describe themselves as that community of practice.
Their members truly care. They want a sense of belonging and they want a place where they can not only progress in their career, but share and give back. And so we do research every year. We call it the state of member [00:03:00] experience, a research report, and we launch it every year at the annual ASAE annual event in August.
And for the last five years, the prevailing answer to the question, why do you join and why do you stay, has been. One for the peer-to-peer connections and two for the ongoing learning. And so that is at the core of the member value proposition. Do I belong and can I connect with peers like me? And is this an environment and a place where I can continue to learn and grow?
And so those are the key factors that drive engagement and ultimately retention. 
Sharon Pare: If learning and community are structured separately, what does that do to the member experience? 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, it creates a fractured and siloed experience. When you think about our own experience as consumers, when we're interacting with a company or a product, and the experience is different from the time we bought it to the [00:04:00] time perhaps we're asking for service.
It becomes frustrating if they don't know us and they don't demonstrate that they understand who we are and what our needs are from one step to the next. And so having those experiences separate can only lead to frustration, and that's what we hear over and over again. So what's the difference? What's the answer?
An experience that is seamless, that's personalized, that's unified, where the member, the learner, feels like you know them throughout every step of the journey. 
Sharon Pare: So are you saying that one of the shifts that you're seeing is mostly generational in how they're learning now? 
Kurt Heikkinen: I think by far one of the shifts is the expectations of early career members.
You think about the expectations of early career members, the concept of membership is even foreign to them. They've grown up in an on demand consumption, subscription based world. That's their world. Whether that's in academia or whether that's from an entertainment standpoint. [00:05:00] You cited Netflix earlier, so that is one of the major shifts.
But for all of us, regardless of what generation you're in, where you are in your career. The last 10 years has informed our own expectations regarding experience and what does a modern experience look like, and personalization is at the core of that. If we as consumers, let's just separate learning and look more broadly in our everyday life as consumers, if we don't experience something that's fast and easy and relevant where the entity we're interacting with.
The service provider or the product company doesn't know us and doesn't demonstrate they know us and understand our needs immediately and guide our experience, we opt out. And that's regardless of age. Anyone who has been using a mobile device for the last several years has experienced that and now knows what good looks like.
But furthermore, back to career [00:06:00] stages, we've also studied a lot. What are the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of professionals by stage. There are expectations that early career members have. They wanna know immediately, do I belong here? Can I connect with peers like me who have solved and encountered some of the things that I'm.
Experiencing early in my career for those individuals mid-career, they wanna know how can they take the next step in their career? How can they climb the ladder? How can they advance in their domain? Um, they might be considering a pivot. And how will this community help them learn and grow vanguard? And many times for those latent career they wanna give back.
They wanna share their wisdom and their expertise from the last two or three or four decades, and they want a forum, a learning community to do that. So when learning and community aren't together, when it's fractured and siloed, you miss out on so many opportunities to engage your learners, your professionals, your members that meet them where [00:07:00] they are, and truly tap in the power of community.
Sharon Pare: So it sounds like continuity may matter more than isolated moments, and having these two together really matters more. So I think it raises a bigger question about how learning actually works. And you've already mentioned that adults and different generations don't learn in isolated events. It tends to happen over time, conversation in context.
Again, as you mentioned, a lot of this education is still structured around single programs. What do you think leaders most often misunderstand about learning value is actually created today? 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, it's interesting, Sharon, because we meet with hundreds of clients every year and prospective clients, and I think intuitively they understand.
That the learning paradigm has shifted. I think they do understand that it is more social in nature. It needs to be more on demand. Micro learning needs to become a part of this, that individuals don't have the time or energy [00:08:00] and to sit down and take hours of courses by themselves. They are looking for that connectedness, but some of them are struggling to understand how to make that happen or they're.
Largely dependent on a couple primary sources of revenue for their organization. A single annual conference, a couple main courses that drive 60 or 70% of their revenue that consumes their time and energy every year. That prevents them from moving beyond and innovating beyond that, and most often and why organizations come to Forj is because the technology they're using is holding them back or experience how today's technology better enables that breakthrough.
Better supports that type of more dynamic social cohort based learning through the concept of a learning community as opposed to isolation. And there's still a place. There's still a place of course, for so many of these courses that lead [00:09:00] to credentials and certifications that help ensure that individuals are qualified in their field.
But there are many opportunities to engage in learners and advance their career. Capture their expertise outside of those in single one-time events. 
Sharon Pare: What would you say are some of the risks that will show up when learning is treated with those one-time transactions, that annual event, that one big main course, what risk will usually show up for an association?
Kurt Heikkinen: I know our clients are already seeing that. In the form of churn in membership, many organizations in the association spaces have retention numbers that aren't what they want them to be. Their retention might be 70% or 75 or 80%. So that's the first place to look is if you're not delivering a continuous always on engagement, that's the first thing that's gonna be impacted.
Where in your one primary course that they are mandated to take [00:10:00] is the breadwinner. You've invested so significantly in other pieces of content. We hear this problem statement over, and it sounds like this. We have great content, but it's underutilized and under consumed. We hear that over and over again, and so the way to help our clients reimagine.
A move away from a one-time experience. We ask them to talk about what makes their annual event so great. Or we ask the more broad question, what is the highlight of community vibrancy or vibrancy in your membership throughout the year? And inevitably they highlight their annual event or confide. They describe with superlatives how great it is, how individuals are connected, how they're sharing best practices, how they're learning, they're growing, how excited they are, and they can't wait for it to happen next year.
And then the risk is if you're over indexed on that single event, that single source of revenue, you miss out the other 360 days a year. [00:11:00] And why not? Why can't you? And you can, our clients are. Creating that always on engagement, where that same sense of vibrancy, the same sense of engagement, that content that you've invested in that gets overlooked, is being unlocked.
It is being captured. It is being founded. It is being utilized 365 days a year. That's the power of a learning community. 
Sharon Pare: So really it's less about delivering content, more about creating that context. 
Kurt Heikkinen: That's just it. It's all about relevancy. Most of our clients don't need more content. They need a form and they need technology to enable it, to ensure that content is served up through a personalized experience in a relevant way.
So members don't have to go search for it and find it. And think about how frustrating it is when you have to go two different places to search, let alone one, but you shouldn't have to search. When you think back about our consumer experiences, whether that's on Netflix or Spotify or Amazon, how much searching do we do versus [00:12:00] how much serving up is done?
How much content is presented to us based on the fact that we're known? That same thing should exist in a learning community. Members deserve to be known to understand past behaviors reflected, and whether that's content or connections or conversations, that's the power of an AI driven learning community.
So it's no longer about searching across two different sources where you have to log in twice, but it's more about the relevancy of content, connections and conversations being served up to me. 
Sharon Pare: So you're talking a little bit more about conversations and communications and connections, and this just brings us directly to community.
Let's use Peloton for an example, right? I don't do it a lot, but when I do, there's something fun that I love about it. You do the workout, but there's this leaderboard in community, right, where you just stick to it. So it's not just you doing the workout, but now you're like, you know what? I've gotta beat Callie Girl [00:13:00] 3 1 2, because she's on the lead award and she's number two and one. Right? There's just a sense of engagement that you get from that type of experience, and there's a shared experience there. So I think what I'm saying is associations have already potentially built that within their members, but it's not always activated intentionally.
Right. Kurt, my question for you is, why does pure connection create a kind of learning value? That content alone simply can't deliver. 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, I think you said it. You used the freight shared experience. If it were just about you getting on the treadmill and consuming a course or content, it would be different than knowing that you're going through that experience together and in associations more than just general social communities.
There is a passion around the subject matter itself. There's a deep passion around advancing the body of knowledge, and so communities unlock shared experience and shared [00:14:00] expertise and done right. It's not just about dipping in and dipping out and taking a course or reading a document. It really is about how can I learn side by side from my peers.
Informally as well as formally, and how can I also contribute to that body of knowledge or that community of practice? 
Sharon Pare: Is there something that separates organizations that truly leverage community from those that just simply provide the space for it? 
Kurt Heikkinen: I think that's a really great question. Really, when we first start working with a client, these are organizations who have come to us who are not yet clients of Forge.
We see really three different profiles. We see individual organizations who have never used community before. They're just exploring for the first time. Maybe they had a listserv, but not truly a community. We have organizations who have tried to adopt community, and in their minds it's a check the box member benefit.
They have it because their members ask for it. [00:15:00] So they check the box and they say they have it, but they wouldn't describe it as vibrant. And they often say We struggle with engagement. And then we have organizations who come to us where they would describe their. Community as having engagement, but they struggle to really associate, tie it to the member value proposition.
And they're wanting to think more broadly about the value of community and tying it to business outcomes. And we're seeing a shift. Those who really get it, think about community through the lens of what business outcomes does. A vibrant community. Generate. And if you can quantify and measure engagement, truly measure it not by logins, by vibrancy in your community, and tie it to outcomes such as retention.
Attraction of new members, the generation of additional non-dues revenue, or the increased consumption of content that you've had for [00:16:00] some time that has been stale or under consumed. That's really where the power of community and learning community comes in, and that's how we see more and more leaders thinking about community.
Not a check the box member benefit, but a real driver for value and member value proposition. 
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Members move seamlessly from formal coursework into a connected community where they can apply what they've learned. Ask real world questions and continue the conversation with peers who understand their challenges. It's not just an LMS, and it's not just a community platform. Journey by Forge brings learning conversation and insight together in one seamless experience.
So [00:17:00] instead of isolated courses, you create an active social learning environment where growth actually happens to see how it works. Visit forge.ai. That's F-O-R-J-dot-AI. 
Sharon Pare: You worked with EcoAmerica where courses and community originally lived separately. Could you walk us through what was happening there?
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah. They train thousands of climate ambassadors every year. When you think about that these individuals are there 'cause they have a passion for the cause. They're not required to fill this role. This is not a course that they have to take to maintain a certification in their field and to maintain their employment.
So experience matters in those instances, A as in most. And so they had two separate experiences and what they know they were really trying to drive not only [00:18:00] education, for someone to be deemed and qualified as an ambassador. Create a sense of how best to fulfill that role through the learning from your peers.
And so previously what would happen is they had a community and they had this course, and individuals inevitably would go take the training 'cause they wanted to support the cause and get the certification to be an ambassador. But that's when the experience would stop. They would never log into community 'cause they saw no purpose or meaning for that.
And many times they didn't come back to update or refresh their training. And so through the power of Forge by unifying community and learning together, that's where we unlocked great potential. And so now you look at an experience where a pre, during and post, you're actually engaging in conversation with your peers.
It makes learning social, it makes it interactive. It's not just a course that you check the box on. You have a [00:19:00] shared experience and a shared purpose. What has happened now as a result is their community has grown significantly. They're recruiting more and more climate ambassadors and in, and a higher percentage of those individuals are coming back over and over again to update their training.
So really great testament and story around the power of community and learning, uh, being a unified experience. 
Sharon Pare: So it sounds like learning became something that the members were a part of, not just something that they finished, not just stripped off the box. Kurt, why is it important for associations to understand and evaluate the difference between integrating community learning and technology intentionally built for unified community and learning?
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, that's a great question and one of the things that I think is really good news for our industry is we've seen a rise in RFPs, request for proposals, that ask for community and learning together from a technology standpoint. And thankfully we've also seen [00:20:00] competitors in our space talking about it as well.
And there's really been an increase in understanding of the why behind the value, and I think it's really important that. Buyers are able to discern the difference between integrated solutions and those that are intentionally built to unify that experience. And so here's probably the simplest way and the word of caution that I would offer.
If you have an integrated solution where it's two separate technologies still, yes, you'll get the benefit of single sign. You may get the benefit of a basic personalized experience because now you can tie a discussion thread to a course or a course to a discussion thread, but you're missing significant opportunities that only get unlocked when it's a single unified solution.
It starts with a unified experience. It continues with AI driven personalization and a unified experience. [00:21:00] We know every click. We know every conversation. We know every piece of content that has been consumed. We know every area of interest, and it gets back to serving up that experience, guiding that learner or that member through their journey.
You also get deeper insights that don't exist when you have two separate solutions that are simply integrated. And those insights unlock understandings of your members, their needs and their interests in ways that you didn't previously have access to, or other content ideas or program ideas. 'cause now you know.
What your members are talking about and what they really crave and how they enjoy learning. Beyond that, you simplify your tech stack and you reduce your costs. And so the difference between integrated. Integrated gets you partially the way there. A fully unified solution is where the true power is unlocked.
Sharon Pare: So what organization or mindset shift most often unlocks this kind of connected experience? I know you've touched a little bit about it, but can [00:22:00] we dig deeper into that? 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, please. I actually grew up on the client side buying and selecting and implementing software from vendors and I talk about my experience.
I say I stopped 29 years in counting. It's my 29th year over and over again. So I've been around a little bit, and there's data that shows regardless of buyer community or technology vendor, upwards of 40% of B2B buyers. That's what we're talking about here. B2B, buyers associations buying services or technology experience, purchase regret within the first 60 to 90 days.
Why? Because now that they're going through implementation, they're realizing that the solution they purchased. Doesn't adapt to their current or future anticipated needs. And so to your question, what is that though? Does that mind shift or organizational shift? It starts with one, start with a member experience in mind.
Don't dust off your old RFP from the last time you bought an [00:23:00] LMS or community solution. And use that as your requirements. Start with a mindset shift around member experience in the moments that matter too. Identify a business champion as the stakeholder. It is great. They do a great job of helping to validate how things will work.
You really should have a business owner driving and sponsoring the evaluation and tying it to business outcomes. And third, break down the silo. Stop buying technology where it's just one department or the other. Don't buy an LMS without engaging the membership team. And don't think about an upgrade to your community solution without engaging your learning team and your marketing team in that experience as well.
Sharon Pare: You bring up three really great points, and I think a lot of associations are still measuring learning by how much the content they offer, but as you said, that's just not the most meaningful metric anymore. So what's one assumption leaders should seriously [00:24:00] rethink right now? 
Kurt Heikkinen: Yeah, and I meet with dozens of CEOs a year and over.
I hear a concern around future relevancy. It's not. This year or next year, it's five and 10 years out. So the risk isn't assuming that you'll always exist, and the risk isn't assuming that your members will always want to be members. And so the biggest fundamental way of rethinking about your future is the challenge of competition that has increased exponentially over the last five to 10 years in so many industries.
Your members have mind share and wallet share that they're making choices around every day, and if you do not create the experience that is meeting their expectations, you will lose relevancy and you will lose your place as the trusted place for them to come and stay. 
Sharon Pare: Kurt, I really appreciate the conversation.
It feels like the future of association learning [00:25:00] isn't just more content, it's more connection. I appreciate you sharing your perspective today. 
Kurt Heikkinen: Thank you so much. And if I could leave one quick thought, because I know change is sometimes hard. It could sound overwhelming. Many of our clients have a staff of 10 or 20 or 30, and so the thought of changing sounds like too much.
Here's a mind shift in terms of changing vocabulary internally instead of saying our LMS. Or our community or our education, start to adapt the vernacular of our learning community, whether that exists for you or not today. Start using that vernacular, our learning community and see how it starts to change the conversations inside of your organization and how you receive the feedback from your learners and your members.
Sharon, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. It's been a great, great time together. 
Sharon Pare: Thank you, Kurt, for the final words. Appreciate it. Learning community. You've heard it from Kurt. Thank you. Thank you. 
And that does it for [00:26:00] this episode of Association NOW Presents:  Industry Partner Series. We'll have these special episodes throughout the year, and please make sure to join us each month overall as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Visit associations now online at associationsnow.com. Thank you everyone.

Examining the Changing Legal Landscape for Associations

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE, CEO of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, speaks with Jerry Jacobs, Esq., partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, about three major issues facing associations today: artificial intelligence, DEI, and misconduct at events. They explore why many organizations are adopting AI cautiously and the importance of guardrails, institutional licenses, and transparency when meetings are recorded or summarized. Jacobs also discusses legal considerations around DEI programs amid increasing scrutiny and evolving interpretations of civil rights law. The conversation concludes with a look at rising concerns around inappropriate behavior at events and why clear policies and enforceable codes of conduct are essential for associations.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/6YBt9suvV2U
 
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Tom Arend, CEO of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. Prior to serving as CEO, I was also general counsel of a large association. And prior to that, I served as a practitioner in the association law space in Washington DC.
Joining us today, we're excited to welcome Jerry Jacobs. Jerry is a partner at the firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pitman, LLP. Jerry has for decades been recognized as the dean of the association law world, both in Washington and across the country. He is a frequent commentator, author, contributor, and speaker on association law topics, and recently came out with the seventh edition of the Bible of association law, the Association Law Handbook.
Welcome Jerry. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Hi, Tom. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: So there's a lot going on in the [00:01:00] world right now, but we're gonna try and focus primarily on three topics. First topic has to do with the use of artificial intelligence in associations and by associations. Then we'll move on to the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion in associations, and particularly the recent changes in the federal law and the sort of broader federal posture with respect to the use of diversity, equity, inclusion in governance and decision making by associations.
Finally we’ll turn to another topic that causes a lot of angst among association executives, which is bad behavior among staff, among members, and among others in the association space, and how associations can most effectively deal with those situations. So in the area of artificial intelligence, actually, particularly today, here we are.
In the third week in February, 2026, and we're [00:02:00] reading today, yesterday, over the weekend, doom and gloom scenarios around the use of AI from a number of consulting firm newsletters and other experts in the field, and AI is clearly becoming a very complex, difficult issue for everyone to deal with. How in particular do you see artificial intelligence impacting associations, Jerry?
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: It's gonna affect us all sooner than later, from everything that I can understand. Last year we had a role in the transition of what's arguably the leading AI company in the United States and the world Open AI from its historic founding as a public charity to more emphasis on a taxable business corporation.
And I had a chance to look on the inside of the workings of a large AI company. And what I learned is that it's being utilized with new creativity and new efficiency in different ways by different [00:03:00] users. The association community, almost by definition, is a person-to-person field. There's advocacy, which is often one-on-one.
There's professional education that's often very personalized. There are communications networking that's always personal, and so I'm wondering whether AI is moving more slowly into the association community than elsewhere because of the personalization required to be successful in association management. But we're seeing association clients use it effectively for preparing content, for communications, for summarizing meeting discourse, for cleaning or mining long lists of members, prospects, vendors, et cetera.
And we've seen some. Fairly creative, but so far very limited uses by comparison as lawyers in the [00:04:00] law firm community, we're going headlong in use of ai and I'm not seeing that as often among associations. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah, I would agree with that. What I've seen both personally within the association that I work for and some of my other colleagues experiences in the last, I would say three to four years, is a, a slightly slower adoption than in some other spaces in the commercial area. But I do see that accelerating significantly, and I see both use cases internal to operations and management of an association, almost similar to any other large organization and then external use cases. And maybe we can talk about those.
I think in both cases, it's important at the beginning to set some guardrails, to set some policies and procedures, some very clear expectations about how it's going to be used by your internal staff. For example, in our case, initially, I recall we had different groups [00:05:00] using different platforms. We'd have one, the marketing group, for example, maybe using anthropic, and you'd have the finance folks using ChatGPT, and you'd have the comms people using something else.
And we ultimately got to a space where we said, hey, we've got to figure out, first of all, a uniform tool that we're all gonna use, that we all can become conversant on. And then importantly, we'll all have a corporate license for and we can use appropriately. And that ideally will help us better integrate what we're doing across the organization in ai.
And is that, what are some of your thoughts on setting up those appropriate? 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: That actually makes sense. You're providing computers and in many cases, ipads and phones to employees. So you have every right to restrict what apps and software are used on those machines. And many organizations are picking one or two buying institutional licenses, which will sometimes allow confidentiality of use of these tools, which is a, [00:06:00] a big advantage.
And yes, everybody is struggling with “What are our policies going to be?” A continuing question is what about members who wanna use AI to summarize meetings they attend? Yeah. Whether governance meetings or educational content meetings. I would think that in our experience so far, we see more associations come down on the side of denying and forbidding politely and diplomatically use of meeting summary AI tools by attendees simply.
Because it's better to have one official record of what happened, especially at governance meetings. But I really appreciate that the exigency of membership relations, you may not be able to hold out. The members may just demand it. And I have seen some pretty darn good summaries of meetings produced by these programs.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah, that's an interesting case. And that's exactly a case [00:07:00] that you can compare to. This is the new technology we have. In some ways, the outcome of that technology is not a lot different in kind than the outcome. Twenty years ago we said, oh, can we record this meeting? Can we do an audio recording of this meeting?
And for the reasons you articulated well, we don't necessarily wanna have, we don't wanna killl the debate among board members or committees or what have you, by them thinking, oh, some somebody's gonna look at, listen to this in three weeks or three months, and maybe I misspoke and I didn't correct it.
And to your point, we want the minutes to be the official record. And so that, my recollection is the universal recommendation would be no, you shouldn't record meetings as a general rule now. I agree with you and just I see the progression that we've taken and some of my other colleagues and other associations, almost every call I'm on it.
We just automatically record it. And the governance people, the staff people use that summary to then [00:08:00] create their own summary and then a set of minutes and it's just become so easy, not error free, to your point, it's always critical to review, have a human. Review everything, but it's hard to stand in the way of that progress from a governance entity.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: That's absolutely correct. And one final point, if we're gonna move on to another subject, we can't remind users often enough that right now AI's programs all hallucinate, they all make up. And, and so to develop something based just on AI and send it out to the members and find that a key fact or even an insignificant fact is just incorrect, will embarrass the association.
And so you've got to check the facts, although we are always surprised with the ability of AI programs to come up with things that we hadn't thought of or data points that we didn't know existed. But very often, not every once in a while, very often they make them [00:09:00] up and so you have to be sure and double check them all.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. Jerry, what about to this point? Everyone's on a Zoom meeting now, even when you are in person infrequently now, andwe all know it's being recorded by AI and will be used later. This notion of transparency around when we're using AI and then disclaimers to that effect. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: I think certainly when it's happening at a meeting, the attendees have a right to know that someone is recording what they're saying or proposing or objecting to.
So by all means, I think just membership relations again dictates transparency and openness, even to the point, does anybody object if we use this program in order to record and summarize this event in order to be more efficient in our work? 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: What about confidentiality concerns? I'm thinking of a board meeting.
A pretty standard agenda item is often executive session. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: One of Jacob's theories of Association [00:10:00] Law and Policy is that there's no such thing as a confidential association meeting because your volunteers are unpaid or just because this isn't the same as their employer. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: For whatever reason, it's virtually impossible to maintain complete confidentiality when you're making a major transaction and you're having it reviewed, or you're considering legislative or litigation advocacy alternatives or major budget issues, or you're evaluating the board itself.
Or senior employees of the organization, or obviously if you're listening to advice from your lawyers or investment advisors or others, confidentiality is important and it's a value to the success of the association, but it's very hard to maintain and, and it gets harder if people are recording meetings and you have no control over what they're doing with the recordings.[00:11:00] 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I've seen a, for lack of a better word, a diminution in the value of confidentiality and their respect for it. Over the years, I don't know, because everything is now just out in the open and transparent and accessible to everybody. People don't think as much about confidentiality. But yeah, that's definitely a challenge.
What about intellectual property concerns when you're using AI? Internally as well as for a lot of associations like ours, we have, we have journals, right? We have clinical practice guidelines, we have other documents, content out there, and in some cases we found they're already being used or have been incorporated into some kind of AI platform without our permission.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: It's the essence of what associations do to corral joint action for the improvement of this or that. Tocqueville remarked about it in the 1830s, how uniquely American it is. It's a [00:12:00] kind of barn raising mentality, offshoot, and from an intellectual property point of view, what. We have to worry about is, if six people or 16 people or 116 people together create something, they actually all own it unless they sign away their rights.
And yes, you need to be careful about creating content in a group, and you need to manage ownership of that. And if that means asking the participants to assign away any rights that they might have in it, usually as part of some other. Document, maybe on confidentiality or decorum for our meeting or agreement on what we're trying to achieve here.
And then you tuck in. And by the way, I agree that the association owns anything that's the output of this event and have 'em sign it. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. And then I know there a lot of significant cases right now before the courts around certain AI providers having gone into. Large news organizations and scraped [00:13:00] their archives.
And like I said, we've seen that with some of our clinical materials, journal articles, that sort of thing that are owned by us or in a lot of association cases. They might be owned by the publisher, but they haven't given any permission to do to use that and that, and 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Of course all of that is in litigation in a dozen cases.
And so far AI is winning. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Alright, last two questions on this area, then we'll move on. What about any insurance to try and protect yourself against liability, mitigate that risk. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Many associations now carry privacy disclosure data, privacy disclosure hacking damage insurance. I haven't seen the insurance community react or respond to risks from use of AI yet, and I'm guessing it's just too new.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: And then finally what I'm hearing is that there should always be this human oversight, this human intervention, whenever and wherever we're using it as an association.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: [00:14:00] Absolutely. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Alright, let's move to another topic that's very timely and also it can be very challenging for a lot of associations, and that's the changing legal landscape, federal policy.
Changes or almost a change to some degree in the zeitgeist of the country on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and the impact on associations and those programs. I recall that there was a case brought by, I think it was Students for Fairness or something to that effect, versus Harvard and University of North Carolina.
And the Supreme Court found that it was illegal, I think, contrary to the equal protection clause, to use any kind of race consciousness in admissions decisions. And then that decision has then been used to justify, essentially what we hear from the federal government is almost a blanket ban on using any diversity, equity inclusion criteria in [00:15:00] decision making, in awards, in contracting, in education.
At the association level, what have you, can you speak to that a little bit? 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: There's a tension. There's a tension between the scientific evidence that suggests that a greater range of voices, ideas, input, can contribute to a more successful output in almost any endeavor. On the other side, there are civil rights laws that have been in place since just after the Civil War that prohibit treating people uniquely because of their race, uh, and by extension from the civil rights laws in the 1960s based on other protected gender, ethnicity, that sort of thing. 
And so how does one resolve that tension? Up to now, it's been step by step, the 2023 Supreme Court case that you mentioned.
The court was careful to limit the purview of its decision to college admission decisions, period. I. [00:16:00] And yet the principle has been taken up, especially by this administration, and extended toward the policy view that essentially all diversity, equity, inclusion, even more broadly, environmental social governance, where and if it.
Results in treating any class unfairly, including those not specifically. Not in a protective class is wrong. Right? In fact, more than once, the administration in various contexts has said it's illegal, but without explaining what it is that's illegal or on what basis it's illegal. In addition to the Supreme Court case, though, we ought to be aware of one federal circuit.
Court case, 10th Circuit, in which a private foundation had a program that provided scholarships to black owned businesses, women, black owned businesses, and it required the recipients of those scholarships to sign a contract on [00:17:00] how they would use the money from the award. And that was challenged in court.
In the 10th Circuit, Alabama, Georgia, Florida purview concluded that violated the post-Civil War, civil rights lawon contracting based on race. What we have so far is college admissions and contracts, but there is a view. By extension of the Supreme Court decision and perhaps the 10th Circuit decision that any kind of benefit or favoritism based on any protected class, if your association has a women's caucus or if it has anAsian Engineers networking group, or Asian American networking group, anything that appears to provide a special privilege or benefit based on participation or non-participation in a protected class in the view of some. Certainly this administration [00:18:00] is problematic. In indeed the rhetoric of the administration is it's illegal.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. Yeah. I know you mentioned just as an aside, ESG, the corporate model of environmental, social, and governance. Using those rubrics and the impact an organization has in those three spaces that's really almost been lumped in now with these DEI prohibitions and I've seen a lot of organizations either abandoning their ESG efforts altogether, or significantly downgrading them or recharacterizing them, refashioning.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the majority of associations that since the second Trump administration began, or taking a look at how they describe various programs and whether there are ways to achieve the same result without using what are potential. Trigger words that could be picked up by a bot somewhere, and if not getting you in trouble, at least [00:19:00] shining a spotlight on you that you'd rather have shown on you.
So we have a lot of clients that are changing diversity to community, but without changing anything else. Query whether that's really worth the trouble because you might offend some folks in doing in your group.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Exactly. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: And even that, but it's going on a lot. One incident that's, that's too long and complicated to go into in detail, but the Department of Education confronted 45 or so colleges and universities for their sponsorship of a particular organization and required that they report back to the Department of Education on what they're doing to mitigate and moderate. Essentially, they wanted these schools to commit to not any longer supporting that organization and one of them. University of Kentucky actually published what had reported back to the federal government, and it went ahead and screened.
We don't know how, they don't [00:20:00] explain how they screened 1600 nonprofit organizations. The University of Kentucky somehow contributed to most cases, probably paying faculty or staff dues for a membership in an organization, purchasing publications or whatever. The University of Kentucky then excluded for from consideration 400 of those because they felt they really needed that.
Nonprofit credentialing organizations or whatever, but the other 1200, they basically put on a watch list and asked DOE what to do about it, because in those 1200, they found evidence of potential civil rights violations based on DEI. Mm-hmm. What they found. But the very number of 1200 means they must have used AI to just 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah.
Yeah. That, that's what we've been hearing as well, that they're using. Keywords. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Yeah. So the point is, do you want your association's website [00:21:00] to be called out impropriety illegality and have to defend it, or does it make sense to change some terminology? 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: So it seems like we're in a very murky environment right now, and even though a lot of times you hear this is absolutely illegal.
Whether something is legal or illegal is still somewhat being adjudicated right now. Formally that said, prudence wisdom probably dictates making some modifications. I've heard the expression used for organizations that feel very strongly about these issues. You don't wanna be deemphasizing, DEI, but at the same time, you wanna be de-risking your association and taking some prudent steps to at least get you out of the crosshairs of the federal government and some of these agencies that are looking for examples [00:22:00] right now.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: I think to conclude we ought to watch two things carefully. We ought to be careful as associations to not find ourselves in a position where we're actually entering into contracts such as scholarships that specifically involve preferential treatment to people based on race. We've got a late 1800s law that prohibits that, and we've got at least one for federal circuit court that said it's illegal.
So that's an area. We need to be careful of if you have a scholarship program where the benefits are based on racial characteristics, for God's sakes, don't ask the scholarship recipients to sign an agreement because that could get you over the line in terms of not just impropriety, but illegality, and then perhaps I would say softer.
Are you providing anything that could realistically be characterized as benefits or advantages to portions of your. Association constituency based on any protected [00:23:00] class characteristic. And it's just worth cataloging those and looking at them and asking yourself, does the culture history and success of your organization depend on perpetuating those or not, and make your decision.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. Yeah. Good points. Alright, let's move to our last topic, which is under the very broad category of bad behavior, bad behavior by members, bad behavior by staff, vendors, consultants in the context of association activities like an annual meeting or a board meeting or an educational course, and I think both of us over our many years combined have seen a lot of these in various different forms.
I will say what I find interesting, and I think something to keep in mind is how you deal with it. Also depends on what the dynamic is. Is it a member to member issue? Is it a staff to member issue? Is it a staff to staff issue? Is it a member to [00:24:00] vendor or external consultant issue? And we've had experiences with all of these various kinds.
How do you first set up? Again, going back a little bit to the AI adoption issue is the environment, the guardrails, the policies and procedures first to hopefully create an environment where you can at least discourage that and set up ways to address it if and when they do happen. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: I hope our behavior here has been beyond reproach, um, yours at least.
Jerry, has the problem accelerated in recent years? Is it COVID when everybody was cooped up? Is it just so much on the internet that everybody has access to right now? I don't know, but it is undeniable in our practice that we get far more frequent calls than we used to from our association clients about.
Bad behavior problems, usually at events, but not always. And it's almost appalling. Old fashioned sexual harassment is up [00:25:00] not down. And you would think that at this day and age we've gotten beyond that. Supreme Court has said that the sexual based conduct that makes a person reasonably uncomfortable is illegal.
And that an organization that does not have a written harassment policy is essentially defenseless against a claim, and that's basic. There's even a case in New York in which a member of an association asked to borrow an office while in the city from the association, and while there allegedly engaged in harassment, the association attempted to defend arguing that.
They had no control over this individual. He was just visiting the office, and the court said, no, you have an obligation to protect your workforce from this sort of thing by extension. That means that your associations have an obligation to protect your staff from attendees at events, engaging in improper conduct, specifically sexual harassment, but [00:26:00] also member to member to vendor staff, to vendor to staff, et cetera, et cetera.
I think we all know enough about sexual harassment to know what it is, how to help prevent it, what policies we need to have, et cetera. This is an issue that's been in the courts for the Supreme Court's Major decision was 20 years ago. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: But. What's new and unique we think is, is just extreme impoliteness.
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Individual dominating a board meeting and kind of not listening to other views and demanding the microphone far disproportionately to what is reasonable. Or individuals walking up to a long line at a registration desk and starting yelling, this is unreasonable. I don't have time to waste standing in this line.
Yeah, I paid my registration or I paid my dues, and those kind of situations are really difficult to deal with. One thing you pointed out that we find amazing is it really does depend who's offending whom [00:27:00] as to what the result is. We've seen associations where their leader, the elected chair, was accused of pretty significant wrongdoing, basically bearing their head in the sand and saying, he's one of us.
We'll talk to him, but no, we shouldn't offend him. He's one of us. A boorish vendor at a trade show booth, it's a lot easier to just throw the bone out. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Right? Yeah. I think I've, I'm aware of examples where, because of a lack of appropriate process, and I would say process and policies that specifically address the different contexts in which harassment, bullying, just poor behavior can occur.
I think how you deal with it. Internally and who deals with it is very important. In other words, if it's a member to member issue, my view is that you absolutely have to have peers, members primarily leading that charge. It's usually not well received [00:28:00] when staff are seen as the. Prosecutors, for lack of a better word, similarly, if the dynamic is between a member and a staff person who, whoever is potentially the individual at fault.
That's a little bit more of a tricky dance because I think you need to have some kind of a collaborative approach to it. There has to be a senior staff person, a CEO, or somebody at that level along with a member addressing it, because I think either way, if you. Turf it entirely to the membership or turf it entirely to the staff leadership.
You're gonna get one party saying, Hey, that's not fair to me. Those are I, my interests aren't gonna be represented, so I 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: You made a good point about having a baseline. Yeah. Too many of these situations arise in circumstances where the association has nothing to point to. It's really not a code of ethics issue.
Yeah. Not a business code issue. It's a behavior issue. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: It's a behavior, yeah. It's just you're being [00:29:00] a jerk. You're being rude, you're being disrespectful, you're being bullying. Whatever. 
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: More and more we are seeing associations develop a good behavior policy, having it have it approved by the board, and then have it click through for every single registrant at every single event I have read and understand the policy on behavior at this event and to move on.
Everybody's gonna click through it. Nobody's gonna read it, but if bad behavior occurs, you can point to that and say, look, you agreed to follow our code. There's ample evidence that you violated our code. We have to ask you to leave. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Yeah, no, absolutely. You've gotta have those codes of conduct on both sides, on the staff side as well as the member side and the vendor side, or consultant side as well.
Jerry Jacobs, Esq.: Yeah. Remember the Oscars award show a couple years ago when there was the famous slap? There was actually no code that dealt with that. 
Tom Arend, Jr., Esq., CAE: Unfortunately. There was something even. Awful. That happened recently at another award show that, yeah, it's, yeah, human [00:30:00] behavior always seems to exceed the battles that are set for it at some point in time.
Thanks, Jerry. We've covered a lot of ground from artificial intelligence to diversity, equity, inclusion to unfortunate and bad behavior within associations. Appreciate as always your thoughtful insights and counsel. Look forward to speaking again in the future. And in the meantime, I wanna say thank you to all of our listeners for this episode of Associations NOW Presents.
Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field. And highlight the significant impact associations have on our economy, the United States and the world. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Please visit Associations NOW online at associationsnow.com. Thanks [00:31:00] everybody.

Why AI Certification Matters for Association Leaders

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Dave Will, co-founder and CEO of PropFuel and host of Association Strong, is joined by Jason Oxman, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, and Amith Nagarajan, AAiP, chairman of Blue Cypress and co-founder of Sidecar, to examine the growing importance of AI certification for association leaders. They explore how AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into everyday workflows and why the real risk is not job loss to AI, but falling behind peers who know how to use it effectively. Amith discusses the challenge associations face in keeping pace with AI’s accelerating evolution, while Jason shares ITI’s practical, bottom-up approach to adoption, starting with small use cases such as meeting summaries, email drafting, and research, supported by clear acceptable-use policies and disclosures. The conversation also highlights how AI can strengthen member engagement through personalization, support board and staff education, and enable associations to develop new products and services for their industries.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/Xf3G-LmxEAM
 
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Dave Will: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Dave Will, co-founder and CEO of Prop Fuel, as well as the host of the Association Strong podcast. If you're listening to this, you'll love the Association Strong podcast.
You can find that at associationstrong.com. Today topic's all about AI certification and whether or not it's a valuable program for association executives. Spoiler, it is. So to dig into this a little further with me, I wanna welcome Jason Oxman, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), and Amith Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress, and the co-founder of Sidecar.
Jason, welcome. 
Jason Oxman: Thanks, Dave. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. 
Dave Will: Of course. And Jason, I just learned you are the host of the Download on Tech podcast as well, right? 
Jason Oxman: That is absolutely [00:01:00] right. We focus on public policy related to AI, so a little different than our conversation today, but a great opportunity here.
Conversations about advancements in tech. 
Dave Will: Who doesn't wanna hear more from government officials and Amith you. That was demeaning. I'm very sorry, Jason. I'm sure it's riveting. Talking to the government officials. Amith, welcome to this podcast. So Amith, you have the Sidecar Sync Podcast. 
Amith Nagarajan: I do.
It's a weekly podcast at the intersection of all things associations and artificial intelligence. We love doing it and the association community seems to enjoy it. 
Dave Will: So while we're on Sidecar, Amit, gimme 15 seconds on what Sidecar is all about. 
Amith Nagarajan: Sidecar is on a mission to educate the association world on ai.
It's very simple. We think that the catalyst to driving transformative change in associations is all about education. If we can educate 1 million or more people by the end of the decade, which is our mission at sidecar, [00:02:00] specifically in the association market, we think we're gonna make a big difference.
So our goal is to move the needle considerably on AI adoption, but AI adoption in the pursuit of driving transformational change. 
Dave Will: Was Sidecar originated with that intent or was, did Sidecar more or less embrace AI as it came to the forefront? 
Amith Nagarajan: Sidecar has been around about 10 years. It has not always been exclusively focused on AI, although AI has actually always been on the agenda for sidecar as a major item.
Up until about four years ago, we had a number of other things we covered, but we decided about 2020 1 22 that we were gonna go all in on AI and do nothing. Other than ai. So that's the shift we made. But the broader theme of sidecar is how do we help associations through change, through significant change, of course.
And right now, AI is the biggest driver of that. That may not always be true. And sidecars commitment is to be here for this community. Regardless of what the changing forces are at the moment, it really is about ai. [00:03:00] 
Dave Will: And Jason, before we dig into the AI talk too much, gimme 15 seconds on ITI. Why does ITI exist?
Jason Oxman: We are the oldest and largest trade association of the technology industry. We're founded in 1916 and we represent 80 of the world's largest technology companies, policy development, advocacy around the world, the regulatory and legislative environment obviously impacts the ability of the tech industry to offer innovative services to their customers.
And so the team at ITI, 60 people strong, spends all day every day advocating for public policy that helps advance innovation. Our member companies are all companies you would've heard of ranging from semiconductor manufacturers, data center operators, components manufacturers, big tech companies to the companies advertising in the Super Bowl against each other, the whole tech stack, if you will.
Dave Will: Yeah. Those are entertaining. Uh, the philanthropic and going after, was it Chat GPT, philanthropic going after Chat [00:04:00] GPT for the advertising? Yeah. We could have a whole podcast on advertising and AI. That'd be interesting to talk about. All right. Let's get into the topic, Jason. I've heard that 2026 is the year that AI becomes a productive tool for organizations.
I think what that means is AI has moved from this experimental phase where we're playing with it to making it more deeply ingrained in our operations. And so why the shift? What do you think changed in people's perspective of AI in the last year? 
Jason Oxman: I think what's interesting is AI is a technology tool, and I wanna oversimplify it.
It's software that does a lot of things very well, but it is still a technology tool. So every time we have technology innovation, we have questions about what it means for jobs and the dialogue around AI as a tool. Up until this year has been, I think, a positive and one perhaps driven by [00:05:00] curiosity, what is this gonna mean for my ability to do my job?
And that quickly became, what is this gonna mean for my job? And so if you look back over time, it's interesting to think about. MIT did a study on this last year. 60% of the jobs that people have today did not exist in 1940. Certainly a podcaster is a job that didn't exist in 1940, but overall, 60% of the jobs.
Out there in the country right now did not exist just a few decades ago, and that's because of changes in technology and we all have to adapt to that. I think our conversation today is important because it's a reminder that. My job might not be taken by ai, but it might be taken by somebody who knows how to use ai.
So I think it's more important to figure out how to use the tools to make yourself more marketable as an employee to make your organization more efficient and more effective than it is to view AI as something that's gonna cause. Such disruption that it eliminates jobs entirely. That's why this certification [00:06:00] conversation we're having, this education conversation we're having, particularly for the association community, is so incredibly important.
Dave Will: Did you say when you were introducing ITI, did you say it was 1960? 
Jason Oxman: 1916. So we're 110 years old. Our founding members were companies that made business equipment, so IBM, which used to be called the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, founded us in 1916. Back then, they made punch clocks and scales and adding machines.
NCR. Still with us today, one of our founding members made cash registers. So we used to be called the Association of Business Appliance Manufacturers. And I like the fact that you like old technology too. 
Dave Will: So I just pointed, if you're listening to this, I just pointed at an NCR cash register that's behind me.
I'm very proud of that. Actually, my grandmother was an entrepreneur. She owned a health food shop. When her husband died, she opened a health food shop and she had an NCR and I used to love playing with that. So she gifted it to me when she closed the shop and retired that [00:07:00] 1916. So I think back and at Thanksgiving and the holidays, I have conversations with my father-in-law who was a.
A developer back in the sixties and a developer back in the sixties used punch cards and yeah, it's just fascinating to think about the progress and the change. And so I take it based on what you're saying, you're not too worried about job replacement. Is that a fair summary? 
Jason Oxman: That's a fair summary. I'm not worried about job replacement.
I'm worried about people not recognizing that jobs are changing. 
Dave Will: Changing. 
Jason Oxman: Yep. And the tools that they need to be familiar with in order to adapt are very important to learn. 
Dave Will: Yeah. Amith you've been working in the association space for 25, 30 years. 
Amith Nagarajan: Yeah, it's been a while.
Jason Oxman: Yeah. And the association space is about, people are called associations because we bring people together to associate with one another.
There was this idea that [00:08:00] Zoom, which we're on right now, which is a great platform, and one of our member companies was gonna kill trade shows because people didn't need to travel anymore. But there is no replacement for the in-person contact with one another. The handshake, the eye contact, the conversation.
That's why trade shows continue to thrive, and the association community continues to. To thrive. AI is going to make it easier for us to develop content, to make use of that content, to bring people together, to research, to market all of the things that associations need to do. But it's not gonna replace that in-person contact.
And I think it's the same with jobs. We're gonna make jobs better. We're gonna free up time, be more efficient to do the things that only humans can do, but it's not gonna replace us. 
Dave Will: Yeah, it's not gonna replace my warm embrace when I see you at ASAE this summer. 
Jason Oxman: I look forward to that. Dave 
Dave Will: Amith, in your decades, which, by the way, you look amazing for having spent so many decades working with association. But if in your decades of working [00:09:00] with association you've seen a lot of change, when you first started working with association's, AMS weren't around. You started Aptify back in the day. LMSs weren't around.
I came out with one of the first LMSs back in the early two thousands. The rate of change though, that we're seeing with ai. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before it, it's unbelievable. How do you think the association space is responding or will respond to such dramatically fast change? 
Amith Nagarajan: Honestly, I'm pretty worried about it.
I think the association space is looking at this as another technology for the most part. I do think people are taking it seriously now as we enter 2026, which is great. I don't think they're taking it seriously enough. So I'm probably gonna come across a little bit negative, some of my comments, but I wanted to kind of reassure people that there's time to adapt, but the issue is that the speed at which this technology [00:10:00] is driving change is the problem.
It's not that we're not used to technologies driving change in jobs, and I agree with Jason, that's an excellent stat. 1940 to now 60% of the current jobs didn't exist. That should give us a lot of comfort. On the one hand, the flip side of it is that's 86 years. And the speed at which things are happening now is more like 8.6 months, right?
Is driving radical change. I agree with what Jason's saying that jobs are not likely to completely go away. But first of all, I don't know that any of us really know that to be true or untrue because we've never, none of us have ever been through this type of exponential change. What I will say is these systems that we have, whether they're systems of economy, politics, social systems, there's incentive reward systems in every aspect of life, in business and in personal life.
And the issue is that if you can substitute one product for another or one service for another, and one service is perhaps equivalent in value, but is dramatically less [00:11:00] expensive, or perhaps is even better in value and dramatically less expensive, you will at least seriously consider it, if not flocked to it, right?
It's unlikely that people will hire the jobs. To put it in, in labor economics terms that could be fulfilled by AI or could be 90% fulfilled by AI. So you think about jobs like customer service, a favorite one to pick on and say, is customer service currently being delivered in an extraordinary way universally across all companies everywhere in the globe?
I don't think anyone would say yes to that. That's why I say it in such a ridiculous way. Would most companies say that they love the customer service experience? They provide their own customers or what most associations say, they think the customer service they provide their members is extraordinary.
I don't think most people would agree with that statement. And if they could do that, and it's not about hiring tons more people. Maybe it's about taking the current people they have, but empowering them and that that's exciting. But most of the time when you're talking about like businesses, if you're saying, Hey, we have 5,000 people doing call center work.
I don't know that you're gonna keep 5,000 people. Maybe [00:12:00] not all the jobs go away, but a large number of them could. Now, that doesn't mean that those people can't be retrained. It doesn't mean that all hope is lost for those folks. I'm actually quite optimistic about retraining. I just don't know what those other jobs are yet, and that's what makes me nervous about this sector.
Coming back to it. I think associations have an extraordinarily important responsibility to themselves, internally and to their staff, but moreover to their sector, to their profession. Associations need to lead the way in terms of AI education for everyone, for themselves, and for their industries to help people figure this out, I definitely do not have all the answers.
I just think that the challenge is perhaps the steepest one we've ever faced when it comes to job retraining and readiness. 
Dave Will: So now a big part of that is the mission behind sidecar, and you guys have hands down, in my experience, become the leaders in AI education and now you've partnered up with ASAE there.
You and ASAE are working closely on this association, AI professional certification, otherwise known as [00:13:00] AAiP. If you're on LinkedIn and you're seeing any of your peers, it's unbelievable the number of people that now have AAiP next to their name. Can you walk me through a little bit of this training?
What does it entail? What's involved in the certification education process? 
Amith Nagarajan: I'd love to. The history behind it is we've been providing AI education in one form or another to this market for years, and about a year and a half ago, we decided that we wanted to produce a certification program so that professionals in this market could demonstrate that they have a strong level of competence in both ai, but also association use cases. How do you actually make AI practical for your association, right? Not just understand the theory behind it, but understand how to put it to work for you. And that's what the certification program is all about.
It was we need to teach you the basics so that you understand not just how to prompt ChatGPT. Sure, that's important, but we want you to [00:14:00] understand why certain things work. Why certain things do not work. We want you to be able to adapt and learn over time. So we also update the content extremely frequently.
Like every single month we're updating the content. To answer your question, Dave, we have seven courses that form the foundational layer of the AAiP certification, and those courses cover everything from foundational knowledge of what is AI and how does it work. We try to dispel a number of myths. We also try to provide some fundamental knowledge that we think is important for everyone to have.
Not deeply technical, but it does stretch your mind a little bit. I think in terms of understanding the technology, we want people to not look at it as a magical creature or a black box or something. We want them to have an idea of what's actually happening under the hood. We've touched, I think it's something on, on the order of about 110,000, 120,000 people that we've touched in some way.
Not with the AAiP program yet, that's over a thousand people now. But I'm talking about overall with our webinars, with our podcast, with our newsletters, with all the stuff that we do. We've touched a lot of [00:15:00] people. What we found is that people are both really curious, which is super cool and that the least technical association staff all sometimes are actually the best users of this technology, which I love 'cause that's not true for any other technology I've personally been exposed to.
It's normally the people that are most technically adept and the reason that's the case. Is because AI is so counterintuitive for technologists, right? We're trained to think in these very deterministic ways about how software and technology works, and AI is just this weird thing. It's non-deterministic, right?
It doesn't always produce the same outputs, given the same inputs, and a lot of times people that are more creative, people that have different backgrounds just find their way to getting more use out of it. In any event, the main point of the program is really simple. We want people to, number one, gain those skills and then we want them to have a valuable badge to be able to apply to their names so that they are recognized for their skills, for their knowledge, and for the value they can provide in our organization.
And we were surprised last year when we thought we might have a couple hundred people [00:16:00] get certified, but it blew up. And we love the partnership with ASAE. I've been good friends with. A number of people at ASAE and the organization as a whole since the nineties when they first started using my old company software.
And so I've known them forever and highly respect ASAE. And so partnering with ASAE to broaden the reach of the program is super exciting. So that partnership was launched in the fall and we're out there promoting it together. ASAE members do get a 10% discount. On the program, which is cool, and I can tell you more about it and double click on any of that if you'd like, but it's, we're very excited about it.
Dave Will: A number of my teammates at Prop Fuel have been certified with the AAiP and I'd love to see the rest of my team get certified as well. 
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Whether you're [00:17:00] upskilling your entire team or advancing your own expertise, you'll receive 10% off your subscription and access to the AAiP. Association AI Professional Certification. Get started today at sidecar.ai/asae and bring AI education to your organization today. 
Dave Will: I've been thinking about the evolution of AI usage recently, and I break it down into three tiers, and there's probably gonna be more tiers over time. In fact, I suspect you guys could probably expand on this, but the way I see it is, first it was treated like a fancy Google, one-off questions or help with creating content, writing a blog post, an email, making my email better, more concise.
The next tier is bigger projects that may require an MCP or multiple systems contributing data to do a [00:18:00] better analysis. And usually that's a collection in a multiple exchanges with one or multiples. And then the third tier, and this is the part that I'm most excited about implementing at my company, which is embedding ai.
Into continuous processes. And to me that's the holy grail when you've got it now baked into the way you do things. And I'm sure I could probably continue on. You guys more likely could continue on and say, then it's gonna do this, and then we could do that. But Jason first, someone working inside with that foundation, with somebody working inside an association.
Where does AI fluency. Create the most immediate impact. Is it operations? Is it member engagement, strategy, governance? Like where do you see AI playing the strongest role as the CEO of ITI? 
Jason Oxman: The biggest challenge any [00:19:00] association faces is engaging members, and imagine particularly for professional societies that may have tens or even a hundred thousand plus members.
The biggest use case that I see for AI is. The hyper personalization, if you will, of engagement with members, making sure that you're tailoring and making members aware of the offerings that are tailored for their specific use case. So I do think how members experience associations is what AI can really improve, and that's why it works.
Dave Will: You would think I fed you that answer. Coming from PropFuel, you would think I set that up for you, but it actually wasn't the case. But thank you for that. 
Jason Oxman: It was absolute not the case. 
Dave Will: Totally agree with you. 
Jason Oxman: I'm so glad to hear that. That's how I get invited back as a guest. But I do think that's an important use case.
And I also think it's important for associations to see this as a tool that can. Again, back to your jobs question [00:20:00] earlier, improve the efficiency of the way in which members interact with associations. So if you are in the customer service business and an association and you're getting dozens of inbound inquiries from members a day, you're gonna be able to respond to them more quickly.
You're gonna be able to find the information they're looking for more quickly. You're gonna be able to provide them, in fact. The tools they need to find the information themselves. So I do think there are improvements, as you noted to all of the operations of an association, but I do think that hyper-personalized experience, the one that AI can do better than anything else.
Think about an association like ITI that's 110 years old and think about how much material we have and how much content we've developed over the more than a century, and then think how hard it's to access that. A lot of it historically has been in a box, in a warehouse, but AI can make that all accessible in, in ways that are really useful to uh, members.
So I think that's the best use case for, uh, for associations for ai. And I'm really excited. Let me just say in response to what [00:21:00] ETH was talking about, I'm really excited about the work that he's doing with ASAE's job as an organization. Its whole reason for being. Is to help the association community do business, much as associations themselves, help their members do business.
The technology industry for us, and if I think back over my association career, what has ASAE meant to me? I'm a certified association executive, CAE through ASAE. Why did I do that program two decades ago? Because it helped me get my first job as a CEO and as an at an association because I could tell them that I got the education from the association of associations about how to run an association.
And going to ASAE's program with Sidecar to get educated about how to use AI in an association is just a great opportunity for all associations to take advantage of these tools. So I'm excited about that partnership as well. 
Dave Will: Boards are starting. Boards have noticed AI, so boards, for better or worse, [00:22:00] I think we have in the association space.
What I've witnessed in my work with associations is that boards are incredibly helpful and valuable and also very difficult and frustrating at the same time. Because essentially for staff members, you're working in the operations of the business. Probably know what you wanna do next. Now you gotta convince the board to jump on the bandwagon with you, and sometimes that's difficult to do.
As the boards are starting to ask more questions about ai, how do you think the certification helps professionals lead those conversations? Talk. Maybe you don't even have to answer that question. Just talk to me about how do we convince boards. To get on board with AI and specifically the certification.
Amme, take that one. 
Amith Nagarajan: Happy to. So I've been asked to speak to a number of boards by CEOs who believe that AI is going to drive change, but they're books don't buy it yet. And so what's 
Dave Will: your email [00:23:00] address Amith? 
Amith Nagarajan: It's Amith@bluecypress.io, just a Amith@bluecypress.io. Feel free.
Dave Will: I figured that might be a good time to plug that in there in case somebody wants your help and convince you for it.
But go on, tell, what do you tell? 
Amith Nagarajan: I love doing that, Dave. And hit me on LinkedIn too. I'm on LinkedIn a little bit too obsessively, but I've been asked to speak to a bunch of boards over time and speak at conferences and stuff, and when I do this. What I typically am sensing in the room is that the board doesn't yet really buy into the vision of their staff that they've hired that, whether it's the CEO, others, and part of that is because they don't think that those folks necessarily know that much about ai.
It was a year or two ago that boards generally themselves that didn't have much of an idea of ai, but now I'm finding that boards, they're not necessarily super well educated in ai, but they have a. Much better sense of it than they did a year or two ago, but they're not necessarily feeling that their staff is prepared.
And so when they bring in an outside expert to say, okay, this is the way AI can shape the association, that is helpful. But it doesn't matter how many outside [00:24:00] experts you get, we've got tons of them over here. Our business includes chewing, lots of consulting. We've got software companies that produce AI products.
We think, obviously they're all great, but they will make absolutely zero difference to your association by themselves if you don't educate your own people. And so the point of the certification is to bolster confidence in yourself that you know a good bit about AI and to showcase to your community, including your board, that you're prepared to do this.
And so that's just step one. Now I will say two quick things about education that are really important. And I think this is true for all education. It's extremely true for AI specifically, and that is you have to start small. You can't just start, you can't swallow the elephant in one bite, and two is you have to maintain your knowledge.
You cannot assume that just because you have earned a certification, whatever certification it is that you're quote unquote good on AI because AI is changing at this ridiculously fast rate. Even those of us who spend basically all of our waking hours trying to learn this stuff, deploy it, build solutions with it, we're all overwhelmed if [00:25:00] we tell you the truth.
It's extremely overwhelming. The technology is doubling in power at roughly a six month interval. So just think about that for a minute. Every six months that this technology doubles in power, that makes Moore's Law, which we benefited from and still benefit from for decades. Quaint in comparison. Moore's Law basically stated that computing would double in power relative to price roughly every 24 months.
And it did like clockwork for years and years. And the compounding of that resulted in actually what. Powers ai, but it was actually a very slow curve compared to what's happening now. So the point is that knowing what you think you know about ai, if your knowledge is circa 2025 and it's 2026, you're outta date.
And so from our perspective, the way we try to approach it is to get you started with small, consumable bites and then to keep feeding you over time. So our program isn't a one and done. Yes, there's the certification. Most people earn it in about six to eight weeks of time. It's about 20 hours of total time [00:26:00] commitment to earn it.
But the key to it is that to maintain your certification, you have to do work every year. You have to do a certain number of additional education. This is very common in association certification programs. We provide a couple courses a year that are what we call refreshers that update your knowledge. So that you can understand what's changed every six months.
And then in addition to that, we ask you to complete some additional coursework, either from us at sidecar or from anyone else that you choose, that you bring to us and we authenticate. So I think it's really important to think about both of those dimensions. It's a start small because otherwise you'll be overwhelmed by it.
You won't do anything. Most people I know, they say, I really wanna get started with ai, but I haven't had time. And I ask them, okay, what about 15 minutes tomorrow morning? Do you have 15 minutes tomorrow morning? And they say, yeah, I could probably make 15 minutes tomorrow morning. I'm like, okay, cool. Do that.
And then what about the next morning? You have 15 minutes and so on, right? And it's, the idea is if you carve out a small amount of time, it can take you 15 minutes. If you've got a half an hour, even better. But do something every day. Listen to a [00:27:00] podcast, play with some type of software, read a book, watch a YouTube video.
There's so many resources. Obviously Sidecar has great content that's at this intersection, but if you do something consistently, that's when you're gonna become an expert. You have to stay at it. 
Dave Will: Jason, tell me about your experience. As a CEO there leading the charge with ai, and tell me what was relevant, whether it was your exchange at the board, or your influence of your employees, or maybe it's the interest started at the staff level and they brought you along.
Tell me about your experience in embracing AI at ITI. 
Jason Oxman: Yeah, and I think as we've been talking about, there's some natural hesitancy to overcome because people are worried about what it means for their jobs. 
Dave Will: Were you hesitant or was your staff hesitant? 
Jason Oxman: I think the staff was hesitant. Okay. The board was certainly, and our board is not made up of technical experts.
Ironically, given who we represented as an industry, the board conversation was more about [00:28:00] just making sure that the tools we use are beneficial to the membership. But we took a bottom up approach to it. We didn't take a top down approach because the board was not driving the conversation about AI usage.
It was more about people on the staff being familiar with the industry. We represent all of the large model companies that are making these AI tools available. So it's obviously part of our daily life here at the organization, but not the technical side. Again, we are a government affairs policy focused organization.
So that bottom up approach meant we had a staff team that we formed, a staff working group who were interested in using AI to develop the. Policies and procedures for the use. 'cause that's important to have on board the acceptable use policy. How do we use it? How, what do we disclose about when we're using AI with a membership?
But also just looking at what kind of tasks were amenable to using AI to improve. So we started with use cases. Small ones that were actually pretty easy to deploy. Summaries of meetings, for example, email [00:29:00] drafting, for example, research on behalf of our members rather than trying to revolutionize everything at once and take on AI capabilities for everything.
And that bottom up approach led to the rest of the organization saying, oh, I see you can actually use AI in a way that makes it more efficient. You can do minutes of committee meetings a lot more quickly and move on to something else that's more strategic. So that approach really worked to help the rest of the staff.
See this as an opportunity. See the tools as something that could, IM improve the way they were able to do their jobs. 
Dave Will: Jason, what's the best way to reach you if people wanna connect with you? 
Jason Oxman: I'm on LinkedIn at J-O-X-M-A-N, Jason Oxman, or my email address is joxman@itic.org. 
Dave Will: Amith. Jason, thank you for the time today.
Is there anything that's in the back of your mind that you wish I asked? Is there anything you wanna say before we wrap it up? Amith, why don't you go first if you have something. 
Amith Nagarajan: I have a quick thing, which is the question people often don't [00:30:00] ask, but are probably thinking, which is, why should I do this right now?
Yeah. My answer to that is very simple. The speed at which this is moving will leave you behind if you don't get started. It is totally something you can do no matter where you're at today, but that won't always be true if you just sit on it. You have to go take action. I think every leader at every level needs to do this. This is not a thing for staff. This is a thing for CEOs. This is a thing for boards. This is a thing for everyone, and on the everyone comment I'll end with. I think that if you do not provide your staff with both the opportunity and frankly the mandate to learn AI, you're not only really underserving your own organization, but you're hurting your people.
The question you should ask yourself is those who are not. Very skilled with AI within six, 12, certainly 24 months. Will they be sought after as employees by you or by any other organization? And the answer is a pretty clear no. That you will not be employable [00:31:00] if you don't know ai. So as a leader, it's really your responsibility to make sure your team's future is bright with you and perhaps beyond your organization.
And so that's why I think this is such a serious topic for us to jump on. 
Dave Will: Amith, you said an interesting word, “mandate,” and I gotta say, at least in my company, granted we're a software company, but I don't think it's about software. We get so excited, like we get so worked up and excited about the things we're doing differently using ai.
I do not need to mandate. The interest. We, I don't need to force it down people's throats. People love digging in. And the more, like most things, the more you get passionate about something, the more you want to do it over and over. And it's incredible the passion we have on our end around ai. Jason, anything you want to add before we wrap this?
Jason Oxman: The only thing I'd add to your excellent questions, Dave, is the question of [00:32:00] associations thinking about how to improve their own practices and procedures using ai. We've been talking about that kind of the inward looking questions, but also encouraging some outward looking questions. Associations have customers who are their members, they represent industries.
What can associations deploy these tools on behalf of their members, make capabilities available that serve their members or the industries they represent. And obviously, Amith has done exactly that with the partnership with ASAE, ASAE's customers, their community, their members are other associations. So these tools that Amith has has deployed on behalf of the association community are what ASAE is providing to their customers.
But of course, there's an association for everything. So we should all be thinking about how we can help our members and our industries. Also use these tools to help satisfy the challenges that they have through AI education. 
Dave Will: That's a great point, Jason. Some of the most innovative associations that I've worked with in the past have built their own software companies or [00:33:00] invested in software companies or come up with incredibly creative.
Tools or services for their members that drive additional revenue? Uh, yeah, that's a great point, Jason. 
Amith Nagarajan: I agree completely with that. I just wanna say that that's where associations looking at the industries they serve are going to thrive because those are the services and products that people want to buy from you, that they're not yet buying from your associations.
And it's also. A completely achievable goal. We actually help a bunch of associations create branded, tailored content just for their industries, and there's lots of ways to go about that, but it's an achievable goal, and it's something I think associations are perfectly positioned to go after and both capitalize on and deliver extraordinarily value to their members.
Dave Will: And to add to the list. I'm Dave Will, also on LinkedIn. My email is dave@propfuel.com. Thank you, Jason. Thank you Amith. And thank you to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents. Join us each month as we explore key [00:34:00] topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US, and the world.

Practical AI: How Associations Are Putting It to Work

In the first episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, guest host Sharon Pare, Director of Partnerships at HighRoad Solutions and co-host of the Rethink Association Podcast, sits down with Lance Wiggins, CEO of the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association, and Layla Masri, Vice President of Customer and Product Intelligence, AI Strategy, and Adoption at Higher Logic, to explore how associations are using AI in meaningful and unexpected ways. Lance and Layla share their professional journeys and discuss how AI is being applied to real-world association challenges—from improving efficiency and reducing errors to strengthening member engagement. Lance highlights how AI tools have reshaped technical support and training within his organization, while Layla emphasizes the value of starting small and building confidence through early, impactful wins. The conversation also addresses the importance of using trusted platforms, like Higher Logic, to adopt AI securely and responsibly. Throughout the episode, the guests underscore how thoughtful AI implementation can free up staff time, improve service delivery, and deepen relationships with members.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/T_L5q9QcfDA
This episode is sponsored by Higher Logic.
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Sharon Pare: [00:00:00] Welcome to the inaugural episode of Associations NOW Presents Industry Partner series, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Sharon Pare, director of Partnerships at High Road Solutions, a HubSpot solutions and implementation partner, and your hosts of this series throughout the year.
This episode today is sponsored by Higher Logic. Today we're excited to welcome Lance Wiggins, CEO of Automatic Transmission Rebuilds Association, and Layla Masri, VP of Customer and Product Intelligence, AI Strategy and Adoption at Higher Logic. Layla, Lance, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us today.
Lance Wiggins: Thanks for having me. 
Sharon Pare: Well, before we dive in, I'd love for each of you to give a quick introduction for our listeners a little bit about who you are. The organizations you represent, and since we're talking about AI today, I wanna know, this is a little bit of an icebreaker here, but [00:01:00] what is one way professionally or personally that you've unexpectedly started using ai?
Layla Masri: All right, so yeah. Thank you Layla Masri. So I am a new hire to Higher Logic, but come from a very deep association marketing background. Many of you in the association space know me from 20 plus years that I ran my own digital agency. Worked with tons of different membership associations doing web and app development, interactive.
Capabilities and so I'm very excited to help Higher Logic, head up AI practices, and build out what is looking to be an extremely robust pipeline for 2026 and beyond. I have used AI most recently in some really fascinating ways. I have used it. To craft jokes to send to my kids really bad Dad jokes. I have used it to create the proper ratio for hanging photos on a [00:02:00] wall.
I have most recently used it. I am going on vacation shortly and I used it to help me strategize my itinerary where a couple friends were joining in the middle of a trip. So I had to optimize the key sightseeing moments, but then also build in a really robust amount of things around it. Super geeky, very helpful.
 
Sharon Pare: Love it. How about you Lance? 
Lance Wiggins: I am the CEO of the Automatic Transmission Rebuild Association. I have been with this company since 1999. The company has been in existence since 1954, celebrating our 70 plus birthday here shortly. We are the only association in an entire planet Earth that does this.
We are a facility that we do research training for transmission shops internationally. We have a little over 2000 shops in the United States. From coast to coast, north to south, we have rebuilder and [00:03:00] warranties that go from Canada, all the way through, the United States. We have chapters that are in Canada, chapters that are in Latin America, chapters that are in Australia, Asia, Australia, chapters that are formulating now currently in the UK as well.
Primarily our goal is to help transmission shops fix your vehicle. There are billions of vehicles out there right now with automatic transmissions in them, how to diagnose 'em, how to fix 'em, how to repair 'em, how to, and also to make sure that we are servicing the customer. We are all servants here at the association, so our culture is of that.
I've been a coach for 25 years, so I know how to coach people. I know how to coach other things. Believe it or not, we've actually been using AI in the automotive industry since, I'm guessing it started back in 19 96, 97 when we had adaptive strategies for transmission. So [00:04:00] adaptive strategies on any vehicle.
Once you rebuild the vehicle, rebuild the transmission, it doesn't know who's the, who the driver is. It doesn't know what the baselines are. It's basically when it gets rebuilt and reinstalled, you can consider it. A toddler, it doesn't have any idea how to walk or shift, right? Or who the driver is. Some drivers are leadfoot, others are soft foot.
You adapt the transmission and once the shifts start getting better and you start getting smoother, then you give it to the customer, and the customer say, it didn't shift this smooth before. I liked it when it shifted. A little bit firmer. Typically, we will tell 'em, give it a couple weeks and come back for your checkup.
If in a couple weeks it's still the same way, we'll take a look at it, but more than likely, it's gonna adapt to who you are. We currently use AI for our technical hotline through Hire Logic, actually, and or one of our partners. We've, we've named our AI assistant techie go figure, and in we can ask it [00:05:00] all kinds of cool questions about automatic transmissions.
It pulls everything from our 90,000 pages of data and it's really helping our association and our members gather information a lot faster than making the phone call and going through that, that, that pro, that process. 
Sharon Pare: I think that's incredible. Lance, in the nineties, adaptive strategies and AI existed before I think we even knew what AI was.
So love to hear about this in the podcast today, and we're going to dig into the six points that Layla has shared about AI adoption that has come up again and again in conversations across our industry. So I think the perfect time to unpack them. Is today from both the technology and the association perspective.
So let's kick it off. And Lance, I know you're about to just get into this here too, but there are so many organizations that are getting stuck thinking they need some type of full strategy before they can even start. So Lance Layla, I'll leave this open for both of you, but how are you identifying that [00:06:00] first meaningful use case for ai?
And Lance, if you wanna dig into this phone line system, or Layla, how you help them implement this, that'd be a great start. 
Lance Wiggins: Sure. So we have had technical department. Since the late eighties, and typically you want to go, for those of y'all that don't know about faxes, fax mill was a big thing back in the day, right?
And so if somebody would call with a problem on a vehicle, we would go through the different scenarios, fax them over a check sheet, or, or a fix, or definitions or specifications, whatever the case may be. That's how that would go. Then email became a thing, and then now with our AI, what the way we use it is actually a lot more efficient, a lot faster.
It's freeing up our technician's time. Even when the phone call comes in, we actually, our technicians go to the AI assistant with [00:07:00] 90,000 pieces of material that we've done in over the course of 35, 40 years. Nobody knows where everything's at, and this is, it's literally, this is like going to a library back in the day.
If I date myself at 55 years old, back in the day, you actually went to a Rolodex and you opened it up and you pulled out the card and you went over to the location where it was at. This is exactly the same thing, just a heck of a lot faster, and we found that the timing that we have to actually do more research on vehicles.
It's unprecedented. We just have a lot more time to, to actually dig into real world problems that prior to that we just, we didn't have that much time. So it's working for us. 
Layla Masri: That's a perfect use case and a great way to dip your toe into the water is to figure out what you have already on hand and or what things you're struggling with.
If there's something you're doing, your staff are doing 50 times a day or a week, [00:08:00] those are things that are just absolutely slam dunk opportunities to look and see if there's a way that AI can optimize and assist with those types of repetitive tasks. It frees up your stuff to do the more needy subject matter expertise, like really digging in with personalized service.
I've found that that has been a really great way to dig in there. Associations somewhat stereotypically, I will say, have. Often been somewhat risk averse and we've seen so much technology come our way of faxes, right? Websites, apps, all of these things like I have lived through the development and creation of those things.
I've helped people implement them, and I think any new technology is gonna come across initially is big and scary. You're worried. Do I have the time, the people, the budget to learn one more new thing to implement this. But there's also that balance of understanding that your members are expecting you to go places with them and to be somewhat forward thinking.
So the [00:09:00] thing that is so promising about AI is that this is the lowest risk technology pilot that I've seen in 20 plus years. You don't need extra budget, you don't need extra people. You can bite off just the teens CS piece and especially using tools like Higher Logic where they're built in. And for our customers, they're free to charge as well.
It's great to just test your, you put your toe in the water, test them things, and then iterate and build from there, which is exactly what Lance and the team are doing. 
Sharon Pare: And I know a lot of folks are still feeling really intimidated by ai, but I love that toe in the water analogy that you just mentioned, Layla.
So. What does that actually look like for associations who are starting to explore ai? I know you started talking about it a little bit, but what are some of those smaller, low risk ways that they can start experimenting with it now? 
Layla Masri: Sure. I can give you two examples that we actually have inside of our Higher Logic Thrive software that are already going gangbusters and are gonna be built out with a lot more functionality in 2026.
So one of [00:10:00] them is the idea of an ai cis. Right. We're at this point, a lot of us are using things like chat, GPT. Lots of us have already used chatbots in various ways across different websites, not just in the association space, but whether you're traveling or whatever. A lot of the kind of back and forth with a chatbot, and that's the lowest I think, hanging fruit that you can implement right now.
And the wonderful thing about using an assistant. Is that you can create a closed wall garden of your content because certainly a lot of associations, of course, we're investing in our own content. We are curating, and that's part of what your membership value is, getting that specialized content that you can only get with a membership.
So we don't wanna put that out into the world. You don't wanna feed that into the chat GPT and let everyone have it. It devalues the membership. It devalues the importance of that research and the exclusivity of your content. With chatbots like the AI assistant, you can actually have that [00:11:00] walled garden where you can say, I would like you to search within my, my repertoire of all of my documents Lance was saying.
Go through that look and see what's available. You can send me to relevant documents. You can suggest events. You can basically pull from all of the things in your learning management system and your content management system, and you can quickly get people to places. However, we all have seen the Yeah, but you might not have the right thing that I want.
And I think one of the best things that we have been implementing is this idea of. Ask my fellow human if I don't get the right answer, if I'm not seeing what I want, or, this is interesting, but I want more. That's the real value is not replacing the human being, but giving you access to information and then allowing you to pose that back to your member community, to then richen the experience and truly.
Take what you've learned from that initial pass with a chat bot, for example, and then take that out into the world and see what your fellow humans are actually experiencing. So it's a really [00:12:00] nice blend of, again, trying out functionality, but also ensuring that you are getting the best of what your colleagues and your professional network have to add to that.
Sharon Pare: And Lance, I've got one for you. And I know that the A TRA has been familiar with AI for quite some time here now, but was there something that made it feel. More manageable for your team instead of overwhelming that you can recommend. 
Lance Wiggins: So for us, it's interesting. I have to digress back to my, my history really as a coach and a football coach, I'm used to change.
Literally you change every half. Sometimes you change in the quarters, sometimes you change of practice. So the whole aspect of new, to me, it's like it's, I'd live it. Our culture here is very much the same. We love technology. We absolutely thrive in technology, right? We, we looked for ways to do things more efficient [00:13:00] and to be better, to better serve essentially our members.
The internet was a big deal back in the day when we launched, we actually launched. ATRA online back in the late nineties, early two thousands. It was like, oh man, look at, this is magical. And it was pages and pages and pages and nobody minds scrolling. Nobody. You'd search for something, you'd scroll and scroll and scroll, and you'd finally find something, maybe you didn't.
Then we decided to add some descriptions, and then that was a big deal, right? And then we decided to add just the transmissions, and then that was a big deal. Now. When you go to the internet, we the company, we don't go to the internet. We go to an ai. We either go to Gemini or we go to chat GBT, or we go to Gro or we go to Techie.
So if we're inside of our higher logic profile, we go to techie. We ask that question in techie, and if he doesn't know. With a [00:14:00] few adjustments that we made because Allis want to give you an answer. They all, it doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong, they want to give you something, feel compelled to just give you something which we appreciate.
But in our world, if we give them something that is inaccurate, that could cost 'em thousands of dollars, it could cost some customers, it can cost us thousands of dollars and customers on our end, we've worked really hand in hand with. Higher logic to, to try to finite our material because it's 275 different types of transmissions out there at any given time.
Uh, 2000, if you go back to 40 years from now, and each one of 'em, while they're different, they work the same internally. The rules virtually the same. And if we don't have the information, we want them to go ask a human, along with what Layla was saying. If somebody goes on and says, I have this transmission with this problem.
And our AI assistant gives them an answer, [00:15:00] but it's not what they're looking for. They can simply ask a human, and then, and now they have a chance to ask 12,000 different individuals, including our technical department and the, and now the answers that come in are. Become part of the AI as well. So it's gonna continually keep learning and learning where that did not happen before, but that wasn't even a part of our thought process.
Now, to give our members an opportunity to see this, to give our own technical department an opportunity, and I want to say this, there were times where we didn't really know what question to ask, and with the formulation of ai. You're asking questions, you didn't even, because you're getting an answer, wait a minute, and then you ask another question, then it, and then another question, and then all of a sudden, four hours later you find yourself, ah, that's the answer I'm looking for.
But it's a wonderful tool that we're currently using and, and I just, it's gonna enhance our association. It's gonna propel us into another [00:16:00] sector, another sector that we've never been in before, actually. 
Sharon Pare: I think that's a really great point, and I think this brings us to one of our next key points.
It's, we're talking to ai, it keeps iterating with us. But I wanna ask this, Layla, but where do you see AI helping associations, reducing those human bottlenecks or operational slowdowns? I know that's a another key point that you mentioned has been brought up time and time again, but is there, what do you see there?
Layla Masri: Yeah, I mean, there is a concern that people have that, like Lance mentioned, it is very important that you can validate that the information that people are getting suggested to them by AI is what will be helpful. It is the right answer. So that's always a key concern. Of course, knowing that the information is coming out of your system makes it a very trusted experience.
But ironically, avoiding AI sometimes is often riskier than using it, presumably because it can help catch mistakes. It can help reduce [00:17:00] some of the things that human error can introduce. AI can often solve for that. But I think the real beauty of AI is that it's just, it's so fast you can get answers in seconds, and like we said, if you don't get that answer, your tools can prompt you where to go next or can ask you questions you didn't think about.
That's one of the things I love about using some of the tools like GPT, et cetera. Where they all, they never just give you the information they end with. Could I help you find an event to go to that would cover this information? Or are you looking for resources? May I connect you to a Higher Logic community where this is being discussed.
So it's really a lovely way to keep that conversation going. As I mentioned, reducing repetitive staff tasks that can introduce inconsistency. That's a great way. To employ ai. It can also help if you have a small staff, which many people do. You can use AI to help teams respond to [00:18:00] things faster. So actually providing better member service and then being able to funnel people that do need that kind of personal assistance, but you do help reduce that overall workload.
And then really it's like having an insurance that you are providing a timely communications with people, it standardizes a lot of the delivery of that material because typically if you're reaching out to a customer service, you're getting my way of telling you this information or Lance's way of telling you this for information.
The nice thing is you can have that beautiful quality control. This is how we want to talk about these things, or these are the kinds of resources that we want to offer. So it does provide a lot. Of risk reduction and it does speed up operation so that it again frees you up to do the things that humans are really good at.
Sharon Pare: Lance, is there an example where AI has helped her team to work smart and avoid errors? Just digging into what Layla had just mentioned 
Lance Wiggins: soon. I'll say that the transmission is a very complex piece of machinery, [00:19:00] so at any given time in a transmission, he could have 500. Pieces of parts, right? Our system and the way that it uses our material is again, based on what we've loaded into, and pretty much we've loaded almost everything.
It's learning our videos, it's learning our rebuilding videos. So to give you that example, we asked a question last week on how to rebuild a pump. Assembly from a 10 R one R 80 transmission, and it gave us some generic information. A week later, we asked the same question. Not only did it give us the accurate specifications, but it also gave us three sources to go and look and view for our pleasure as well.
So now you can go to the [00:20:00] PDF, you can go to the video. You can see how the pump is built. So as it's learning, like I mentioned, it's like a toddler now. Maybe it's a five year old and seven year old. And the more information you give it, the fungi year it becomes, and really for us, it's just making sure that the information we're giving it is accurate.
And our technicians, we've got 300 years of technical experience between everybody here, including myself. When we build things and we edit. We make sure that quality control maintains The difference is if you, if you drop that stuff into Gemini or drop that stuff in a chat, it, it pulls from all over the place.
That's where you can get in trouble. Yep. You can really get in trouble. 
Layla Masri: If I could add one other item. As you said, it's every month, every day. It feels that the agents, these engines are getting smarter and smarter. There are things that I can do now that six months ago wasn't [00:21:00] able to do. Same for pretty much anybody across the AI universe.
The half-life on improvements is just. Astonishing. And I think what we're really seeing is AI is improving in a way that allows us to get better info to answer things more accurately. And in fact, that's what Higher Logic is devoting a lot of our roadmap and AI development to do. And this is what we're focusing on right now.
And then definitely for 2026 and beyond ongoing releases. And you mentioned, Lance, you mentioned adding video and that's one of the things that I am personally so excited about. Is the ability for AI to add transcription to video and to be able to search it. How game changer that is. If you like this exact podcast, being able to search for text and language and phrasing inside a video like that is.
Super exciting. 
Sharon Pare: Our logic unifies your community marketing, learning events, and more into a complete engagement [00:22:00] ecosystem. So every member touchpoint feels connected and personal. With AI powered campaigns and vibrant online communities, members feel seen, supported, and excited to engage every day. And because everything works together, your staff spends less time wrestling with tech and more time achieving your mission.
Plus you get built-in strategic guidance and support to boost retention and turn passive members into passionate advocates. See how higher logic is revolutionizing engagement by booking your demo@higherlogic.com. I wanna shift gears a little bit. See what I did there, Lance? 
Layla Masri: Anyway. You mean to need chat GPT or write your dad joke for that?
Sharon Pare: Just ask my dad. Dad jokes of association. We talked last week and you both said that this is the first time we've all had, we've had technology that's now truly accessible to everyone. So what do you think makes AI different from some of those past digital tools? 
Lance Wiggins: For us, it's. [00:23:00] By far, it's the speed of searchability.
It's the q and a. It's the informal formal conversation. You, as you're talking to our techie program, it's asking other questions, and then as you're having that conversation back and forth, it's like. When we have a brand new trend that we, we actually have a brand new transmission down there from Toyota.
It is state of the art. It's a CVT transmission that doesn't have, uh, a belt in it. It's two electric motors that run this. It is state of the art. It is the future of CVTs. It's pretty awesome. We pulled it apart, so you got three guys sitting there pulling it apart, figuring out how to pull this thing apart.
There's no videos on it. There's the Toyota hasn't released anything on it. We're all bouncing stuff off of each other, right? And so we're taking pictures and we're doing things. The motor is the same type of motor that's used in other, like Elon Musk has in this Teslas, right? Same type of motor. So I'm, all right, let's, [00:24:00] let's go to our programs and we start researching some of the programs, start finding out how the motor actually works.
Now we can put it into our own words, how that works. Once that happens, we put it into our higher logic platform. Now when we do the videos where we do the shoots, we do the, anybody that gets on there when they search this transmission is gonna have an endless supply of material that they can't get.
They can't get it from Toyota. That's another thing that I think is very interesting is all of the manufacturers, all of them back in the day. We used to go to a helm, a bookstore, and purchase shop manuals for every manufacturer out there. Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler. The ones you couldn't get really were BMW and Volkswagen, but we don't really have a lot of those units in the United States as much as they do in Europe.
But you, that's where we purchased our library and would fill up rooms. I'd have hundreds. Thousands of books, [00:25:00] and you'd go to a book and you'd open the book and you'd go to the page and you'd find the page and you'd scan the page and you'd fax the page and so on and so forth. And then when everything went digital, now you could get it digitally, but the subscription, right?
Like anything else that you purchased, there's a subscription. The subscription cost, if you don't use it once or twice a month, people start thinking, I'm not gonna really use that. We started building that into our own subscription. Like any other association, when you have material that will help your members, you build it, you research it, you build it, you put the training together, and now you have that information.
So what we're doing now currently is building that information for the future. So next year when they get into, it's all gonna be accessible to 'em. That's proprietary. That's not out in the world until somebody gets that transmission and decides to throw it on YouTube. But do I actually trust that guy? I don't know.
I would much rather trust the association that's been around since [00:26:00] 1954 doing transmissions since 1954, 90,000 plus technical things and 300 plus years of material. It's a game changer for us. It's just huge. It's just a, it's a great opportunity for us to do things that we haven't really had the opportunity of doing with less people.
We have a saying, you can only go as fast as the slowest car in front of you. And that's a true statement, right? But when there's no cars on the road, look out, man, we could, we can get up and get to it. This is just, it's just changing the way we do business, literally right in front of our eyes. 
Sharon Pare: It really is, and I wanted to add something in here and throw this in.
Especially as you say, you can only go as fast as the car in front of you. And I was thinking about this over the weekend, and a lot of our for-profit peers, right? Us in the tax exempt world, our for-profit peers. I think that the level playing field of AI is now, we're all behind that same curve. Do you think this is an opportunity for the association world as historically?
[00:27:00] We've always been a little bit behind that curve. Is this time for us to be able to set that tone and innovate with this technology? Now, what do you, I would love, 
Layla Masri: I think AI tools are modular, so modular that I think it really lends itself to really. Making a jump in deciding what you wanna try so you can turn on AI for a single workflow or single campaign.
You don't have to take this huge leap of faith. You can just take a leap of curiosity or a step of curiosity and say, what would it be like if we tried this one thing? Even if it's something that's just for one department of your organization, you can try that. You can try AI without making like an overarching.
Commitment to ai and what that means is that there's no IT lift. You're not talking about like integrations, you're talking about staff that can run like micro experiments off the side of their desk like Lance is describing. And you can then determine what's the ROI on this? So that if you can, if you decide that this is something you wanna take [00:28:00] more broadly through your organization, then you can explain.
We ran a test on it. The test took us an hour to set up in our existing tools. We ran it for this amount of time. These are the results we would like to now implement this through the rest of our organization. And assuming, of course, those results are highly positive, whether it's we've reduced staff time, we have things like smart campaigns in higher logic Thrive, where you can actually use AI to.
To generate very hyper targeted micro campaigns to do the stuff that staff usually doesn't have time to do. Like encouraging people to join a committee or to update their profiles so that you can best customize experiences for them. Really important stuff. A lot of times people don't have the time to do those things, so if you can bite off these little pieces, show that they work, it's just a great way to, to jump in your staff benefits.
Your members will feel it after that. And these like snowball effect of these internal winds make the innovation and the reach of [00:29:00] it and your expansion of that seem a lot less scary and gets people more excited about it. 
Sharon Pare: So question for you both when you are saying to just start going out there and peak that curiosity by actually using it.
What defines a trusted platform for everyone to start it? And is it security, is it usability? Is there something else? What would you say is a great place to start, 
Layla Masri: if I can jump in on that one? Of course, higher Logic has built this into our tools and is continuing to build this into. Platform, and I think regardless of what you use working with ai, the safest way to try ai, I believe, is inside of a trusted platform.
Because as Lance mentioned, if you go out and start to roll your own, you can be introducing a variety of different issues. For example, taking proprietary content and putting that out on the internet. Diminishes the value of your organization. It also requires IT assistance to make sure that you are tapping [00:30:00] into the proper agents or LLMs, et cetera, that you're able to move this content around and have it digestible and output.
So that would mean like writing APIs and not like people's heads are probably like, yeah. Too much tech, right? It gets overwhelming. So anytime that you can try something, anything of a tech experiment, I think it's always best to try it inside of a platform because the data stays where you're already governing it.
You are not worried about uploading many things sensitive, as I mentioned, and then. The great news is that the AI and what it does and its outputs, can also follow the same permissions and rules that you have set up in the rest of your systems. So starting where your data already lives, it means that you can just work with inside your tech stack and you don't have to do anything special to it.
You're just enhancing it. I'm sure. Lance, you have some thoughts on that? 
Lance Wiggins: Yeah. Interestingly enough for us, the majority of the people that currently work for the association aren't. Brand new. We've [00:31:00] had a 30 year turnover, so most of the people that had worked with us had been with the company for 30 plus years.
My, I've been with the company for 26. Those groups of bodies are retiring and the newer groups, which are much more. Used to working in these types of platforms are the ones that are suggesting these type of platforms. So it's, I'm a father of six kids. I understand how this goes from the age of 24 to 33.
So I've got a pretty good span of technology that they use. Some things I do, some things I don. Our material is proprietary to an extent. We produce material, we do members and non-member events. We have books that we have that we sell to members and non-members. And believe it or not, there are people that scan it, put it on the internet for everybody to use.
That's cheaters will be cheaters. That's how that works, right? But having something that we can. Sandbox [00:32:00] and it's our own material. You can't put a price tag on that. That's where this particular scenario and using the AI platform within higher logic, for us, it's a game changer. Like I mentioned before, it's just, it's gonna take us to a place that we probably thought if we're gonna go with some other larger companies that are out there, the price tag is.
B beyond expectations. This works this and they're working with us. That's another thing. OG is a great company. They are literally partners with us. So as we give them something, they give us something back and then we collaborate and say, this is where we're at. We are very unique. We are the unicorn of unicorns.
But there are no other company like ours. They are companies like. No other association like ours, you can't just put a blanket and say, this is good for all associations. Some associations are different than others, and this is the best part about this and working with them, is that we can give them our problems, tell them where we're at, and then they're creating solutions that are not only [00:33:00] helping us, but also could help other associations as well.
Sharon Pare: I think this will be an interesting note to end on for our podcast. We've run out of time, but speaking of time, we talked a lot about how AI has given our staff that time back too, right? And I wanna keep this one a little bit more generic, but what do you think associations. Could accomplish if they did have 10% more, 20% more of their time back each week, because now they're using these technologies that are now in place at the organization and either one of you can jump in.
Layla Masri: Sure. I'll start. So I think in terms of using AI that's giving. Time back to their staff. That's not changing. Member experiences. The, so I'll summarize the things that I think AI would be fabulous use for in terms of how we're saving time. So drafting, marketing copy, summarizing discussion threads and [00:34:00] communities, suggesting engagement messages, auto tagging, categorizing content.
Those things are huge. If Lance can say to his team, Hey. We can use AI to do those kinds of things. Then what it allows his team to do, and I'll of course let you speak to this with the specifics, Lance, but like theoretically across all organizations, so you're then not asking a staffer to, Hey, pull out that generic email that you send every time someone asks you for X.
Or if people are needing resources on these 10 things and we just have a list and you have to send them out. That's probably not the best use of that person's time. You really wanna use them for strategizing, for analyzing, for sitting with your membership and actually providing like real customer experience and customer input so that helping them actually problem solve and or ideate on really bold and audacious [00:35:00] things, whether it's marketing, whether it's event planning, you name it, community engagement.
Those are the things where people. Are really great at doing that, and you build those relationships. That's why AI has, in my opinion, an area where it sits in helping manage, digest, and surface information, but it's never gonna replace that value, the human being. And that's why we join organizations, right?
We're not just getting it for information. So much of it is about the community, about learning from your peers, sharing your subject matter expertise. That's what I think the staff of an organization. Are also best free to do when you introduce those efficiencies of ai. 
Lance Wiggins: Yeah, a hundred percent. For our association, it's, it's an aged association.
If anybody's listening to the news, you got Ford CEO going on there saying, we, we have a technician shortage, et cetera, et cetera. That's true because quite frankly, we told everybody to go to college and been tell 'em to work on cars. So [00:36:00] it's the way that the world works, right? Like we mentioned earlier, it's the world's a different place than it was 30 seconds ago, even 30 years ago, right?
The curiosity is there for our staff. We spent most of the time gathering lists getting. Dues shipped out, answering incoming calls, getting events organized. We failed miserably at communicating with our people. And to me that is the most important thing. If we don't talk to our people and we don't have a relationship with our members, there's a huge question they ask.
Why am I a member? It's very simple. And if they think that we don't care. They think that we're just an entity, a body that collects dues, chances are they'll leave. And once they're gone, as any association would know, they're, it's very [00:37:00] hard to give back. So from our perspective, it's helping us with time to make those phone calls, to create those relationships, to maintain those relationships.
So much so that on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We had maybe three or four calls come in the entire day. And so I told the crew, I said, listen, if y'all wanna take off, go ahead. Just forward the calls to me and I'll take 'em for you. And a call came in as a gentleman. He said, oh, I gotta pay my dues. And I said, and I answered the phone.
Thank you for calling ATRA, this is Lance. He says, who? And I said, Lance, he goes, Lance Wiggins. I said, yeah. He goes, I didn't mean to call you. I know, but I'm here. What's up? How you doing? What's going on? You about ready for Thanksgiving. And we started having a conversation that was real. It was just a true conversation.
And he said, I gotta pay my due. I gave, I let everybody go home early to go visit with their families. Can we give you a call on Monday? He says, [00:38:00] absolutely. I said, why don't you take the rest of the day off as well and we'll see you on Monday. And he, you can hear him smile. You can just feel he felt like I was treating him like a human, as we all should be doing.
And as I mentioned before, we're servants. We should be serving these people. And that's the part of the game that a lot of companies don't. You're not just a number, you're not just a bed, you're not just a car. You're human beings with, with families, with people. You need to get those people to those locations.
You need to help the young bucks, the ones, the new blood that's coming in. They can't be afraid of failure, right? In our industry, we learned a lot By failing that was part of the game plan. Now we can learn. Gather information and reduce the failures, but also gain the valuable experience that we need sooner than later.
All of our shop owners and technicians that are in their forties, when you look at a 20-year-old kid coming through the door and he's [00:39:00] got a few tools here and there, he may or may not know how to use 'em, who knows? But if you put 'em in front of the, our video programs. You put 'em in front of a, a, an AI program on our community forum and say, Hey, research something on this.
And then, and when you're done, I want you to come over 'cause I'm actually working on that vehicle. I want you to see what it looks like in real life. I don't know that you can get better training in that. So it, it's a, it's an opportunity for us to, to just have more time to spend with them rather than having more time to spend.
Licking stamps and sticking them on an envelope. It's just one of those things. 
Sharon Pare: Lance, thank you so much for sharing your story, especially CEO of ATRA, picking up the phone call on Thanksgiving and a member not knowing the CEO of ATRA is picking up the phone, but giving them that true member experience.
I'd love to know any final thoughts before we conclude the podcast today? 
Layla Masri: I'll just say [00:40:00] that I think that speaks to the power of ai, that Lance felt confident that there were enough supports and tools to do more with less, that he felt confident that. It could hold down the fort while people were away enjoying their families and that things would continue to hum along and members would continue to be able to get service.
And also the special treat of getting to talk to the CEO, that's pretty amazing. And I just wanna say thank you to Lance because. It's never a good idea to build anything, especially software in a vacuum, and being able to ideate with our customers and understand exactly what they need and how they need it oftentimes surfaces things that we wouldn't have even thought of.
So it's just such a treat to be able to have that direct connection and to listen and learn from each other and to build something that is super helpful together. 
Lance Wiggins: A hundred percent agree with that. It's teamwork is the dream work. Yeah. I appreciate you guys for having me on. This has been great. 
Sharon Pare: I wanna [00:41:00] personally thank you, Lance, and thank you Layla for sharing your insights, both of your experience, your expertise for the conversation today.
And that does it for this episode of Association NOW Presents Industry partner series. We'll have these special episodes throughout the year, and please make sure to join us each month overall as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the U.S. and the world.
We wanna give a big thanks to our episode sponsor Higher Logic. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. For more information on how AI is transforming the way associations operate, visit associations now online at associationsnow.com. Thank you [00:42:00] everyone.

Leading Together: Strengthening the Board-CSO Partnership

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Joanna Pineda speaks with governance experts Glenn Tecker, Mark Engle, DM FASAE, and Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE about the essential partnership between the board and chief staff officers (CSOs). Together, they break down how these roles differ, why their relationship is inherently interdependent, and how expectations shift across different types of associations. The conversation explores the competencies leaders need today, the role of trust and communication, and how associations can navigate rapid change—from the disruptions of COVID-19 to the growing impact of AI. The guests also offer practical strategies for fostering strong board–executive dynamics and close with reflections on what they hope to achieve personally and professionally in 2026.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/i5E0LcD_rhI
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Joanna Pineda: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Joanna Pineda, CEO, and Chief Troublemaker at Matrix Group International, a digital agency to associations. I'm also host of the podcast Associations Thrive.
Today we are excited to welcome Glenn Tecker, founder of Tecker International, Mark Engle, principal at Association Management Center, and Jon Hockman, chief practice officer at McKinley Advisors. Our topic today is the imperative of a healthy relationship between the chief volunteer officer and the chief staff officer.
Gentlemen, welcome to the show. To make sure that we are all on the same page, I'm gonna ask you all this question. Who are the chief volunteer officers and the chief staff officers? Glenn, maybe you [00:01:00] can define that for us. 
Glenn Tecker: The chief staff officer is the paid individual who is responsible for overall leadership and direction of the organization.
The chief elected officer often goes by a variety of different names. A board chair, sometimes they're called president, sometimes they are called chief mucky muck. It really depends upon the history and the culture of the organization. Similarly, the titles of chief staff executive can change depending upon the history of the organization as well.
Sometimes they're called executive director, sometimes chief executive Officer, sometimes president, oftentimes President, and CEO. So depending upon the history of the organization and the model of nomenclature, it's using the terms and the credentials can be different. 
Joanna Pineda: Okay, so how would you describe the relationship between [00:02:00] the chief staff officer and the chief volunteer officer?
What should be the relationship? 
Glenn Tecker: It's based upon the expectations that member leadership has for the relationship with their chief staff executive. There are subtle but real differences. The expectations that the volunteer leaders of trade associations have for their chief staff executive versus the expectations that the volunteer leaders of professional societies have for their chief staff executives.
Again versus, or different than the expectations that the volunteer leaders of cause related or philanthropic organizations have for their CEO. So there really is no one who earns that. You can put all of the answers to the question you've asked into 
Joanna Pineda: John. Maybe you can explain how are the expectations different between say, a professional society or a [00:03:00] trade association.
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: The depiction that I would bring forward here. The pair between the chief staff and chief volunteer is the epicenter of leadership in the organization. Not exclusively, but it's the epicenter. And I think of it as a Venn diagram where those two roles have distinct responsibilities, but there's also places where they overlap.
And we oftentimes talk about the metaphor of a bicycle. And the front wheel is where you set direction. And the back wheel is where the chain connects and powers the board chair, the volunteers at that front wheel. With the board setting course for the organization, the CEO, the staff committees, all the other ways that members are organized sit at that back wheel and power things forward.
And so those are just very different roles, but they're obviously symbiotic to make it work. 
Joanna Pineda: Mark, if I'm running say a charity, a nonprofit, maybe a disease related organization versus A CEO, who's running a trade association, are the expectations different of my role and of the relationship. [00:04:00] 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: I think the expectations are different, but they're based in competencies, and the competencies in those two areas are very different.
The trade association execs are often a public face, so I was CEO of several trade associations. Actually, when we went to the Hill, we were leading the charges. The chief staff executive, I was, my title was president. We had a board chair, and they were the backup because they did not want to be on display for their companies necessarily.
As for the industry. Whereas for a professional society, it's almost the reverse element of it where the CEO is the one who's putting in place the right ambassadors to represent the organization. So the competencies are aligned very differently on that basis. And again, with philanthropic organizations or public organizations that are out there raising money or trying to combat disease, for instance, they're trying to open doors, they're trying to support financially.
The organization and moving it forward. So the competencies are [00:05:00] very different from what you're looking for a CEO in those VAs. 
Joanna Pineda: Wow. Our topic today is the imperative of a healthy relationship, so why the word imperative? 
Glenn Tecker: There's probably nothing more germane to the continuing success of a CEO than the relationship they have with their board of directors.
That relationship in large measure is a model of the relationship that the chief staff executive and chief volunteer officer or chief elected officer has. It becomes the model of how the two will work together. What we have found over time is the successful relationships tend to be defined by a subtle but real understanding.
That is that on the complex and often controversial issues that boards and [00:06:00] senior staff will face together, it's critical to understand which body of knowledge needs to be the primary driver of the selection of the solution strategy. If the body of knowledge is that's held by members who are sitting on the board, then staff needs to defer to the view of the members on the board.
If the body of knowledge that's essential is the body of knowledge held by the staff in association management, then board members need to defer to the opinions and expertise of the staff. Asking the question, which expertise is needed for us to make a confident decision is probably the best start that you can had to sustaining that relationship over time.
Mark and John will both agree. I am sure. That the relationship between a board and the CEO is as much [00:07:00] a personality that differs from combination to combination as it is in fact based upon a set of dispensable competencies that both the staff leader and the elected leader need to exhibit in their work together.
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: Yeah. If I could just build on Glen's point. Completely agree. As he predicted, and. If the culture of the organization is such that supports that sort of recognition that the body of knowledge sits at the board, that's where we go. If the body of knowledge sits at the staff, that's where we go. The core culture supports that.
Great. Often it doesn't, and that's where things break down or get mucky, is navigating the way through that. It could be really a wild ride. 
Joanna Pineda: Can we go a little bit deeper with this? 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: Of course. 
Joanna Pineda: I was on Facebook recently in one of the discussion groups where a lot of association execs hang out and somebody said, I'm in hell right now because my board chair is [00:08:00] micromanaging everything.
That sounds like a situation where maybe the chief staff exec is thinking, this is my domain. The staff have knowledge here, but the board chair is causing trouble, if you will. How do you set the expectation about whose domain should be respected in what situations? Like the choice of an annual convention venue versus a position that you're gonna take on a government policy, for example.
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: We try to move it through a policy base, if you will, so things like routine items, and I know conventions are important and people have a lot of emotion tied up into where that goes. If you can put that into a policy format, it reduces the effect development making a decision on that basis. And that really then becomes more staff driven if the board sets the parameters for it.
So providing that clarity is helping define the line between board role and staff role. And that's where it comes down to the competencies. The staff has the competencies to [00:09:00] determine the profitability and the aims of that. Conference, if you will. If it's framed at the board level, then they don't have to get in that decision making loop every time and make what becomes an emotional decision.
Joanna Pineda: Is that something that you teach your clients, for example, to ask the question, who's got the knowledge to be able to answer this question or provide guidance? Glen? 
Glenn Tecker: Yeah. There are also some systems and processes which are essential to sustaining appropriate role definition. One of them is something that we refer to as a strategic board agenda.
A key to all of this is understanding that boards will talk about what's on their agenda. So ensuring that the agenda focuses on items at the level of strategy and policy rather than at the level of management on operations becomes essential. Having said that, there are still some board chairs and some board members who carry a [00:10:00] mental model with them from other places where they believe the appropriate role is to get into issues of management, staffing, and operations.
In order to deal with that as Mark suggested policy that describes the expected roles of governance is an important addition to the organization's conversation. Establishing board norms as a compact between members of the board where they make statements about how they intend to work with each other as a group.
And how they intend to work with staff. Having a process for planning strategically that functions like an ongoing GPS rather than a traditional roadmap, having a methodology for addressing complex issues. That involves the development of information basis, so the conversation can be intelligent and confident.
All those are examples of systems and processes you [00:11:00] can put in place that will, in fact, as John has suggested, have a significant impact on the culture of leadership within the organization. Associations are weird. There's only two ways that you can affect culture. You either change people or you change people.
And if you're going to change people, then the way to do that is to give them a different experience in terms of how they function than they've had before. If you can alter the work process that's being employed, you can alter their behavior. And if you alter the behavior of enough people, you are altering the culture.
These are the kinds of things that we find the most successful CEOs, the chief staff executive is continually paying attention to, so that she or he is managing the functionality of their partner as along with their partner, as well as managing the organization [00:12:00] itself. 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Let's unpack that cultural element a little bit deeper because I think the one critical word in this space is trust.
And it takes competence and caring to develop that level of trust, especially between the chief staff executive and the chief volunteer. And if those two have that bridge of trust, and again, based on competence and caring about each other and about the organization, then you can develop a very positive culture.
Also, and as Glen said, we do have a lot of turnover in our board. You can blow a culture overnight. You can blow a culture in one conversation, but it takes a long time to build that productive culture. So save it at all costs. 
Glenn Tecker: There are very few instances where a chief staff executive has ever won a battle over the distribution of power.
Developing the competence required to finesse whatever leadership personality you inherit becomes an essential competency of the [00:13:00] CEO. Essentially, they are operating like chameleons, 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: So I think underneath all this is strong communication. I mean, to the core question around role definition and getting on track with that all the way through the culture pieces is that both the chief staff officer and the chief volunteer officer are actively working on communicating.
That's not just speaking, that's listening and truly hearing what the other is saying. All three of us run programs for ASAE around this, and at the heart of those, as wonderful as the content is, and kudos to my colleagues on that. Is the chance for them to be in dialogue with one another. A consequence of that hopefully, is a deepening of trust that Mark talked about.
So I just think that you can't over, well, you probably could, but you can't over emphasize the importance of communicating with each other each to understand one another. [00:14:00] 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Yeah, I was a CEO for 30 years, various trade professional societies and so on. I always made it a point to go visit. The incoming board chair, where they work, what they do, who they work with, how they work, how they wanna communicate, and those are critical elements in developing that trusting relationship.
So they develop into friendships too. Hopefully, not always, but hopefully they do. 
Glenn Tecker: Different individuals have a different work and communications preferences. So in the relationship, given the fact that the chief staff executive is in fact the professional. Our belief is if there is adjustment to be made, it probably is the function of the chief staff executive to make the necessary adjustments.
With good conversation, both can make adjustments so that their natural thinking and working style preferences are compatible and consistent rather than in conflict or inconsistent. And as John has said, communication [00:15:00] that is continuous, that is open, that is honest, will be able to sustain trust over time, assuming that you have a partner who is mentally healthy.
And that's not always the case. That's right. I think true. 
Joanna Pineda: Lemme ask you a question. So I've been on a couple of boards and you've talked about things like having the board charter, having open communications, defining the roles. I'm not sure that I ever saw those, unfortunately on the couple boards I was on.
Where do people learn this and how do you, I don't know, how do you impart this when the board does turn over a lot? Like where is this being taught? 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Should be in starting with orientation and development, and so many boards do orientation for just their new board members. No. Every year the board changes 'cause you have new people coming on.
The principles probably don't change and maybe some of the strategies don't change, but how we work together changes. When people change, [00:16:00] you're gonna have a new influx of, even if it's just one person in a 12 person board for instance, that's change. And the issues coming before you are changing. So spending time on how we do our work is as important as what is the work to be done.
Glenn Tecker: There are a variety of approaches that are used to create a common information base among volunteer leaders about expectations and roles. For example, Pennsylvania now has a law that requires board members of school districts to have a certain amount of training before they're able to take their position on the board.
And I share that with the podcast because increasingly we are seeing boards committing to ongoing quote, professional development. For their board members. So it's not just a single event at a single meeting, but it's continuous. As Mark and Joanna both suggested orientation is critical, and if you can [00:17:00] get the board member engaged in a way that allows them to see how an effective board functions before they take that seat, that's critical.
Every new board member comes to that position with a set of mental models, expectations they have about how things should work, and oftentimes those expectations come from roles in other organizations that are not sufficiently consistent with how associations operate. It's important for them to understand the difference and to have conversation with successful volunteer leaders, particularly the board chair.
Who will use previous board chairs who have been successful as a kind of mentor in the process. But our belief, and I think Mark and John would've shared this, is that those intuitive understandings need to occur before they're asked to take the role, 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: Not during it. Yeah. And just to build on [00:18:00] everything that Mark and Glenn have said, and to the extent that the organization can get a culture within the board of learning and development.
So that the board is, whether through self-assessment or other assessment tools, where is there a need for learning or skill development at the board level so that once, hopefully that orientation type foundation is in place, there are other opportunities to learn and grow and be a stronger leadership body because of it.
Joanna Pineda: Mark, you said that when you were a chief staff executive, made a point of visiting your board members. What are other things? Chief staff execs and chief volunteer officers, what should they be doing to promote this healthy relationship? Anything new and creative that you've seen recently? 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Not necessarily new, but creative, I think is to visit one of our programs that Glenn and John and I represent.
'cause it does bring them together to focus intently on the organization and intently on their relationship. And it gives 'em a common understanding of [00:19:00] roles, responsibilities, when to lead, when to support. And the whole element of that positive, productive partnership, that's a lot of peace. 
Glenn Tecker: Yeah. It's just one of those areas where there really is no best practice.
That is something that works the best all the time everywhere, but there are effective practices and practices that suck and you can tell the difference. And one of the important initiatives here is that there be a common understanding of how they're going to work together. The creation of that common understanding is probably more important than what the understanding itself is.
So it's through that conversation, that lasting trust, the ability to depend upon each other, to make promises and keep those promises. A colleague of mine years ago defined trust in this relationship as the residue of promises kept. 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Hmm. There's a [00:20:00] couple of trust relationships too. One is, does the board trust the board within those dynamics?
Then does the board trust the staff, especially the CEO. But the third one I've experienced particularly recently was, does the staff trust the staff? And that's an interesting dynamic and you talk about a board healthy culture and association, healthy culture. And a staff healthy culture. If we don't have those three elements, board to board, board to staff and staff with staff, a culture of trust, there's gonna be a breakdown.
There's gonna be a dysfunction in achieving any kind of strategy for the organization. 
Glenn Tecker: One of the competency areas that we find the most frequent and softest area is the ability of the group to address those kinds of conflicting behaviors when they occur. Most boards will have something like a code of ethics or a code of behavior.
It's [00:21:00] attempts to shape behavior by the threat of a penalty. If you misbehave. The best boards we find have something that we refer to as board norms. That is agreements on how they are going to work together and how they will interact with their staff. And they also have, as part of those board norms, judgements they have made about how they will at the moment intervene when a violation of those norms take place.
So having in place an understanding about how you will deal with. Emerging conflicts or potential violations of the judgments that have made about how that culture should work. It's an essential tool that still, unfortunately, too many boards don't have. 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: Yeah, we talk about the three-legged stool of respect, candor, and trust, and all those relationships that Mark outlined it, board to board, board to staff and staff to staff.
There's gotta be presence of respect, candor, and trust. [00:22:00] And it's not that hard to find respect, although it's not always present. But there's so many examples where candor is lacking and we're not having real conversation. We're not having complete conversation often because the trust isn't there. But that's not the only reason.
But you can't get to good norms or good communication if you don't have the appropriate presence of respect, candor, and trust within the dynamic. 
Joanna Pineda: You've talked about what an effective relationship looks like between the chief staff exec and the chief volunteer officer. Give us examples of when it broke down and then how do you fix it?
Glenn Tecker: There was an almost universal breakdown that occurred during the pandemic during when COVID forced everyone to go to entirely virtual communications. We observed a number. Things occurring as a result of the inability to spend face-to-face time together. [00:23:00] One thing that occurred was the bright minds that only contributed when they saw necessity to do.
They were the anecdote to the bullying voices tended to become more passive in the conversations, so folks who were the loudest to talk the most often tended to carry the day rather than good thinking. The second thing that we emerged is that groups selected management level issues to deal with because they were easier to address in a virtual environment without having the ability for the continuing face-to-face conversation.
The third thing that we saw that was absolutely disastrous was the kind of social interaction that occurs among board members and staff in between the sessions of the board, and in a night in between could not happen. So the ability to develop an understanding of their colleagues, which is really the [00:24:00] essential ingredient to trust growing where I can like you, even if I disagree with you, didn't have an opportunity to grow.
I'm willing to drink online if I have to, but I'd much prefer to be at a bar with my colleagues. 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: And the good news is they're getting back together face-to-face. Again, I think we're finding the average board is three to four times face-to-face again, which it was prior to COVID. Yeah. So that's encouraging news.
 
Glenn Tecker: So it is encouraging. A concern that we have, although we're seeing it decrease over time, is that the cultural. Expectations of some groups have remained what they were when they joined the board during the pandemic. So working with those groups to get them to return to what we all consider to be best practice is sometimes a challenge, particularly when the members of the board have no board experience prior to having [00:25:00] joined the board in COVI.
Joanna Pineda: John and Mike, give us an example of how you fix stuff when it breaks down. 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: The reality is sometimes you can't fix it, and accepting that is better than trying to hang on forever, but that's not the only outcome. It goes back to communication is sitting down and seeking to understand this is a skill that is unfortunately all too absent in our society right now, and I fear getting worse.
Not better. But trying to understand different perspectives, different approaches, and see if you can't find a thread that can begin to build a bridge, a reconnection. Absent that, it's hard to make progress. It's hard to write a toxic or an unhealthy situation. And I know all of us work with folks all the time who it's broken and they're just not sure where to start on the rebuilding it.
But it's gotta start with conversation. You gotta sit down and talk. 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: Let me build on that. 'cause I did have a personal [00:26:00] experience in this. I was this probably 20 years ago. I was CEO of an association. We had a board chair, two year terms, but you could be reelected. The first two years with this gentleman were awesome.
We were like in sync, right? It was really smooth, productive. Something happened his first year of the next term between our relationship and somewhere I failed in his eyes. I could not discern it. Luckily, I had a good relationship with the vice chair who was next in line, and we had a conversation and he was able to have a conversation with the board chair.
He came back and said, mark, sometimes relationships just unwind and you can't really explain them. And so I was able to dig in, was it an integrity issue? And he assured me it wasn't. So I'm like, alright, I might not know the answer. At least I'll be okay with the fact that it's not an integrity issue. And then actually the vice chair became the chair sooner than.
What his normal term would've been, and we had two terrific years together. Sometimes those [00:27:00] relationships just get fractured. You don't know why, as John said, you try to communicate, but sometimes it's plan B, bring in some reinforcements that are on a volunteer to volunteer basis to help, help bridge that relationship or the gap, if you will.
Joanna Pineda: You talked about the pandemic. We're now post pandemic, and now we're increasingly in an AI powered world. Have those things changed? 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: The relationship between the CSE and the CVO Arc, I think they have the opportunity to, I don't know that we've experienced it entirely yet, so it's interesting. I was at a board meeting recently and they were making a decision that impacted one board member, and so you could see there was a motion tied to that.
So my point was, if AI had a seat at the board table, how would AI vote? They likely removed the emotion from the decision so you could make a cognitive decision, [00:28:00] which is what the CEO was desperate for, and yet. They made the emotional decision. So I think AI can play an interesting role when you consider that voice at the table.
It's really interesting 
Glenn Tecker: and there's a way to get the voice there that is, if the board and the senior staff have a habit of. Complex decisions being informed by background information, usually compiled by staff, but sometimes by staff with volunteers or staff with volunteers with outside contractors.
That background paper is the place where the insights that AI can lead you to can be presented to the group in decision making. I have had boards now we're working with where the board members will utilize AI during the conversations to look for additional information or to answer a question about something they wish they knew more about but did not, but.
Well, the other thing we are [00:29:00] finding with AI is not so much with AI as it is with the effect that the emergence and evolution of AI is having on the group's view of change. Recently, somebody authored a statement that said change itself has changed. I'm not sure about that. What I am sure about is that association leaders cannot manage change.
Not like for-profit hierarchical organizations can, they can manage through change. The reason being, they don't have the same kind of line authority with a group of volunteers that you would have in a for-profit or a public agency, for example. So understanding the necessity of developing competencies in managing through change, which is the essence of agility at the personal level, has become, in our judgment, a new necessary competency for the [00:30:00] successful CEO.
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: I wanna underscore, first of all, I think we're very early days on the impact of AI on the relationship, really governance overall, but certainly the relationship between the staff and volunteer leaders. But I just came from a Breakfast of Trade association leaders where an example got brought up of a group where their staff CIO, with the board's blessing and created a persona AI persona.
To participate in the strategic planning process, and that person was a seat at the table as the board did their strategic planning work, own experiment. Lots of lessons learned, but I suspect that's not the end of that story by any stretch as that continues to get integrated, so much more to come. 
Joanna Pineda: Wow.
Gentlemen, I could talk to you for hours about this because I'm a newbie at this. I know you're busy, so I'm gonna close out with a question for you and you can answer with something professional or personal. What are you looking forward to [00:31:00] in 2026? Glenn, I'll start with you. 
Glenn Tecker: I'm looking for surviving an assault on the truth that is occurring at a national level, 
Mark Engle, DM FASAE: mark.
I'm looking forward to catching up on my reading list. To be honest with you, there's so many good publications out there today around especially collective decision making at the boards level and the role that courage has to play and should become a competency. So that'll be my research agenda for 2026.
Courage in the Boardroom. 
Joanna Pineda: Wow. John, close this out. 
Jon Hockman, CPF, FASAE: I think 2026 is gonna be a, your extreme tumult on almost every front. And so we talked a little bit earlier about a change management. I'm. Looking forward to leaning in on what I would call change readiness. 'cause you can't manage it, but how do you get ready to deal with all the turbulence that is coming?
I think that's a skill of the future and lots of juicy work to be done there. [00:32:00] 
Joanna Pineda: Gentlemen, this has been insightful and wonderful. Thank you for being on the show today. Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents. Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals.
Discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US and the world. For the full conversation, visit associations now.com. And for more information about governance, visit asaecenter.org. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
And if you have a hot topic or pressing challenge that the association community would benefit from, we'd love to hear from you. Please contact ace's Michael Ross at mross@asaecenter.org to propose a thought leadership sponsorship opportunity on a future [00:33:00] episode.

Powering Advocacy: Why PACs Matter for Associations

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE, president and CEO of the Ohio Society of Association Professionals, is joined by Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE, Chief Public and Governance Officer at ASAE; Dawn Mancuso, CEO of the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry; and Mark Falzone, President of Scenic America. Together, they dive into the essential role Political Action Committees play in advancing association advocacy. The discussion breaks down PAC compliance requirements, why PACs matter in today’s legislative environment, and how associations can more effectively engage their members and leaders in political action. The guests highlight recent advocacy wins—including efforts to halt costly tax reforms—and underscore the need for consistent participation to ensure the association community’s voice is heard. The episode closes with a clear message: advocacy is a shared responsibility, and association leaders must stay active to protect and advance their missions.
Check out the video podcast here:
https://youtu.be/k8Ys7y1lB_M
Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.
 
Transcript
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Jarrod Clabaugh, President and CEO of the Ohio Society of Association Professionals. And this month I'm lucky to be the host of this podcast. Before we begin, I would just like to thank our three panelists for being on the call today.
Thank you, Dawn, Mark, and Mary Kate today. We're excited to welcome Dawn Mancuso, the current chair of ASAE PAC, and also the Executive Vice President and CEO of Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry. And the immediate past chair, our friend Mark Falzone, who is the president of Scenic America. And Mary Kate Cunningham, who most of you likely know, ASAE's, chief Public Policy Officer and governance officer. Friends, let's jump right into the questions. We have a lot to cover. Mary Kate, thank you for the great work you do and the rest of the team and the public policy department at ASAE. Would you mind [00:01:00] providing our listeners with a quick overview of what a PAC stands for and also what missions of PACS often are?
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. So PACS are Political Action Committees and we're gonna talk about PACS at the federal level that are formed by trade associations, professional society and other membership organizations. And the goal is to support candidates that align with their policy goals and interests.
The PACS are funded by voluntary contributions by individuals, so  they have to be by eligible members. Again, individuals and not corporations. There's a lot of restrictions around giving and around reporting to the federal government. So federal ballot prohibits associations from using dues or general funds for contributions to candidates.
It's really just from your individual members. Also must have a designated treasurer for compliance. They also must register with the Federal Election Committee and follow very strict reporting and disclosure requirements. That includes regular filings and contributions and expenditures. [00:02:00] And for solicitation, they can only solicit from their restricted class, which is members, executives, and certain employees.
For trade associations, they have to follow prior approval where they get specific approval from companies to solicit their individual members there. So the Federal Election Committee is what they have to follow the rules for, and we say sometimes in PAC world, FEC jail is real jail. So PACS are a great tool for advocacy.
There’s very strict reporting that you have to follow. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Sexy stuff. Mark and Dawn, would either of you like to share any examples of PAC victories or PAC experiences the two of you have been involved in? 
Dawn Mancuso: I will say that in a prior life I ran a small trade association where we did have a Political Action Committee and had to deal with those regulations where we had to get permission from the CEO in order to solicit or even talk about the PAC in many ways with their employees at different [00:03:00] levels of the organization.
Which can be challenging if you're trying to reach the advocacy folks at a particular institution, but it is doable and there are strategies you can employ to make sure that you can speak to as many of the individuals at the member organizations as possible. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: What about you, Mark? 
Mark Falzone: PACS are a part of the political ecosystem.
And so if you're not playing in that field, then you're not taking advantage of the entire range of tools available at your disposal. And I think that  SAE has done an amazing job with their PAC under Mary Kate's leadership and Michelle Mason's leadership, and making sure that they have every tool at their disposal when they're using the pack versus lobbying.
Direct lobbying versus grassroots lobbying. This is just another tool in the tool shed that every organization should really make sure that they have at the ready for them to use. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: I would throw this next question out to all of our [00:04:00] panelists. When you think about turbulent times, what kinds of challenges come to mind for PAC leaders today?
 
Mark Falzone: I think that this year, ASAE has been the most turbulent time that it could be in my memory. Literally, associations were on the chopping block when it comes to taxation and tax treatment associations were about to get taxis levied against them where all of a sudden nonprofit statuses were in question.
For some associations, this would be the equivalent of a death penalty, and for other associations it would certainly mean cuts. I would say that this year, 2025 has been very turbulent in terms of the association world, but Mary Kate with her leadership and Dawn as the ASAE PAC Chair has done an amazing job in navigating ASAE through these turbulent times.
And, I would defer to Mary Kate to speak a little more on the amazing work of what ASAE had [00:05:00] to do in order to make sure that the tax bill ended up okay. And associations still are not subject to taxes because of Mary Kate and ASAE's work and Michelle Mason's work and Don Mancuso’s work. 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: Thank you so much, Mark, and thanks to all of our members who helped to make this big victory possible.
But about a year ago, we were preparing for tax reform like everyone else in Washington, knowing associations are always a target. Our non-dues revenue specifically, and this was not our first rodeo show with tax deform, but this was a much more serious threat because two major, well-respected Think Tanks called for.
Taxing nonprofits across the board at the corporate rate, which is 21%. So all told there were 6.5 billion in additional taxes on nonprofits that were introduced this Congress for the tax reform bill. So through all of the advocacy of ASAE members around the country, we were able to defeat all of those 6.5 billion over the course [00:06:00] of the legislation taxes.
Specifically the biggest taxes were the nonprofit parking lot tax. That would be the tax on employee transportation costs that associations give the first time that we would be paying a tax, an excise tax on an expense. So that was also a potential constitutional issue. And then a huge other source of taxation that was introduced in the house was on royalty income.
So on that tax revenue, it would be taxing our revenue on royalties that are received that are part of unrelated business income. Those are, in addition to the across the board tax that was floated and never introduced because lawmakers support associations. I think that's the main focus over the last year that we're really proud of.
But we know we're not out of the woods, so it's something we're continuing to engage on. And I would say PACs are a great tool, as Mark said in your advocacy strategy to elect candidates who share your association. [00:07:00] Positions on these important issues and on your legislative priorities. I'll also note, I think we really take a nonpartisan strategy for our work, and most PACs are nonpartisan supporting candidates from both sides of the aisle that support their positions.
Dawn Mancuso: Thanks Mary Kate. I really applaud the work you've done, your whole team as well as the leadership at ASAE, Michelle as the CEO, because you saw the handwriting on the wall and you took action at a time when we had to get prepared, we had to put the resources in place and ASAE made the commitment to do that and marks.
Very sweet to pose me as the leader of the PAC, but during much of this work, he was the chair of the pac. I was the vice chair and learning as voraciously from him as quickly as possible. So it's been a real team effort and I really appreciate playing a role in this. We're right. Politics are very contentious right now.
ASAE characterized the tax threat that took place this past [00:08:00] year as the biggest one that we've ever faced since the creation of the tax code back in 1913. So we've got a lot of concern behind this, and that has helped to mobilize people. But when you've got this kind of winners versus losers framework happening in the larger environment, people are divided and they may respond by saying.
They pull away from the public arena or altogether, or disengage, or alternatively, they become tribalized. They really only wanna support one team, and these are the times when PACs can make a big difference. There is a critically important tool to help educate legislators from both sides of the aisle about the value of associations to American society.
PAC leaders are challenged to break through all the noise. To make sure that our value is understood. I think we will continue to play a very important role in ASAE's advocacy efforts in the future to come. 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: Jarrod, your point [00:09:00] also brought up a another issue for me. When you're thinking about turbulent times for associations and association PACs, I think the candidates that are not taking association PAC dollars is also something interesting.
I've noticed, it seems, like these candidates are more likely not taking corporate PAC dollars. Sometimes they're actually saying encouraging, giving through the association PAC instead. But as he talked about with the FEC Regulations Association, PACs are some of the most regulated ways to engage in the political process.
There's so much sunlight. So I think that telling that story and that I think is important too. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: It sounds like a lot of this is tied to education and getting. The association leaders educated, getting members educated, and then also going out and making sure you're actually educating members of Congress.
And as somebody who participated in the fly in this past year and in other years, many of the approaches changed when we started telling our stories and when our members started telling our stories. How [00:10:00] then do you think we can work with leaders within our own, maybe membership or just within the space to help them engage more and to get them excited about delivering those messages to lawmakers?
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: One idea we just had, what I think. We realize that the top percentage of members are always really engaged in advocacy, but there's so much room for growth for people who are newer members to the association. So just putting on more, as you say, Advocacy 101 or Your Association Advocacy 101 sessions, I think is a great way to make it feel approachable so people realize that.
I think if they're not, if they don't have a background advocacy, they might be a little more hesitant too. Go to hill days, and when we make it more transparent, I think that people realize that they are the experts really talking to the congressional staffer, they're the ones bringing the wisdom and that it's, it isn't really less scary than it may seem at first glance.
Dawn Mancuso: I think the ASAE PAC has a particular challenge in that so many of our members who are politically [00:11:00] inclined or advocacy inclined are focused on the needs of their member organizations or their member professionals. And so they use their time and energies to put forth the messaging that their members need.
Oftentimes forget about the ecosystem they work in, right? As we've learned this past year, that ecosystem we've taken for granted, and it's not something that will survive without the support of everybody in the community. And that not only impacts our own organizations as our own associations, but affects our members, and we all need to get behind this.
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: In terms of educating candidates, we know so many states are strongly considering or moving forward with gerrymandering this year. So congressional districts will change and there can be a lot of new faces that we need to educate. So I think the pressure just is continuing for telling the story. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: What factors do you think contributed the most to the successes A SAE had earlier [00:12:00] this year? Mary Kate? 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: I think it's waving the flag early. I think getting on everyone's radar really early before the tax cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire, I think was very helpful. But we know, like Dawn said, our members have to focus on their own members first. That's their day job and it's really ASAE's job to care for the advocacy issues for the whole community.
So I think because we were able to stand up our Community Impact Coalition early, it really helped people say, I'm gonna support the coalition. I've gotta focus on my own members, but here's this support to help you guys tell the story better. So I think that's one of the main elements. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Mary Kate, I know one time I heard you say it's easier to blow out a candle than it is to put out a forest fire, and I think that's really one of the things that ASAE excelled at in the past year.
And as Dawn has said, and as Mark has said, bringing everyone together no matter what our members' interests are, but defending the industry as a whole. [00:13:00] Given that and given these successes, what should we be on the lookout for moving forward? Do you think there are more turbulent times ahead? 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: Absolutely. We know just last month, the Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing on the tax exempt status of some nonprofits, and there are, or members of Congress on the committee recommending removing exempt status, asking are they truly earning exempt status?
So I think this is not going away. We have to continue to tell that story. We've also done it through polling, especially using. The pollsters of the members of Congress that we really wanna influence so that they can, they feel like they're trusting those numbers, the percentage of voters in their district that would oppose taxes on nonprofits.
That was really helpful. But I think we've got a lot of work ahead in just really telling the story on how we drive the economy and train the workforce, and that increased taxes on associations means less community benefit. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: How do you feel we can maintain momentum and make sure [00:14:00] that leaders keep telling this story not just to their communities, but also to their boards and to their peers?
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: I think it's people like Mark and Dawn that take time out of their extremely busy days to engage in ASAE advocacy, and we are so lucky. I think we have the best members in town, and so more association professionals putting their name in the hat to engage in advocacy, I think is the most useful because once a member of Congress can hear from a constituent about how their association is improving their community, I think that's the best proactive measure.
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: So you guys have all made some great points in the right direction to lead our members and to engage our leadership. I'm gonna direct this question to all of you. Many association execs struggle to inspire leadership level giving. What approaches typically motivate CEOs and board members to contribute?
Dawn Mancuso: The ASAE PAC's mission is an easy one for CEOs and association professionals overall to give, given the [00:15:00] magnitude of the challenge we are facing. But I think there are some tools that. PACS use, one of which is a scorecard that you can keep track of board members' contributions and engagement with the PAC as well as other activities of the organization, I believe uses that approach.
Right, Mary Kate? 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: Yeah, absolutely. We know board members would like to have all their checks, especially in something that's primarily displayed in the board book. So I think that when the leadership starts at the top, especially. Having a host committee has always been really helpful to us as well, because those key leaders wanna see their name among everyone else on the host committee.
Those are two elements that really work for us. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Great insights. Can you share an example of where a partnership that your organization has or collaboration that your organization has done, whether that's internal or external, significantly boosted visibility or your fundraising results. 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: So this is the coalition that we stood up in tax reform, and [00:16:00] it's more than 115 organizations, all different types of nonprofits around the country.
And I think the great part about this coalition is that congressional staff knew our goal was simple to stop additional taxation on nonprofits. They knew we weren't picking winners and losers. We wanted across the board to keep the tax code treatment of exempt organizations the same. So I think having all those different really diverse groups from associations to disease advocacy organizations, law enforcement organizations, all kinds of nonprofits, I think that really helped us be effective.
And then also if we had a lot of silent partners, orations that are, were. Influential in the space that we just shared. Information, intelligence, talking points so that we could try to again, sing from the same song sheet. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Great perspectives. What common misconceptions do you encounter from time to time when it comes to pacs?
Dawn Mancuso: I think probably the number one misconception I've encountered is that people [00:17:00] think they can use the organization money as a contribution to the pac, and I think it just means we have to do a better job of educating people what a PAC is and how they work that. Contributions need to be from an individual or contribution from another PAC.
So from time to time we've been able to get contributions from another organization's pack, which is really gratifying. It means that we're sharing, we have a common goal in mind. 
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: I think to Dawn’s point is that association PACs are somehow dark money, quote unquote, and I think that's absolutely a misconception.
All contributions over $200 are reported to the federal election committee and are listed on the website. So there's so much sunlight here. This is a really ethical way to support the legal process and candidates, and I think that's one misconception. 
Mark Falzone: Yeah, I agree with that, Mary Kate. I think that a lot of people think that, like you said, that there is something wrong with doting pac and oh my goodness, I could never do that.
And the truth is, this is [00:18:00] just another tool in the toolbox, like I said earlier, for your association or your group. And it's really important to leverage all the tools at your disposal and that not only from an association level, but from a personal level. If there is a cause out there, you want to support, giving to a causes PAC can really further that organization's mission. 
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Unfortunately, our time has come to a close. We've flown through the questions we had and we shared a lot of good insights today. Thank you to all of you for being on the panel. I would like to ask before we conclude our conversation, do you guys have any nuggets of knowledge that you would like to provide with our listeners to help them motivate either their members, their board, their leadership, or the communities that they operate in to get involved and to make sure that their voices are being heard?
Mary Kate Cunningham, CAE: I think the often quoted phrase in DC is, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And that's absolutely true. So get involved in your own association’s advocacy, get involved in ASAE's advocacy because there are real kind of threats [00:19:00] ahead, frankly. And we really have to be diligent about telling our story for our community.
Mark Falzone: Yeah, PACs are just, like I said earlier, just one tool in the toolbox, but it's an important one. And to me, if somebody is a seasoned professional or wants to really be active in advocating for their association's work or something that they just care about, you want to be making sure that you're leveraging everything that you can.
So, being active in the PAC, contributing to a PAC, being active in lobbying, direct lobbying, being active in grassroots, lobbying, making sure that you're actually doing everything that you can. A lot of people think, oh, I can't do that, or I just think that that's a little weird. That actually couldn't be further from the truth.
What's weird is not doing it because it means you're not advocating for yourself. It means you're not actually participating, and it means you're not contributing to your mission and it means you're not doing your damn job. So make sure you do your damn job, get off your butt and work [00:20:00] tirelessly for your PAC.
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: Dawn, any last thoughts my friend? 
Dawn Mancuso: Our membership organizations are based on the same premise that our democracy is, that everybody needs to be educated, choose to engage, and take the time to get active. And I think as association executives, there's a moral imperative. We have to walk the talk and we need to do what we ask our members to do by serving as a role model.
By doing what we can to educate others so that they can play as active a role as they would like. I think we are demonstrating to our members and to society and to our members about what the options are for engagements. We are not association executives just from nine to five. We do it throughout our lives, and as Mark so aptly said, PACs are an important tool in that engagement.
Jarrod A. Clabaugh, CAE: I would just throw out there, condensing everything we've talked about today. When you stay silent about the work that you're doing, you are the only one to blame when no one hears your message. [00:21:00] So I would thank all of you. I'm lucky enough to serve on the PAC Committee with Dawn and Mark and many other wonderful people, and to have great public policy advisors like Mary Kate and her team, and the great work that Michelle does on behalf of the association industry.
So I want to thank you for your time today. I want to thank you for your engagement. I wanna thank you for, as my good friend Mark said, get off your damn butts and do something, because otherwise you really shouldn't be complaining about what happens. Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents.
Join us each month as we explore key topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy. In the United States and throughout the world. Again, we'd like to thank our guests today, Mark, Dawn, and Mary Kate.
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And for more information on the great work being done in the advocacy space, please visit Associations NOW [00:22:00] online.