Membership Associations

Understand the changing behaviors of young professionals to create membership offerings & experiences that engage them
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Young professionals aren’t sticking around

The world has changed. Most membership programs are flat or in decline, especially among young professionals.

Young professionals join professional associations less often and engage less deeply. These trends are well-established and consistent across all professions.

Association leaders can be tempted to believe, "When they grow up, they'll realize how important the association is, and do the right thing and join." But all of our research and years of evidence say this isn't going to happen.

We need to reimagine membership to meet the needs, context, and expectations of young professionals.

Why Highland?

We're not content with the status quo. We know what it takes to actually make transformative changes to membership models, member experience, and association technology.

Using our unique blend of behavioral research, human-centered design, and digital development, we've worked with dozens of the largest global and national membership associations to make audacious and impactful change.

Highlanders sitting around a table.
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"I've been looking at member data for 30 years and I've never seen anything like the content and quality of Highland's research. Their work is incredibly insightful and actionable."

Edith Wilson
Board Member

Membership Transformation

Our approach to membership transformation is anchored in behavior, not opinions. We can help you gain actionable insights into members' and non-members' needs, expectations, and behaviors, and design membership offerings that reach, engage, and retain them.

Member Research Insights

Gain a deep understanding of your future members & the offerings that reach them.

We use ethnographic research along with other qualitative and quantitative methods to gain insight into the most important unmet and under-met needs of your prospective members. Our research is designed to not simply tell you what is true, but why it matters and what you can do about it.

We have particular expertise in:

  • Young professionals and the student-to-early-career journey
  • Jobs to Be Done analysis
  • The Member purchasing journey
  • Explorations of new markets, new member types and new offerings

Membership Offering Design

Membership offerings succeed by nailing a small set of compelling value propositions that solve a real problem for members in a unique way. This requires focus, distilling what you can offer into the most valuable and applicable benefit for a specific potential member at a specific moment in time.

Our approach to membership offering design locates and defines that specific set of compelling value propositions by inviting target members to shape the offerings with us in a collaborative process.

We can help you reimagine your existing offerings and design new ones, working both on the overall membership offer and on specific products and services bundled within membership.

Together we can create:

  • New and reimagined membership products
  • Membership value propositions aligned to target member needs
  • Messaging and differentiation
  • Pricing and bundling

Prototyping & Pilots

We help associations test and learn as fast as possible by using real life situations and lean startup methods. We prove and refine new membership offerings and experiences through rapid design sprints, mock sale tests, and pilot programs. You'll have evidence of what really works and the confidence to deploy at scale.

The Future of Membership Cohort

Engage in a 5-week cohort experience with teams from other leading associations, focused on reimagining membership for young professionals. Explore an upcoming cohort.

Digital Experience

Design & launch websites, mobile apps, and digital products that engage members and create new opportunities and revenue streams.

Websites & Digital Experiences

Your website is the digital hub of your prospect and member experience. It does the heavy lifting of attracting, educating and converting prospective members. But it also has to serve many types of current members and many other types of constituents in your industry.

We design and build award-winning websites for associations, as well as member portals, offering-specific applications, and the overall digital experience you deliver to members and other constituents.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps can create deep and frequent engagement with your offerings, and can deliver compelling experiences when linking different benefits across education, peer community, mentoring, and career development into a single mobile experience.

We can help you decide if a mobile app is right for your association, and where it can create outsized value.

We build mobile apps that are flexible, intuitive, and scalable. We use a blend of rapid research, iterative design, and agile development to get the product in front of end users early so that the best solution can also be the fastest solution.

Digital Products

Digital products are revenue-generating applications that build on your core expertise. We've helped membership organizations imagine, create, and launch applications that serve core members, reach new audiences, extend into practitioners' day-to-day jobs, and leverage industry data to advance both mission and revenue.

Creating a digital product that customers will buy and use requires much more than building a piece of technology.

Highland's digital product design and development team has 25 years of experience working from concept to launch, bringing together experts in digital product strategy, research, design, and development into a single, powerful team.

We've launched over 280 new products, services, and businesses for for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Let's Talk
Tell us about the opportunity you're pursuing, and we'll follow up in one business day. If you prefer, you can email ask@highlandsolutions.com.