Reading the State of Associations 2024

The State of Associations 2024 report came out in March with data from 690 associations. Director of Research Inês Carvalho-Reyes joins host Amara Obiledu to explain how the survey is built, what a 2.1% median membership growth rate and a 93% median renewal rate actually mean, and how a member organization should read its own numbers against them.

• Inês Carvalho-Reyes — Director of Research, NANA. Leads the State of Associations survey, the compensation survey, and the quarterly data briefs; PhD in survey methodology.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:20 What the survey actually measures

• 06:45 690 organizations, and how that sample gets built

• 12:00 Median growth: 2.1%

• 17:30 Median renewal: 93%

• 22:50 How to read your own numbers against the report

• 28:10 What changes next year

Host: The State of Associations 2024 report came out in March, and I want to start with the basics. What is this report, for someone who's never opened it?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: It's an annual survey of association executives — this year 690 of them — asking the same set of questions about membership, dues, staffing, and renewal. We publish the aggregate results as a free resource, and the point is comparability. An executive director can't usually see inside a peer organization's books. This report is the closest thing to that.

Host: 690 organizations is a real number. How do you build that sample?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: We field it to our own membership first, and then through partner networks so we're not only capturing NANA members, since that would bias the results toward organizations that are already engaged with us. Fieldstone Data Partners handles the survey tooling and some of the outreach. We ask the same core questions every year so the trend line means something, and we retire or rewrite a handful of questions annually based on what the sector's actually asking about.

Host: Let's get into the two numbers everyone quotes. Median membership growth, 2.1%.

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: That's the median across all 690 respondents, comparing this year's member count to last year's. It's modest. It's not a sector in decline, but it's not a sector expanding fast either. What I think is more useful than the topline number is the spread underneath it — larger, established associations are closer to flat, while newer or smaller organizations post higher growth off a smaller base. If you're a 400-member organization and you posted 2.1%, you're exactly typical. If you posted negative growth, that's worth a board conversation, not a panic, but a conversation.

Host: And renewal, 93%.

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Median renewal rate, meaning the share of members who were due to renew and did. 93% sounds high until you do the math on what 7% attrition means over five years if you don't backfill it with new members. Renewal and new-member acquisition are really the same conversation split into two numbers, and I'd encourage anyone reading the report to look at both lines, not just the one that flatters them.

Host: How should a listener use this report on their own board?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Don't just read the medians. Find the breakdown by organization size and sector if it's close to yours, and use that as your comparison point instead of the whole sample. A 25,000-member professional society and a 40-member trade council are not on the same curve, and it's a mistake to hold either one to the other's benchmark. I also always tell people: bring the report to your board before your board brings it to you. It's much better to walk in with context than to explain after the fact why your renewal number looks different from a headline you didn't control.

Host: Is there a number in this year's report that surprised you?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Not this year, honestly — 2024 tracked close to what we expected going in, which is itself useful information. A survey that never surprises you is either measuring something very stable, or it's not asking sharp enough questions. I'd rather it be the former, but I stay alert to the latter.

Host: What's different about next year's survey?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: We're adding questions on non-dues revenue — sponsorship, certification fees, that kind of thing — because we kept hearing from members that dues alone don't tell the financial story anymore. We field again in the new year and publish in March, same cadence every time so people can plan around it.

Host: Last thing. You have a PhD in survey methodology. Does that change how skeptically you read your own numbers?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: It should make me more skeptical, not less. Every year I run the non-response checks before I let anyone quote a median in a press release — are the 690 who answered systematically different from the associations who didn't respond at all? If a number can't survive that check, it doesn't go in the report, no matter how clean the topline looks.

Host: Inês, thank you for walking through this.

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Happy to. Ask me back next March and the numbers will have moved, one way or another.

Host: One more thing before we close — for someone listening who runs a small shop and has never filled out this survey before, what does it actually take?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: About fifteen minutes if you have your membership and finance figures on hand. We keep it short on purpose, because a survey that takes an hour gets abandoned halfway through and then the sample skews toward whoever had the most free time that week. Fifteen minutes, once a year, and you get the whole report back for free, plus you're represented in the sample your own peers are reading.

Host: That's a good closing pitch. Thanks again, Inês.

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Thank you.

Host: Actually, hold on, I want to go back to something. You said larger associations tend to sit closer to flat growth. Why would size correlate with slower growth at all?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: A few reasons, and none of them are alarming on their own. A large association has usually already recruited most of the addressable market in its field — there are only so many hospital administrators or water utility engineers to go around. Growth for them looks more like defending a renewal rate than adding new logos. A smaller, newer association is still finding members who don't know it exists yet, so the same percentage point of growth is a much smaller absolute number of people.

Host: Does the report separate those two stories out, or does it live inside one median?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: We publish both. The topline median is the number that gets quoted, but the report itself breaks growth and renewal out by member-count band, because collapsing a 25,000-member society and a 40-member council into one line would hide more than it reveals. I'd rather someone quote the wrong headline number than have the underlying breakdown missing entirely, and this year we made sure it wasn't.

Host: Last question, and it's about you rather than the report. What got you into survey methodology specifically, as opposed to research more broadly?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: I got frustrated in graduate school reading industry surveys that reported a number with total confidence and no visible method behind it — no sample size, no response rate, nothing you could check. I wanted to be the person who could tell you exactly how much weight a number can hold before it breaks. That's most of what this job is, honestly. Deciding what the data can responsibly say, and refusing to let it say more than that.

Host: Before we close, one practical question for anyone about to file their board's copy of this report away and forget about it. What's the one page they should photocopy and hand to their treasurer?

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: The renewal breakdown by member-count band, every time. Growth gets the attention because it's the exciting-sounding number, but a treasurer building next year's budget cares much more about how reliably last year's members come back, because that's the revenue you can actually plan around. Growth is upside. Renewal is the floor.

Host: That's a good place to end. Thanks again, Inês.

Ines Carvalho-Reyes: Thank you. See you again after the next report.