Reading the State of Associations 2025

Director of Research Inês Carvalho-Reyes returns, a week after the State of Associations 2025 release, to walk host Amara Obiledu through what changed and what didn't: 720 organizations surveyed, up from 690 the year before, median growth flat again at 2.1%, and renewal steady at 93%. The conversation is about what a repeated number means, not just what it is.

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

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:35 720 organizations, up from 690

• 06:10 Growth flat at 2.1% for a second year

• 12:00 Why renewal held at 93% while growth stalled

• 18:20 What's driving membership growth where it's happening

• 23:45 The methodology question: is this the same 690?

• 29:00 What NANA does with a flat number

• 32:30 Compensation data and the recruitment link

• 34:50 Floor or ceiling: which is it

• 36:40 The Fieldstone Data Partners partnership

• 38:20 Outro

Host: Inês, you were on this podcast six months ago talking about the 2024 report. Now there's a 2025 edition. What's the headline?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: The headline is that not much moved, and that's the story. Seven hundred twenty organizations responded this year, up from 690. Median membership growth came in at 2.1% again — identical, to a decimal point, to last year. Median renewal held at 93%, also unchanged. If you were hoping for a dramatic year-over-year shift, this isn't that report.

Host: Is a flat number actually less interesting than a moving one, from a research standpoint?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: No, and that surprises people. A single data point can be noise. Two years at the same 2.1% starts to look like a floor, or a ceiling, depending how you want to frame it — either way, it's a signal that the sector has settled into something, rather than one association having a good or bad year that happened to land on the same average as last year's.

Host: Let's talk about the 720 number itself. Is that growth in the survey's reach, or did we just get lucky with response rate?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: Some of both. We added respondents in sectors that were underrepresented in 2024 — smaller trade associations, a few more professional societies under 1,000 members. That's a deliberate outreach choice on our end, not organic growth in the sector. So part of the jump from 690 to 720 is us doing our job better, and I'd caution anyone reading too much into the raw increase as if it reflects the sector expanding.

Host: You mentioned renewal held at 93% while growth stayed flat. Isn't that a contradiction? Shouldn't a healthy renewal rate produce growth?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: Not necessarily, and this is the part people get wrong most often. Renewal measures whether existing members stay. Growth measures net new membership minus departures. You can have excellent renewal and still be flat, if new-member recruitment is exactly offsetting whatever attrition exists. What a flat growth number next to a strong renewal number tells you is that the sector's problem isn't retention — it's recruitment. Associations are good at keeping the members they have. They're not adding new ones at the same rate.

Host: Where is growth actually happening, for the organizations that beat the median?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: The strongest performers this year skew toward associations that added a concrete, usable benefit in the past 24 months — a certification, a benchmarking tool, a peer community specific to a sub-role within the field. It's less about marketing spend and more about whether a prospective member can point to one specific reason to join beyond general goodwill toward the field. That's consistent with what we saw in 2024 too, so I'd call it a pattern now, not a one-year fluke.

Host: Is this the same 690 organizations from last year plus 30 new ones, or has the panel turned over?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: It's mixed, and we're transparent about that in the methodology section. We retained a solid majority of last year's respondents, but response panels always have some churn — an organization merges, a survey contact leaves and nobody picks it up, or we simply didn't reach them again in time. I'd treat the 2.1% as directionally comparable year to year, not as a strict same-cohort comparison. If someone wants that rigor, the quarterly data briefs track a more consistent sub-panel, and that's actually a better source for trend work than the annual headline number.

Host: What does NANA do differently because of this report, versus just publishing it?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: The clearest example is the Dues Model Study. Haruko Tanaka and I have been looking at whether dues structure correlates with growth, and this year's data feeds directly into that. We also use the report internally — if recruitment is the sector's soft spot, that's a reason for NANA's own membership team to look hard at how we recruit, not just how we retain, since we're not exempt from the pattern we're describing in other people's sectors.

Host: You fielded compensation data too, separately from this report. Does that connect to the recruitment problem at all?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: It does, more than I expected when we started looking at the two datasets side by side. The Staff Compensation Survey we run every June shows salary growth for association roles has been modest, and for some entry-level positions basically flat. If associations themselves are competing for staff talent against sectors offering faster pay growth, that same recruitment weakness shows up on the staffing side too, not just the membership side. I don't want to overreach on that connection with only two years of data, but it's the kind of thing I'll be watching closely in next year's edition.

Host: You called the flat 2.1% a possible floor or ceiling. Which do you actually think it is?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: If you'd asked me after the first flat year, I'd have guessed ceiling — that 2.1% was about as good as the sector gets in a normal year, and we'd likely see it dip in a bad one. Two years running changes my thinking slightly toward floor, meaning the sector has found a baseline level of recruitment activity that's fairly resistant to going lower, even without anything specific pushing it higher. I'll have a much better answer once I have a third data point, which is exactly why I'm already thinking about next March.

Host: You cited a certification or benchmarking tool as a growth driver earlier. Is there a specific example of that from this year's data you can point to without naming a respondent directly?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: I can point to a pattern rather than a single named organization, since respondents answer under the expectation we won't single them out. The clearest version of it is an association that launched some kind of data or benchmarking product for its own sector within the last two years — essentially doing at their scale what NANA does at ours — and used it as a standing reason for a prospective member to join beyond general professional community. Associations doing that showed up disproportionately among this year's above-median performers, the same as last year.

Host: Last question. If someone only reads one number from this report, what should it be?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: Not the 2.1%, honestly — the fact that it's the same 2.1% as last year. A single number tells you where the sector stands. A repeated number tells you where it's stuck, and that's the more useful thing to plan around.

Host: One more before we close. Fieldstone Data Partners fields the survey with you. What does that partnership actually add versus running it entirely in-house?

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: Survey tooling and statistical rigor, mostly. Fieldstone handles the distribution mechanics and response-weighting math at a level my team, which is small, couldn't build and maintain on our own without pulling staff off of every other research project we run. What stays entirely with my team is the interpretation — deciding what the numbers mean for NANA's members is our call, not theirs, and I'd never outsource that part.

Host: Inês, thanks for coming back to walk through it.

Inês Carvalho-Reyes: Anytime. Ask me again next March — I have a guess where the number lands, and I'd rather be wrong out loud than quiet about it.