Dues at a 7,800-Member Society

Kenji Albrecht, Chief Financial Officer of the National Society of Water Utility Engineers, walks through how the 7,800-member, 28-staff society structures dues today — and what NSWUE hopes to learn once it joins the pilot phase of NANA's Dues Model Study this September.

• Kenji Albrecht — Chief Financial Officer, National Society of Water Utility Engineers. Joining the Dues Model Study's pilot phase.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:20 NSWUE at 7,800 members, 28 staff

• 06:30 How dues are structured today

• 10:30 How the rate actually gets set each year

• 15:00 Why a flat rate has held this long

• 19:45 Where the current model creates friction

• 23:30 Dues versus non-dues revenue at NSWUE

• 26:30 Joining the Dues Model Study pilot this fall

• 29:40 Talking to Haruko Tanaka's team about the design

• 32:30 What Kenji hopes to learn

• 34:50 Communicating this to members now

• 37:00 Outro

Host: Kenji, give listeners the shape of your organization before we get into dues specifically, since this one runs a lot bigger than some of the associations we've had on the show.

Kenji Albrecht: The National Society of Water Utility Engineers is 7,800 members, mostly engineers working inside public water utilities around the country, with a staff of 28 based here in Chicago. We're one of the larger member organizations in NANA's own network, and dues are a big enough share of our revenue that getting the structure right matters more than it would for an association leaning heavily on non-dues revenue.

Host: Walk me through how dues actually work today.

Kenji Albrecht: It's a flat individual rate, the same whether you're an entry-level engineer two years into the field or a utility's chief engineer with thirty years in. We've had that structure for a long time, and the logic behind it was simplicity — one number, no committee arguing over tiers every year, easy to communicate to a prospective member.

Host: Why has a flat rate held this long, if it's on the table for review now?

Kenji Albrecht: Because it genuinely worked for a long time. Simplicity has real value — a flat rate is easy to budget for, easy to explain, and it doesn't require us to build and maintain a tier system that has its own administrative cost. The reasons to reconsider it aren't that it's broken, exactly. They're that the membership itself has gotten more varied than it was when the rate was set, and a rate designed for a more uniform membership doesn't necessarily still fit.

Host: How is a rate like ours actually set today, mechanically? Is there a formula, or is it more of a board decision each year?

Kenji Albrecht: It's a board decision, reviewed annually, but in practice it moves rarely — small adjustments tied to inflation, not a structural rethink. That's part of the appeal of a flat rate: there's very little to debate each year beyond a modest percentage change. The tradeoff is that "very little to debate" also means structural problems, like the ones I'm about to describe, can sit unaddressed for years simply because nobody's forced to reopen the bigger question.

Host: Where specifically does the flat rate create friction now?

Kenji Albrecht: Two places. A newly licensed engineer at a small rural utility pays the same rate as a senior engineer at a major metropolitan system making several times the salary, and for the smaller utility, that flat number is a bigger share of a smaller paycheck — we hear that from younger members directly. On the other side, some of our largest utility employers have started asking whether there's a group or organizational rate that reflects how many of their engineers we're already serving, versus billing each one individually with no volume recognition at all.

Host: That sounds like the tiered-versus-flat question NANA's Dues Model Study has been looking at more broadly.

Kenji Albrecht: It's exactly that question, and it's part of why we're joining the Phase 2 pilot this September. NANA's own Phase 1 research found that flat-dues associations under 500 members lost members over three years while tiered associations gained slightly — we're much larger than that threshold, so it's not a direct match, but the underlying dynamic, whether a one-size rate serves an increasingly varied membership, is the same question at our scale.

Host: What will actually happen once the pilot starts?

Kenji Albrecht: We haven't run anything yet — the pilot phase begins in September, and NANA hasn't finalized exactly which model each of the twelve participating organizations will test. For us, I expect it to involve piloting some version of tiered or graduated pricing with a subset of our membership, measured against a control group still on the flat rate, so we can compare actual renewal and satisfaction outcomes rather than guessing.

Host: Have you talked to Haruko Tanaka or Inês Carvalho-Reyes directly about how the pilot design will actually work, or is that still being finalized on NANA's side?

Kenji Albrecht: We've had one planning call so far, mostly about what data NSWUE can realistically provide — member tenure, engagement history, which of our members would be willing to be in a test group versus a control group. Haruko's been clear that the twelve participating organizations won't all run identical experiments, since a 7,800-member engineering society and a much smaller organization like the Association of Seed Library Curators face different questions. What we share is the measurement framework, not necessarily the exact model each of us tests.

Host: What outcome would tell you the pilot was worth doing, whichever way it comes out?

Kenji Albrecht: Honestly, either a clean yes or a clean no is a good outcome, as long as it's backed by our own data rather than a hunch from the board. What I want to avoid is spending two years debating this qualitatively, the way associations often do, when NANA's actually built a structured way to test it with real numbers attached.

Host: How does NSWUE's dues revenue compare to non-dues revenue? Does that ratio affect how much risk you're willing to take on this?

Kenji Albrecht: Dues are a substantial majority of our revenue, more than most trade associations our size, since we haven't built out a large conference or credentialing business the way some peer societies have. That actually raises the stakes on getting this right rather than lowering them — if we had a bigger non-dues cushion, I'd be more willing to experiment aggressively with the dues structure, because a misstep would hurt less. Since dues carry so much of the budget, I want the pilot's evidence in hand before we touch the structure that funds most of what we do.

Host: Is there a risk that changing the rate structure damages the simplicity you said has real value?

Kenji Albrecht: Absolutely, and that's the trade-off we're going in aware of. Any tier system adds administrative overhead and a small population of members who feel they've been sorted into the wrong bracket. The pilot is partly about finding out whether the benefit to the members who are currently poorly served by a flat rate outweighs that added complexity for everyone else. I don't know the answer yet, and I'd be lying if I told you I already do.

Host: How are you communicating this to your own 7,800 members right now, before there's anything concrete to tell them?

Kenji Albrecht: Carefully, and mostly in general terms. We've told members that NSWUE is participating in a national study looking at dues structures across associations, and that no changes are planned for existing members until we have pilot results. I'd rather under-communicate right now than get ahead of ourselves and generate anxiety about a rate change that might not even happen, or might look completely different from whatever a member is currently imagining.

Host: Kenji, thanks for laying out where things stand before the pilot even starts.

Kenji Albrecht: Happy to. Come back once we actually have pilot data — that'll be the more interesting conversation, and hopefully a more conclusive one than what I've been able to offer here today.