What the Renewal Benchmarks Show

Rashida Kimbrough, NANA board director and Chief Membership Officer at the Federation of Food Bank Networks, co-authored the Member Renewal Benchmarks, published five days before this recording at the Pacific Northwest Spring Forum. She walks through what the first edition found, and where it complicates the easy story about renewal rates.

• Rashida Kimbrough — Director, NANA board; Chief Membership Officer, Federation of Food Bank Networks. Co-author of the Member Renewal Benchmarks.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:50 Why NANA built a renewal-specific report

• 06:30 The headline number and what it hides

• 12:15 Renewal by association size

• 17:45 Renewal by dues structure

• 22:30 What a food-bank network's own renewal data taught her

• 27:10 What NANA does with the finding next

• 32:00 Outro

Host: Rashida, the Member Renewal Benchmarks came out five days ago. Before we get into the findings, why did NANA build this report at all? The State of Associations survey already reports a renewal number every year.

Rashida Kimbrough: It does, but it reports one national figure — 94% this year — and that number is true and almost useless on its own. It tells a 750-member association and a 12-member association the same thing, which is nothing about either of them specifically. What members kept asking our research team for was a way to see where they actually sit against associations that look like them — their size, their dues model, their sector — not against a blended national average that no real association matches.

Host: So walk me through the headline number, and then tell me what it hides.

Rashida Kimbrough: The overall renewal rate is 94%, consistent with what State of Associations already reported. What that hides is a spread of nearly fifteen points between the best-performing and worst-performing segments once you cut the data by size and dues structure. A 94% average can be built out of a lot of associations sitting well above it and a meaningful number sitting well below it, and if you're one of the ones below it, the national number tells you nothing about why.

Host: Break down the size cut for me.

Rashida Kimbrough: Larger associations — call it a few thousand individual members or a few hundred organizational members and up — renew at a noticeably higher clip than the smallest associations in the sample. That's not surprising on its face; bigger associations usually have more staff dedicated to renewal outreach. What surprised us is how much of that gap tracked to something more specific than staff size: the smallest associations were far more likely to be running a flat annual dues structure with no tiering at all, and that turned out to matter more than staff capacity did.

Host: That connects to the Dues Model Study, doesn't it — Haruko Tanaka's work has already flagged flat dues as harder on the smallest organizations.

Rashida Kimbrough: It connects directly, and honestly that's part of why I wanted to co-author this report. The Dues Model Benchmarking Report looked at membership growth or loss over three years and found flat-dues associations under 500 members losing a median 3.4% of members, tiered associations gaining 1.2%. Renewal is the mechanism underneath that number. A flat fee taxes your smallest, most price-sensitive members hardest every single year at renewal time, and eventually enough of them don't renew that the association shrinks. This report is the annual snapshot; the Dues Model Study is the multi-year trend. They're describing the same problem from two angles.

Host: You lead membership at the Federation of Food Bank Networks. Did your own organization's renewal data hold up when you looked at it against these benchmarks?

Rashida Kimbrough: It was a useful gut check, honestly. We're a network of 96 regional food-bank networks, tiered by service volume rather than a flat fee, and our renewal rate sits above the benchmark for associations our size. That was reassuring, but it also made me look harder at the handful of networks that don't renew some years, because against this data I can no longer explain that away as normal churn. If the benchmark says our peer group should be renewing at a certain rate and a specific segment of our own network is under it, that's now a question I have to answer, not a number I can shrug off.

Host: What does NANA do with a finding like the size-and-dues gap, practically? Is this just a report members read, or does it change anything NANA does?

Rashida Kimbrough: It's already shaping how the Dues Model Study's Phase 2 pilots get evaluated — twelve member organizations are testing new dues models through next spring, and this report gives us a renewal baseline to measure their results against that's specific to associations their size, not a blended national figure. It also gives our membership team language for onboarding calls with smaller organizational members: instead of a generic "renewal matters," we can now say something closer to "associations your size on a flat dues structure renew at this rate, and here's what tiered peers your size are seeing instead."

Host: Is there a finding in the report you didn't expect, something that didn't fit the story you walked in expecting to tell?

Rashida Kimbrough: Yes — sector mattered less than I predicted. I assumed a food-bank network and a ski-area operators' council would show completely different renewal behavior because the members' businesses look nothing alike. They didn't. Once you control for size and dues structure, sector differences mostly washed out. That told the research team, and told me, that the structural choices an association makes — how it sizes its dues, how it tiers membership — matter more to whether members stick around than what industry those members happen to work in.

Host: How was the report actually built? Walk me through the mechanics for a membership director who wants to trust the number before she acts on it.

Rashida Kimbrough: We asked participating associations for renewal data going back three cycles, not just the most recent one, because a single year can be noise — a bad renewal season doesn't always mean a structural problem, and a good one doesn't always mean you've fixed one. We cut the data by organization size, individual versus organizational membership, and self-reported dues structure, then checked each cell for enough associations in it to say something responsible. A couple of the narrower cells — the very smallest flat-dues associations, for instance — only had a few dozen respondents, so we flagged those as directional rather than definitive. I'd rather tell members a number is thin than dress it up as more solid than it is.

Host: Did any association decline to participate once they saw what the report would ask for?

Rashida Kimbrough: A few. Renewal data is more sensitive than it sounds, because for a small association it's basically an admission of how well or badly the year went, and some executives weren't comfortable handing that over even anonymized. I understand the hesitation. What I'd say to them is the same thing I said to my own board before we shared our numbers: an aggregated, anonymized benchmark can't single you out, and the associations who sat this one out are the ones least able to tell whether their own renewal problem is normal for their size or a sign something specific is going wrong.

Host: Last question. If a membership director listening today can only do one thing differently tomorrow because of this report, what should it be?

Rashida Kimbrough: Find your association's actual peer cell in the report — your size band, your dues structure — before you decide whether your renewal number is good or bad. Too many of us compare ourselves to the national 94% and either celebrate or panic based on a comparison that was never fair to begin with. Compare against the segment that actually looks like you, then decide whether you have a problem worth fixing.

Host: Rashida, thanks for walking through the first edition of this.

Rashida Kimbrough: Thanks for having me. Ask me again next May — the plan is to run this every year, and one edition only tells you where you stand. Two editions start to tell you whether you're moving.