Generating Non-Dues Revenue for Your Association

Associations that diversify their revenue streams to incorporate non-dues revenue are much better positioned to deal with economic uncertainty, keep a robust staff, and explore valuable new member benefits and programs.

In this guide, I’ll explore a few of the ways you generate non-dues revenue for your association. Then I’ll dive a little deeper into how you can create successful sponsorship and advertising programs. With these strategies, your association can tap into new financial growth avenues and offer even better value to members. Let’s get started!

Why is Non-Dues Revenue Important for Associations?

Having diverse revenue streams stabilizes your association’s financial resources and can help you invest in programs, events, and member services that ultimately draw new members. Generating income beyond just member dues also allows you to keep membership (and other programs) affordable without sacrificing the quality of services and benefits you offer.

Without non-dues revenue, it’s very difficult to keep the financial ask on members low, fuel improved events and content, maintain a staff size that avoids burnout, and tap into the association’s full potential.

How to Generate Non-Dues Revenue

Though many association professionals know that non-dues revenue is vital to their association’s ability to keep providing value to members, they may not know where to start. It’s important to identify the right non-dues revenue strategies that align with your association’s unique needs, target audience, and potential sponsors and partners.

Your priority is your members – you don’t want to spam them with advertisements or sponsorships they’re not interested in. Luckily, many non-dues revenue tactics create value for members.

Common Types of Non-Dues Revenue

There are several types of non-dues revenue activities. You might already be doing some of these, but for those you’re not already doing, consider which could work for your members – or what you could adjust to broaden your revenue sources.

• Sponsorship opportunities and packages:Provide sponsorship opportunities to businesses that resonate with your mission and values. Create appealing sponsorship packages that deliver value to sponsors, such as logo placements, speaking opportunities, and exclusive event access.
• Advertising options:Utilize your digital assets, like websites, newsletters, and conferences, to offer advertising options to relevant businesses. This could include banner ads, sponsored content, or sponsored emails.
• Career Centers & Job Boards:Establishing a job board for your members can provide job listings, career resources, and professional development opportunities. By partnering with employers and offering premium services like resume reviews or interview coaching, you can monetize this valuable resource.
• Virtual and In-Person Events: Interactive events, such as webinars, can create exciting opportunities for your members and generate revenue. These events provide an enjoyable experience for members and create opportunities for sponsorship and advertising. Additionally, webinars can serve as a platform to showcase your organization’s expertise, attract new members, and generate revenue simultaneously.
• Premium content and courses:By developing exclusive content or online courses that provide in-depth knowledge or specialized training, you can generate revenue while providing added value to your members. Remember to ensure that the content aligns with the interests and needs of your members.
• Data and member insights monetization:Associations often have valuable data and insights about their members. By anonymizing and aggregating this data, you can offer it back to members (e.g. workload and salary surveys or other insights into your industry) or, if appropriate, to businesses or researchers invested in trends in your industry. This not only generates revenue but bolsters your association’s position as a trusted industry resource.
• Merchandise Sales:Leverage your organization’s brand and create merchandise that resonates with your members. These items can be sold through your website or at events. Additionally, consider partnering with relevant vendors to offer exclusive discounts to your members.
• Publications and Digital Resources:Consider offering publications such as industry reports, research papers, or expert interviews, for a fee. You can also explore advertising opportunities within your publications or on your website.

Implementing these strategies can create additional revenue streams for your organization while delivering value to your members. Regular evaluation and adaptation of these initiatives based on member feedback and market trends are crucial to maximize their effectiveness.

Sponsorship Options

One of the takeaways we’ve often heard from experts at the Non Dues-a-Palooza conference is to explore the assets and platforms you already have with an eye toward monetization. Think about your email, online community, events, etc. and ask yourself how you could build sponsorship into those to offset the cost of those platforms or channels.

Some examples include:

• Community Sponsorship: Run ads on the logged-out homepage (visible to anyone who visits your community site) and/or within your community (targeted to members). In a platform like Higher Logic Thrive Community, there are multiple placement options (leaderboard, sidebar, footer, ads in community email digests) available where you could sell and place graphic ads.
• Community Thought Leadership & Sponsored Resources: If it’s appropriate for your community and members, let sponsors join your online community and develop direct connections with potential customers by participating in discussions and answering questions as subject matter experts. Allow sponsors to contribute whitepapers, toolkits, or videos to your community resource library or contribute to the community blog. You set the ground rules for what you want to allow from sponsors in your online community, but there are many ways to gain revenue and member value from their participation without letting things get too promotional.
• Event Sponsorship: Let sponsors leverage event fanfare to drive attention. For in-person events, consider booths, print items, signage, swag, etc. For virtual events, sponsors can be noted in slides, on the event website, and in event online communities. You might also highlight sponsors in communications to attendees – for example, in banner ads in attendee emails or in a dedicated sponsor thank you.
• Partner Webinars and Programs: Many sponsors are looking for more than a logo placement. They want to demonstrate their knowledge by providing thought leadership. If you have partners who are experts in a certain area, consider co-hosting educational programs with them. This is a great way to generate sponsor revenue while adding genuine value to members through relevant education.
• Email & Newsletter Sponsorship: Reserve space in your emails and/or newsletters for sponsor ad placements. Or offer sponsors the opportunity to send a “chaperoned” email, where you send a message to your audience on their behalf. Remember, you set the guidelines for what they can include – if you don’t want your emails to become too promotional, consider advising sponsors that ads have to highlight thought-leadership content rather than products.
• Newsletter Thought-Leadership & Sponsored Content: Beyond ad placements, sponsors can be content contributors. This positions them as a valued and trusted source of information that could only come from their access and expertise. Again, this can be delivered in a variety of formats, be it text, audio, video, graphic, or infographic.

How to Price, Expand, and Optimize Your Association’s Sponsorship Activity

As a former association marketer and Higher Logic customer, I have first-hand experience monetizing the investment my association made in our member experience platforms. In my former role as the Assistant Director of Marketing at Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, (PRIM&R), I helped run a sponsorship program that eventually completely covered the cost of our Higher Logic Thrive Marketing and Community products – in fact, the year before I left we brought in over $60k non-dues revenue from email and community ads alone (not including conference sponsorship).

What I found is that you can start small and work your way up. At first, we were only selling member newsletter sponsorship, but as that began consistently selling out, we expanded our offerings.

I’ll admit that setting the “right” price felt daunting, but we researched what other email, web, and community ads cost in our space. If you’re not responsible for purchasing ads for your organization, connect with the staff who are and ask what they’re spending as a starting point. Then just pick a price, give it a try, monitor performance, and adjust as needed.

For my program, I settled on between $1,000 and $1,500 for email ads, and $300-600 for web and community ads because our community was new and we needed time to build the positive reputation of the community for vendors and members.

You can always adjust pricing until you hit the sweet spot. If something’s not selling, try lowering the price, or offering a complimentary placement to a trusted sponsor who’s already buying other placements so that other vendors can see what that placement looks like in action. Or run your own ads (and maybe ads for your sponsor opportunities) in those openings – this can help you generating awareness (and performance stats, like click rates on email ad banners) so sponsors know what they’re buying.

Also, don’t be afraid to raise prices even if it means less ads are sold – having fewer, but higher-paying sponsors can help you maximize revenue per placement while lightening the load on staff.

With Sponsorship, Your Platforms Can Pay for Themselves

An association platform like Higher Logic Thrive not only helps you create an engaging member experience, it’s also perfectly positioned to give sponsors the kind of year-round exposure and interaction they’re looking for. Because of this, it’s a great avenue for generating non-dues revenue.

The great news for associations is that this kind of powerful technology becomes more accessible when you consider how to use it to generate non-dues revenue – many of Higher Logic’s existing customers have more than paid for the cost of their platform.

Any association, whether for profit or non-profit, is better positioned with powerful communication, community, and member experience tools that scale to generate additional, recurring sponsorships. The end result: a strong, secure association that becomes indispensable for both members and sponsors.