Magazine Monday: Rethinking Membership From the Ground Up

Barry Schieferstein on challenging long-held assumptions and building a more inclusive professional community.

How did your path into the association space influence how you approach leadership at ASNT?

My path into the association profession was anything but traditional, and that has significantly influenced how I approach leadership at ASNT. Before entering the association world, I spent most of my career in retail sales management. Retail teaches you very quickly that success depends on understanding your customers, delivering value they can clearly see, and creating experiences that keep them coming back. It also provides a strong foundation in business operations, revenue generation, financial management, and leading teams through constant change.

When I transitioned into conference and event management and eventually association leadership, I carried those lessons with me. While associations are mission-driven organizations, they still operate in a competitive environment where professionals have countless demands on their time, attention, and resources. We have to earn engagement by continually demonstrating value.

Because ASNT was my first association role, I also benefited from not having preconceived ideas about how associations were supposed to function. That allowed me to ask questions and propose changes that challenged longstanding assumptions. Over the years, that perspective contributed to rethinking aspects of our annual conference schedule and attendee experience, redesigning our awards banquet, modernizing governance meetings, and examining other practices that had remained largely unchanged for decades. Those conversations weren’t easy for an 85-year-old organization, but they underscored the need to balance tradition with a willingness to evolve.

That same mindset ultimately led us to question one of the most fundamental assumptions in the association community: whether our membership model was creating barriers for the very professionals we hoped to serve.

What went into your decision to rethink ASNT’s membership model?

Before ASNT ever discussed a freemium model, we asked a more fundamental question: Who should be a member of ASNT?

As we discussed that question, the answer became increasingly clear: everyone involved in the nondestructive testing profession should have a place within ASNT. That realization naturally led to a second question: If that is our goal, how do we make it possible?

For nearly a decade, ASNT had experienced a gradual decline in membership. At the same time, the profession was changing. New generations of professionals were engaging differently, career paths were becoming less linear, and many individuals wanted access to information, community, and professional resources without immediately committing to a traditional membership model. We also recognized that many people who could benefit from ASNT’s resources were connected to the profession but had not yet found a clear pathway into the organization.

As a mission-driven organization, we began looking beyond membership growth alone and focused on expanding access, increasing engagement, and better serving the broader nondestructive testing community. We explored multiple approaches, including à la carte options, persona-based models, and variations of traditional membership structures before ultimately focusing on a freemium model.

What made the freemium concept compelling was its alignment with our mission. We wanted professionals to experience value before making a financial commitment. That meant inviting them into the ASNT community, demonstrating that value over time, and creating a pathway toward deeper engagement and paid membership when it made sense for their career stage and needs. In many ways, the decision was less about changing dues and more about removing friction between our mission and the people we exist to serve.

Read the full article in the 2026 edition of Association Adviser magazine!