The Relevance Test: Would Your Industry Miss You If You Disappeared?
Let’s get one thing straight: Relevance isn’t the same as popularity. An association can have strong brand recognition, a packed annual conference, and a loyal membership base and still be irrelevant because its functions could be replaced by the private sector or nonprofit sources. It could fade away without leaving ripples.
By contrast, a relevant association wields influence within its industry and the governing structures that affect the industry. Separating the concepts of relevance and popularity allows association leaders to assess their association’s true standing and pursue strategies that make them central to their industry’s well-being.
Why Relevance Matters
A truly relevant association is the governing authority in its industry. It’s the body that shapes policy, sets the legislative agenda, defines the certifications and standards that practitioners are held to. It’s the organization that legislators, regulators, and industry leaders call when they need the industry’s voice in the room.
At its core, relevance is about advocacy working on behalf of members to create a favorable operating environment, reduce friction, protect their interests, and shape the conditions by which they do business. If your association isn’t doing that, then it’s a service provider. And service providers are replaceable.
This distinction matters more now than at any point in recent memory. Recent research from Association Laboratory found that joining an association is increasingly perceived by many members as an option, not a necessity. ASAE’s own research found that only 11% of associations describe their value proposition as “very compelling.” That’s a relevance crisis hiding behind decent membership numbers. Being well-known won’t save you.
Who Judges Relevance?
Relevance is in the eye of the beholders, but association leaders are prone to consider the wrong beholders. The most important signal comes from the most active, most influential association member practitioners—the ones shaping the profession, the executives deciding whether to send their people to the conference or invest in the certification. If those people are disengaging, that is a five-alarm fire regardless of what overall membership numbers look like.
If companies and professionals in the field do not feel compelled to join, that is a relevance verdict. Associations rarely study non-members with the rigor applied to their members, which means they are missing the most honest feedback available to them. If legislators and agency officials are calling the association when they need industry input, that is a relevance signal. If they are going to individual companies or other bodies instead, that is a gap that should concern association leadership deeply. Finally, if the association’s certifications and standards are being built into university curricula, relevance is penetrating the next generation of the profession.
Functional Relevance
To make the point concrete, let’s put core association functions to the relevance test:
- Conferences. Conferences are relevance made visible in real time. The annual meeting of a truly relevant association isn’t just a gathering; it’s the room where things happen. Where deals get done, standards get debated, and the industry’s direction for the next year gets set. If people feel like they can skip it without missing anything consequential, that’s not a programming problem. That’s a relevance problem.
The conference must be the best networking opportunity in the industry. The one where you’ll encounter the 10 people you most need to see, where relationships that drive real business outcomes get formed and maintained.The associations losing the conference battle are programming for attendance. The ones winning are programming for consequence. The association is the only institution with both the mission and the membership to represent the whole. That’s a structural advantage almost impossible to replicate. Most associations are not using it.
- Certification and Training. Association-sponsored certification and training should zero in on the industry in two ways that outside entities, whether vendors or online learning, cannot. First, an association should not just supply a credential; it should convey the legitimacy that a certification holder has met the industry standard. That only means something if the association is the governing authority—which, incidentally, is why relevance isn’t just a brand question, but the foundation of the entire education value proposition.
Association education should deliver the industry’s top guns and their specialized expertise. A LinkedIn Learning course on project management is generic because it has to appeal to millions of people across dozens of industries. An association convenes top subject matter experts in a given field.
- Advocacy. No LinkedIn Learning course, no independent conference, no trade media outlet can walk the halls of a statehouse or a federal agency on behalf of an entire industry. The association is an indispensable partner for advocacy because it holds, or at least should hold, the credibility and mandate of an industry. If your advocacy function is working, legislators are calling you. If it’s not, they’re calling someone else, or no one.
Now You See Me
The associations that fail to distinguish themselves are usually trying to compete on the same terms as their for-profit competitors. The ones that win have stopped competing and started convening. Relevance places an association at the center of the goals of its members, of industry players, and of political and regulatory decision makers because no one else does what it can. If the relevant association were to disappear, everyone would miss you.
