Third-Party Partners: An Essential Tool for Better Association Business
Third-party partnerships are an especially valuable tool in the multifaceted world of association management. Such arrangements enable associations to focus their attention and efforts on doing what they do best: serving their members and advocating for their industries.
Third-party partners help your association save on communications overhead
One particularly powerful and profitable area to utilize third party partners is member communications. In this realm, associations save on the overhead costs of producing member communication publications and the back-office management of content, revenue tracking and strategic planning. In addition to cost-saving advantages, associations reap the benefits of qualified partners coordinating profitable relationships between them and major businesses interested in promoting their brands or services to association members.
Third-party partners can help increase non-dues revenue
Through member communications, associations excel as the thought leaders and power brokers of their industries while earning non-dues revenue through advertising to better serve their members and achieve their industries’ goals. For associations with a focus on highly specialized fields, it is particularly beneficial for product and service providers to connect with the top leaders and decision makers in their industry to garner legitimacy and buy-in. Such association supplier members possess buying power in terms of ads and sponsorships they can purchase to reach other members interested in goods and services tailored to their industry’s specialized market. This can strengthen an association’s industry influence, with the association’s publication highlighting the cutting-edge products and services offered in their industry through company advertising.
A partner who researches and connects with such businesses interested in reaching association members as potential customers can save the association they work with hours of time while still passing along revenue from the advertising partnerships that result.
Third-party partners supplement your content strategy
Beyond generating non-dues revenue, advertising can engage association members and supplement a publication’s content strategy. Third-party partners are adept at brokering relationships between associations and businesses to build a marketing campaign that marries an association’s publication content with companies’ new products and services. This creates a stronger business community and enables association publications to provide their audiences with relevant, important, and timely content for their industry.
By engaging experts who are in-tune with the evolving association landscape and with the specific industries associations serve, associations reap the reward of generating non-dues revenue that translate into increased member benefits. We at Naylor make it our business to identify industry leaders and ensure the legitimacy of association publications by sourcing reliable, legitimate industry players to advertise their goods and services to their audiences. This ensures the continued integrity and value of an association’s brand.
This is why third party partnerships can be a key differentiator in successful and lucrative association management. By capitalizing on productive partnerships, associations increase influence, continue their industry legitimacy, and are empowered by additional sources of non-dues revenue to better achieve their primary goals.
