The Young Professional Membership Index (YPMI)
The Young Professional Membership Index (YPMI) is the field's first research-backed framework for assessing and improving young professional engagement. Developed with forward-thinking membership leaders, it provides clarity on where you stand, how you compare to peers, and what actions will drive impact.
The YPMI measures four critical Enabling Factors that determine success with emerging professionals:
- Leadership Focus - Whether key leaders prioritize young professionals in ways that shape action
- Culture of Value - Your capacity to design and deliver meaningful experiences
- Strategic Alignment - How well initiatives are supported across teams and priorities
- Experience Infrastructure - Whether you have systems to consistently deliver strong experiences
Through a simple organizational snapshot, you'll identify strengths, uncover gaps, and receive tailored recommendations. You'll also gain access to benchmarking tools and the 2025 YPMI National Report with insights and proven practices from associations nationwide.
Membership Transformation
Our membership transformation methodology is grounded in behavioral evidence, not assumptions or opinions. We help you uncover actionable insights into what drives member and non-member decision-making, then co-create membership offerings designed to attract, activate, and retain the right people.
Member Research Insights
Understand your future members at a deeper level and discover the offerings that genuinely resonate.
We employ ethnographic research combined with rigorous qualitative and quantitative methods to identify the most critical unmet and under-served needs of your prospective members. Our research doesn't just document what's happening—it reveals why it matters and provides clear direction on what actions will drive results.
Areas of specialized expertise:
- Emerging professionals and the critical transition from student to early-career practitioner
- Jobs to Be Done research and analysis
- Member decision-making pathways and conversion journeys
- New market exploration, emerging member segments, and innovative offering development.
Membership Offering Design
Successful membership offerings don't try to be everything to everyone. They excel by delivering a focused set of value propositions that solve genuine problems in ways competitors can't match. This demands strategic discipline, identifying and amplifying the most meaningful benefits for specific member segments at critical moments in their professional journey.Our offering design process centers target members as active collaborators, involving them directly in shaping solutions that address their real needs and contexts.We work with you to transform existing membership structures and architect entirely new ones, optimizing both your overall membership portfolio and the specific products and services within it.
What we create together:
- Innovative membership products and reimagined existing offerings
- Value propositions precisely calibrated to target member needs
- Compelling messaging and clear competitive differentiation
- Strategic pricing frameworks and benefit bundling
Prototyping & Pilots
We accelerate learning and minimize risk by testing concepts in real-world conditions using lean startup principles. Through rapid design sprints, simulated purchase tests, and controlled pilot programs, we validate and refine new membership offerings before full-scale launch. You'll have concrete evidence of what drives engagement and the confidence to invest in what works.
The Future of Membership Cohort
Join a 5-week intensive cohort experience alongside membership teams from progressive associations nationwide, focused on reimagining membership for the next generation of professionals.
- The Challenge Examine macro trends in young professional engagement and clarify your association's specific challenges through collaborative discussion.
- "Bridge" Experiences Discover proven strategies and real examples of how associations retain early career members through transitional experiences.
- Understanding what young professionals need Learn and apply the Jobs To Be Done framework through live interviews to uncover the true needs of young professionals.
- Creating New Value Propositions and Products with Young Professionals Practice rapid co-creation techniques with young professionals to develop offerings aligned with their needs and expectations.
- Planning for the Future: Next Steps for Your Team & Organization Develop concrete action plans for reimagining membership while receiving feedback from peers and Highland experts.
Digital Experience
Design & launch websites, mobile apps, and digital products that engage members and create new opportunities and revenue streams.
Websites & Digital Experiences
Your website is the digital hub of your prospect and member experience. It does the heavy lifting of attracting, educating and converting prospective members. But it also has to serve many types of current members and many other types of constituents in your industry.
We design and build award-winning websites for associations, as well as member portals, offering-specific applications, and the overall digital experience you deliver to members and other constituents.
Mobile Apps
Mobile apps can create deep and frequent engagement with your offerings, and can deliver compelling experiences when linking different benefits across education, peer community, mentoring, and career development into a single mobile experience.
We can help you decide if a mobile app is right for your association, and where it can create outsized value.
We build mobile apps that are flexible, intuitive, and scalable. We use a blend of rapid research, iterative design, and agile development to get the product in front of end users early so that the best solution can also be the fastest solution.
Digital Products
Digital products are revenue-generating applications that build on your core expertise. We've helped membership organizations imagine, create, and launch applications that serve core members, reach new audiences, extend into practitioners' day-to-day jobs, and leverage industry data to advance both mission and revenue.
Creating a digital product that customers will buy and use requires much more than building a piece of technology.
Highland's digital product design and development team has 25 years of experience working from concept to launch, bringing together experts in digital product strategy, research, design, and development into a single, powerful team.
We've launched over 280 new products, services, and businesses for for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.
AI Career Partner
A digital platform that helps professional associations offer members a connected and personalized experience. Through intelligent recommendations and a conversational assistant, it guides members toward the most relevant courses, jobs, events, and connections based on their interests and activity. The platform brings together data from different systems to act as a true career companion, supporting each member’s professional growth in a simple and human way.
