If your organization disappeared tomorrow, would the world lose a set of useful products? Or would it lose a community capable of acting together for good over time?
That question is the clearest way I know to understand whether membership is still necessary. It’s not a moral argument about what organizations should be. It’s a structural argument about what certain missions require.
Right now, many organizations are under real pressure to reach more people, open up access, and diversify revenue. Leaders are being asked to think in terms of scale, products, partnerships, and new business lines. In that environment, membership can start to feel like an outdated model or an unnecessary constraint.
The problem is not that membership is old. The problem is that many organizations have tried to make membership do the work of growth, distribution, and revenue, rather than the work of building a sense of partnership and collective capacity.
The hidden mistake: treating membership like a marketing channel
A lot of organizations have quietly come to treat membership as a customer acquisition channel. You join, you get access, you receive benefits, and you renew if the value feels worth it. In other words, membership functions like a subscription with a vintage name.
When membership is built that way, the results are predictable. People treat it like a transaction. And transactions are easy to cancel.
That doesn’t mean people don’t value community. People still do. The problem is structural: when membership is designed like a subscription, it cannot reliably deliver the trust, continuity, and shared responsibility the promise implies.
At the same time, leaders are under real pressure to reach more people and diversify revenue. They are being asked to expand access, open programs, and develop new lines of business through courses, events, sponsorship, licensing, partnerships, and productized services. Those approaches can be healthy and necessary. The question is whether they can replace membership.
In a very small number of cases, they can. But for most mission-driven professional organizations, the work is not only to deliver useful offerings. It is to build a field’s coherence, credibility, and capacity for collective action. Transactions can scale distribution, but they rarely create the commitment and shared structure needed for long-term influence and mission delivery.
That is why the most useful question is not, “Is membership good?”, it is, “What does our mission structurally require?”
Membership becomes necessary when your work structurally depends on the following:
- Collective legitimacy and influence: You need recognized authority to credibly represent a profession, field, or community and to shape decisions, standards, or outcomes that affect it. That authority must come from an identifiable body of committed members, not a loose audience or customer base.
- Continuity of commitment and authority: You need shared purpose and coordinated action to persist across leadership changes, funding cycles, shifting priorities, and contested moments. That continuity cannot reset with each cycle of attention or participation; it requires an ongoing commitment to the organization and its mission.
- Shared responsibility and enforceable standards: You need people to accept obligations to the community, uphold shared standards, participate in governance, and act collectively even when doing so is inconvenient or costly. The work depends on responsibility, not just participation or consumption.
If an organization’s primary role is to distribute skills, host events, or provide tools, membership may be optional. But when the work depends on the conditions above, membership is not a legacy model. It is a structural necessity.
The structural difference between a customer and a member
A customer relationship is built around exchange. A member relationship is built around mutual (here comes a scary word!) responsibility.
Customers can love what you provide. But they don’t owe you anything. They can leave whenever the value stops feeling immediate. That’s not a character flaw. It’s simply how markets work.
Membership is different. Membership creates a mutual contract. People opt in not only to receive value, but to belong, contribute, and uphold something. That contract makes it possible to build trust, standards, continuity, and collective capacity over time.
This is why membership is especially relevant in professions and missions where influence is collective and integrity matters. If you need a community that can advocate, steward standards, and act together, you can’t build that reliably through one-off transactions.
“But we need broader reach”
You probably do. The mistake is thinking that broader reach requires weaker membership.
A healthier approach for many organizations is not choosing between openness and membership, but designing a deliberate boundary between public mission and member value.
A limited open layer can support visibility and public-good dissemination, but it should be intentionally scoped. It exists to advance the mission and build trust, not to replicate the core value of membership. Openness should expand the mission, not replace the reasons to belong. The membership layer must remain the primary engine, concentrating the experiences, tools, relationships, and opportunities that create continuity, shared responsibility, and collective influence over time.
This structure allows an organization to extend reach without dissolving the mutual contract that makes membership meaningful.
The uncomfortable truth: membership requires protected value
If you want to defend membership honestly, you have to say the part leaders often avoid.
Membership requires some form of exclusivity.
Not exclusivity as elitism. Exclusivity as design. Because without protected value, membership becomes a donation. And donations do not reliably produce participation, responsibility, or long-term commitment.
This is also why “membership as a paywall” is such a trap. The goal is not to lock knowledge behind barriers, nor is it to reserve meaningful value for a small leadership class. The goal is to concentrate the experiences, tools, relationships, and opportunities that require continuity and shared commitment within the membership itself.
Think of the difference between reading training materials and being part of a residency, fellowship, or professional cohort. The information can be widely available. The value comes from the pedagogical partnership: structured pathways, the relationships, the accountability, and the progression.
When membership is designed this way, value does not sit at the edges of the organization. It runs through the core of how people learn, participate, contribute, and act together over time. In other words, the work is not to make more things free and hope people opt into commitment later. The work is to design membership so that meaningful progress, application, and participation naturally happen inside the member relationship.
This is not the easiest path
A true membership model is not the path of least resistance. It forces hard choices. It requires clarity about what belongs to the open layer and what belongs to the member layer. It requires the courage to protect exclusive value even when there is pressure to make everything available to everyone.
It also requires operational alignment. Membership cannot remain a department on the side. If membership is the operating system, then systems, teams, metrics, and decisions have to align around the member journey.
That work is hard. But the payoff is substantial.
The payoff: impact that compounds
The advantage of membership isn’t that it feels warm or traditional. The advantage is that it enables impact that compounds.
It builds a durable community, not just an audience. It creates legitimacy to speak and act. It sustains standards and integrity. It produces continuity and institutional resolve through disruption. It supports long-term investment in capabilities that don’t pay off immediately but are essential to the mission.
And in an era where institutions are under pressure and trust is fragmenting, that kind of collective capacity is more relevant, not less.
Why Membership Is a Structural Choice
In the end, the membership question is not about nostalgia. It’s about structure.
Transactional models can expand reach and diversify revenue. But when a mission depends on collective legitimacy and influence, continuity of commitment, and shared responsibility, transactions alone cannot do the job.
Membership is harder work, but it is the mechanism that makes stewardship, collective action, and long-term impact possible. The real question is whether we are willing to design it deliberately enough to deliver what the mission requires. Membership is the mechanism, not the limit, of impact.
