Here in early 2026, a lot of associations are talking about AI: AI tools to be more efficient, AI chatbots to help members discover what they’re looking for, AI to drive marketing personalization, and more. There are AI-related tools and solutions everywhere and, it seems like, for everything.
We're thinking too small.
Yes, we should be grateful that AI can help solve the terrible search and findability problems members face on fragmented association digital properties. But most AI solutions are focused on narrow use cases: improving continuing education, making processes more efficient, reducing effort in creating marketing materials or curriculum. All iterating on the status quo.
We need to think more holistically.
The true challenge of membership is not long customer service wait times or insufficiently tailored recommendations for education courses. The challenge is that differentiated member value has diminished.
The Value of Membership Has Declined
The interlocking value propositions of membership have been under pressure for decades, and we see it reflected in the increased difficulty to acquire members and especially to retain them.
The historic pillars of membership have all been eaten away by alternatives in the broader market.
- Annual events are no longer must-attend occasions.
- Continuing education offerings have many alternatives in the market from employers, for-profit organizations, and other associations.
- Local chapter participation and local networking has declined as the internet has changed the way people connect to advance their careers.
- Information and content is seemingly everywhere.
Membership Has Shifted from Perennial to Contingent
As the uniqueness of the interlocking parts of membership has declined, two types of members emerged.
Perennial members are the kind of members we tend to think of when imagining a member. Perennial members, as the name implies, renew their membership year after year. They tend to be more advanced in their career and operate out of a traditional membership model that values affiliation and loyalty. Perennial members see membership as part of their professional identity.
Contingent members are the new type of member that has grown profoundly over the past few decades. Contingent members join every now and then for a specific functional purpose: presenting at the annual meeting, completing required continuing education, accessing a salary benchmark, etc. They often seek information and connection through digital platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. as alternatives to traditional member benefits. Contingent members tend to be earlier in their career, and for most associations make up an increasing majority of their members in any given year. But since contingent members join periodically and don’t stay members year after year, associations need a much larger number of contingent members to maintain or grow the total number of members.
For contingent members, the act of joining and the act of staying are now two separate decisions. Loyalty or durability as a member is not baked into the decision to join. On the contrary, often the decision to join for some specific reason is accompanied by an assumption that they will not remain a member because they do not see the ongoing value to stay.
Membership organizations face an existential question at the core of the organization: does membership still have sufficient value for members to join and stay on a perennial basis?
The Key Value to Sustain Ongoing Membership: Career Partnership
Over the last five years, the Highland team has worked with dozens of leading associations, as well as conducted research with professionals across all sorts of industries. We’ve designed early career experience, built digital platforms, launched AI-driven tools, and run pilots to test and measure what really moves the needle.
As we have sought to understand what might reignite acquisition and retention of perennial membership, one clear bright spot has emerged: professionals who believe an association is an essential partner in their career are more likely to remain members over time.
We’ve spent the last several years developing what we call “career partner experiences”, particularly focused on very early career members who are just leaving training and entering the first few years of their career.
When you look across virtually every association in the country, the conversion rate from the very last year of student membership into the first year professional membership is usually extremely low, 40% or lower. This is true even when the first few years of professional membership are heavily discounted, and they usually are.
This is the most challenging group of professionals to acquire and keep as members. Very early career professionals in particular see the many alternatives to the historical value propositions of membership, and often struggle to understand what enduring value membership might offer to them in their career.
Across all of our efforts to design career partner experiences, walking alongside early career members in the first year of their career, anticipating and designing for the things they will need to transition into the workplace and to establish themselves early in their career, we’ve seen something very interesting:
If we can even slightly increase the sentiment that the association is an essential partner in their career, we can have a significant impact on the retention rates over time for those members.
For example, in one global scientific association , our early career partner experience increased the sentiment that this association was a career partner by about 7%. From that 7% increase in career partner sentiment we saw a nearly 50% increase in retention after one year and a nearly 33% increase in retention after three years.
That’s an enduring change, driven by the belief that the association was an essential partner in their career. The impact is dramatic, but the challenge is scaling that kind of impact.
The Challenge of Scale
These early career experiences are time intensive and resource intensive to produce.
They're often based upon coaching, personalized guidance, and tailoring the resources, opportunities, and connections of the association to anticipate—in the right time and in the right way—the kind of help, connections, and guidance that early career professionals are going to need.
This is possible and worth doing in the first year of their career, because gaining and keeping a member early on can have huge benefits over the decades of their career. But it's simply not feasible to scale this kind of high touch, high intensity career partner experience across the career of a member.
Until now. Which brings us back to AI.
AI Enables Career Partnership at Scale
AI provides a scalable, highly differentiated way for members to engage with the trusted knowledge, resources, and connections of an association in a way that has never been possible before.
This is why I believe we're thinking too small when we focus on customer service bots, or bots that help find things across our websites and other digital properties, or bots that recommend a single kind of resource like an event session or an educational course.
AI provides a way to deliver hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant career partner experiences to all of our members in a way that wasn't possible, even two years ago.
Imagine a member getting salary benchmarks, exploring career paths, finding local employers and jobs, making connections to precisely matched members, getting feedback on an employment contract, and receiving precise recommendations for the right offerings and programs at the right time. That’s the kind of interaction the AI Career Partner is capable of, and it can be transformative to the member experience.
It is, in short, a new and powerful member benefit that can impact both acquisition and retention, not to mention member intelligence, revenue, and engagement.
So we continue to design high touch early career partner experiences for members transitioning from training to the first few years of their career. But we are also now increasingly designing and deploying AI Career Partner experiences that can scale to your entire membership, creating cohesive experiences drawing from all of your relevant information, resources, and connections to help members advance their career.
So sure, we can and should use AI to help things on the website be more findable. But we shouldn’t stop there. Let’s all think bigger about how AI can address the core challenges of membership by creating new and differentiated value propositions for members.
If you’re interested in learning more about Highland’s AI Career Partner platform, contact us here.
