The Member Value Gap. What Over 50,000 Members Tell Us

The question  most associations ask us, and almost none can answer with evidence

There is a question that comes up nearly every time we are working on a member research project. It could come from the CEO. It might be the Membership Manager asking the question.  Or it could be directly from the Board. But they all want to know the same thing.

What do our members actually value?

 And the reason we are asked is because existing member engagement and activity reports cannot answer it. The renewals report cannot answer it. The CRM was never designed to answer it.

The only thing that can is independent member research, measured consistently over time and benchmarked against the wider sector.

Belinda Moore put this well in her recent article on LinkedIn ‘Stop Measuring Activity. Start Measuring Value’. She is right that many associations spend too much energy counting outputs, and that the more important, but harder, question is how you measure value in a way a board can put weight on.  After fifteen years of working on exactly that question with Australian associations, the most useful answer is not a single satisfaction score. It is the value gap. Almost every association we have worked with has one, and the size of it is what matters.

Participation, engagement, value: three terms the sector routinely confuses

Before going any further, it is worth being precise about three words that get used interchangeably in association reporting.

• Participation statistics measure what association services and activities member use. Events attended, training completed, articles read, renewals processed. CRM systems are designed to capture this.

• Engagement is the depth and breadth of a member's interaction with the association over time. It tells you who is leaning in and who is drifting. Some CRM systems claim to support measurement of this, by combining participation data into a composite score.

• Value is what the member believes they are receiving in exchange for their membership fee. It is an assessment made by the member, against their own professional and commercial expectations, and it is the single best predictor of renewal, recommendation and willingness to pay more.

A CRM can count the first. It can approximate the second with the right configuration. However, it cannot tell you the third. Value is not a behaviour. It is a perception, and the only credible way to measure a perception is to ask in a way that produces comparable data over time.

Why members join, why they leave, and the gap that explains both

We have been measuring member value with Australasian associations for fifteen years. As of the 2025 data cycle, our Associations Matter Insights Hub holds responses from 54,704 association members across more than fifty professional and industry associations, gathered over fourteen consecutive years of fieldwork. It is, to our knowledge, the largest longitudinal benchmark of association member sentiment in the country.

And the clearest finding in the whole benchmark is what members tell us about joining and leaving.

On the joining side, access to CPD is one of the strongest single drivers. Fifty-seven per cent of members across the last five years of the benchmark say access to CPD is one of the main reasons they belong to their association. This is the highest single response in the data, alongside access to information, and it consistently sits at the top of the list of reasons they joined in the first place.

Looking at the data around members perceptions of the value provided by this CPD, however, a different story emerges. While two thirds of members have taken part in some form of association CPD, , only 56% agree it actually meets their needs.

Let’s repeat that.  Access to CPD is the most common reason members belong - but only 56% believe that CPD is delivering what they anticipated when they joined.

This is a clear value gap, but one that wouldn’t be evident looking at engagement or participation data alone. And on our read, it could be translating directly into retention figures.

Why do we say that?  Because the most common reason members give for not renewing is the absence of that same value. Across the 2020-2025 Insights Hub benchmark, nearly half (48%) of members who choose not to renew say the reasons is because they were not receiving the value they expected, ahead of cost, ahead of leaving the industry, ahead of any other single factor. And the trend is sharpening. In 2023 the proportion of members leaving due to perceived lack of value sat at 30%. By 2025 it had reached 54%.

That means that the share of departing members who say they are leaving because the association is no longer giving them what they signed up for has nearly doubled in two years.

These findings sit at the centre of what fifteen years of member research is telling Australian associations. Members leave when they stop receiving value from the services they joined for. The implication for every association is simple. You need to know what your members consider valuable, you need to measure whether you are actually delivering it, and you need to do both regularly because, at the moment, what members need and value is changing rapidly.

The questions to put on your next board agenda

There are two critical pieces of information the Board needs when setting or endorsing your strategic plan.

The first is the member activity or engagement dashboard you already have. The second is independent evidence of the value members say they are actually receiving versus the reasons they belong, segmented by member type, benchmarked against comparable associations, and if possible, trended over at least three years.

If the second does not exist, that is the first investment to make. Without it, you are shaping your strategy using data that tells you what (some) members do, but not whether they are getting what they came for.

For more on what good member research looks like in practice, see our companion piece How to measure member value: four disciplines that separate good research from a survey export.

Survey Matters has spent fifteen years measuring the value members say they receive from their associations, and where the gaps sit. If your board needs evidence of where to focus, contact us at info@surveymatters.com.au