Katherine's saved pages [10]
Membership organisations need to consider this if you have local or regional groups: with a shift to localism at a governmental level will the balance of power within your organisation shift away from the central office? How can you use local links to your advantage and manage potential difficulties which might arise? Can you consider utilising your members’ existing networks to help build links with local government? If so, are you prepared for the balance of power shift that this will bring?
You need to consider this if you have local or regional groups: with a shift to localism at a governmental level will the balance of power within your organisation shift away from the central office? How can you use local links to your advantage and manage potential difficulties which might arise? Can you consider utilising your members’ existing networks to help build links with local government? If so, are you prepared for the balance of power shift that this will bring?
Membership can be understood financially as a donation or as earned income. Even if your organisation doesn’t already offer this, there’s an argument that you will have to increase levels of enterprise within an organisation.
Presure from trustees or management for financial wellbeing needs to be balanced against incurring ‘fatigue’ amongst members to buy products on top of paying for the membership, or to increase the costs of their membership fees.
As people feel more able to define their own identities, memberships are likely to become less long-term. People are likely to have more and more varied memberships rather than a single organisation around which they base their entire identity, often based on multiple cultures and values, creating a sense of individual freedom. - from 'Sources of Identity' driver
As people become more mobile, it is likely that membership organisations will have to move away from traditional geographic structures (with area groups for example) or combine them with structures based around communities of interest.
Membership organisations are traditionally very good at bringing groups of people together around a cause (creating strong ‘bonding’ social capital). However, they are less good at linking across communities and interest groups (what is known as ‘bridging’ social capital).
As social cohesion varies in importance in policy terms for political parties, and as it varies in importance at a societal level, these inherent characteristics can be played upon and developed or altered (eg by creating reciprocal memberships with other organisations).
Just as membership organisations can learn a lot from innovative public participation schemes (such as participatory voting) as tools to increase interest and a sense of value, so active voting membership can be viewed as a ‘dry run’ for engagement in civic politics. The increasing use of technology and social media may create opportunities to work with groups (such as younger people) who have traditionally been hard to engage in genuine participation.
Membership organisations, traditionally reliant on long-term, committed volunteer-members, are likely to have to adapt to include people who feel that they have less time to devote to such a full commitment. They may instead need to create structures that encourage sporadic, low-time cost actions such as microvolunteering. This decreases certainty internally in terms of project and budget management but is likely to be increasingly necessary to attract and keep potential members.
Some commentators suggest that younger generations are increasingly expecting higher levels of service from membership organisations, and on an anecdotal level this was supported by our qualitative research. As people become more used to asserting their own rights and interests in other areas of life (particularly through the marketisation of public services as welfare providers are required to provide a more personalized approach) this is likely to be more apparent in the ways people interact with membership organisations. This change in social attitudes (such as a decline in deference towards figures of authority) is fueled and reinforced by technology (e.g. expecting an immediate response to an email to a CEO).
Changing demographics will greatly impact on membership organisations. On the surface, an ageing population and more active older people should mean a boom for most membership organisations, for whom older people often make up the majority of members. However, longer old age combined with lower pension expectations and greater ill health with increased age will mean that older people may not be able to provide the anticipated financial and voluntary support.
Generational differences should also be taken into account: some argue that the natural associational tendencies of baby boomers and their predecessors are not shared by younger generations, who are reputed to be more self-centred and less civic minded (though there is little evidence to support this and of course individuals vary).
