Assessing the Quality of Your Member Experience: A Quiz

Assessing the Quality of Your Member Experience: A Quiz Your association invests time, energy, and resources into delivering a great experience to your members. But when was the last time you paused to ask if your efforts are actually working? Sometimes, the best way to answer that question is to look inward. Reflecting on your…

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How to Manage People Well: 5 Rules for New Leaders

Graphic showing a leader managing a team in different situations

Stepping into a management role is a big shift. You’re no longer just responsible for your own work, you’re responsible for helping other people do theirs well. At AMR, this is especially true for the managers who oversee team members working across multiple clients. When someone’s day is split between two or three clients, good…

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Adaptive Governance: How Association Boards Move from Approval to Agility

Image of a man holding puzzle pieces that fit together

Here’s what we hear from association staff again and again: “Our board is brilliant. They’re thoughtful people who really care about the mission. But at the end of the day, we spend a lot of time in meetings talking about strategy, and then… nothing changes.”  This isn’t a board problem. It’s a governance problem.  Many…

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4 Member Communication Strategies to Boost Engagement

Graphic showing people connected across the world

Declining participation and member retention rates are among the biggest challenges associations face right now. At the start of 2025, the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report found that 26% of associations reported that their membership size had decreased. By July, that figure had risen to 36%. To overcome this hurdle, your association needs to prioritize effective…

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Strategic Portfolio Management: Making Smart Bets in Uncertainty

Illustration of strategic portfolio management with a large donut chart at center, a person aiming arrows at a target, and devices showing charts and graphs in the background.

You don’t have to bet everything on a single strategy. In fact, you shouldn’t.  One of the most valuable lessons from corporate strategy and investment management is viewing your organization not as a single plan, but as a portfolio of strategic investments. Now, not all corporate methodology translates directly to the association space—associations have different stakeholders, different…

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