As 2024 draws to a close, how did it treat membership associations, and what will 2025 bring? Here, we take a look back and ahead.
2024: Recruitment, retention, readiness and revenue
Your association must recruit and then engage members to retain them and generate revenue. Your team must also be ready and able to meet members’ needs efficiently. All these things affect how much you can grow, develop and continue being the voice, and face, of your industry. They were high priorities in 2024 and will continue into 2025, too. Many factors play a part in member engagement and organisational efficiency, but as training and learning are key aspects of members’ benefits package, that’s a good place to start.
Members value continuing professional development (CPD)—a CPD Standards Office survey found that 90% of respondents saw career development because of it. That’s a compelling reason to provide convenient, relevant and engaging learning that will keep members coming back for more.
Seeing the growth that can be achieved by associations when providing effortless learning journeys, we asked membership organisations to deep dive into the topic with us and MemberWise on a recent webinar. We gave attendees a list and asked them what the main challenges of the year had been. Not too surprisingly, over a third (38%) picked everything in the list—financial pressures/the need to generate revenue, member engagement, member retention, and operational efficiency.
These challenges connect to each other, of course. Seán Goucher, technology enhanced learning manager at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI), put it perfectly when he said: “It’s always member engagement, but also operational efficiencies. They kind of go hand-in-hand from our perspective. I think revenue generation follows if we get those first two right.”
The associations who joined us on the webinar recognised there is room for improvement in their organisations. Only 4% were very satisfied with the impact of their learning offering; a fifth (21%) weren’t satisfied.
How can gold-standard learning help associations meet the challenges ahead in 2025? Consider these three ways:
- Stem the skills drain
Many associations have rich heritages, just like the industries they represent. They want to keep the skills and experience workers in their industries possess, drawing on the knowledge to help new, youngerworkers start their career journeys.
If they don’t, industries can face a worrying skills drain, something that’s has been highlighted already in industries like construction. In the UK, a substantial proportion of the trade’s workforce is nearing retirement, yet the volume of young people entering the profession is declining.
According to one business barometer, 62% of organisations in the UK agreed they faced skills shortages in 2024. Top of the list of most frequently cited skills and roles where shortages exist was engineering, with one manufacturing firm referencing a large section of the workforce retiring.
D2L’s customer in the UK, the Lighting Industry Association (LIA) knows something about this and is committed to using technology to drive CPD and support a talent pipeline. Teresa Beazley, commercial and training manager, believes technology in the member journey has elevated the organisation’s reputation and contributed to member recruitment and retention.
Teresa adds that if the association didn’t deliver training online it would be, “less likely to build sustainable talent pipelines and would haemorrhage skills and knowledge within the next ten years. For us, it had to be something dynamic that would bridge skills gaps and ultimately speak to a younger generation. And young people, on the whole, have grown up in a more technologically advanced environment.”
Tailored, member-centred learning that reaches learners where they are with relevant, engaging online courses, modules and programmes can help associations address skills gaps and tap into existing knowledge and expertise.
Subject matter experts within associations can contribute valued knowledge and expertise to online content as it is developed. They can even take a hand in the creative process using tools like Creator+ that don’t demand design skills.
Digital learning solutions are likely to resonate with newer members. They can help build essential skills across the workforce, including in industries like construction, which struggles to attract the workers it needs with the skills to meet increasing demand.
- Meet individual members’ needs
Advanced digital learning solutions offer the flexibility to learn from anywhere at any time, collaborate through online workspaces, integrate with other apps and tools, and deliver a smooth user experience. Associations can use them to incorporate content in a range of formats, including video, and take advantage of techniques that encourage learning engagement, such as gamification.
Everyone learns differently. Instructional videos may best suit some practical skills development, while interactive graphics could convey workflow or timeline-based information effectively.
The key is bringing a subject to life and meeting the practical needs of members who need content that adapts to their individual goals and busy schedules. Whether members are learning during work breaks, on handheld devices while away from home, or in collaborative groups online or in person, flexibility is essential so professionals can balance studies with their work and personal lives.
- Boost operational efficiency
Operational efficiency is critical for membership associations. Many have small numbers of staff, so anything that can be done to speed up tasks and improve processes is a plus.
Seán Goucher describes RCPI’s experience before it implemented D2L Brightspace as its learning platform. Many tasks were manual and, he says, “massively time consuming.” These included sending reminder emails, which could be sent early or delayed if the responsible person wasn’t around. Additionally, courses were in-person and relied on paper-based evaluation forms that were taken back to the office afterwards so the data could be manually entered into a spreadsheet.
With automation through Brightspace, the scene at RCPI is very different because staff have been released from manual learning administration and can focus on higher value activities.
RCPI achieved significant timesaving through automation and enhanced self-enrolment. Find out how >
As well as providing a great way to offer engaging, feature-rich learning, a learning platform helps associations deliver learning more efficiently. Here are just four ways it can make a big difference:
- Platform integration: The experience for members isn’t great if they must access different websites or portals to book events or training and get information. By integrating with other systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), ecommerce and finance, the learning platform helps you give your members the experience they deserve, with clear and straightforward routes to manage their accounts, book and pay for training and events, and stay up to date, online
- Member communication: Staying in touch when members are learning is important but can be an administrative overhead as RCPI found. When you can schedule communications in the learning platform, it is much more efficient to welcome members joining a course, prompt them when they haven’t logged in for a while, and congratulate them when they reach their goals. All your team must do is create messages once, set rules for when they go out and leave the rest to the automation.
- Content creation: You need a simple way to create course content, particularly when you don’t have experts with online design skills, and why would you? You excel in your knowledge of the industry not content creation, so take advantage of authoring tools, templates and workflows in the learning platform.
- Reporting: You must track learning progress, but reporting can be a hassle if you haven’t got simple dashboards that make sense of the data. Create custom data sets in the learning platform to support your reporting approach and reduce the impact on your team.
Need help with member learning in 2025?
As you hone your 2025 plans, your strategy for learning must support and enable you to achieve your goals. Digital learning programmes can play a significant role in recruiting and retaining members and reaching your revenue targets. Why not talk to D2L about your plans? Take a look at our learning management system for association learning and training.
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