Potential IMO Revenue Model - Presented for your consideration

The 2013 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report will be released in June at the Marketing and Membership Conference here in DC.

I recently used the results of the study to help a client develop a revenue model for her association. To do this I cross-tabbed two questions: Operating Budget by Revenue Streams. Here's the result:


POTENTIAL MODEL OF REVENUE DISTRIBUTION BY PRODUCT CHANNEL for IMO.

Rev. Stream/Prod                 Under $1MM           $1MM to $4.9MM         Over $5MM

Dues                                           43%                             35%                            31%
Conf/Web (Events)                      29%                             27%                            26%
Cert/Bks/Affinity                          14%                             23%                            27%


It's interesting to see the changes in revenue impact as the Operating Budget increases, and this makes perfect sense. Every association or business must be responsive to the market and have product which is readily available to sell. Small IMOs may not have built up the inventory of products so they heavily rely on dues. As they grow, their market base increases, their revenue increases and they have more support in the development of product that can be sold through multiple channels.

While conferences seem to remain stable in their revenue contribution, what's of great interest is the increased participation of certification/books/affinity programs which is primarily driven by certification (see below).

So, if you're an association with an Operating Budget of $5MM+, and you're demanding Dues to provide over 31% of your revenue, are you properly allocating your resources to maximize your renvenue potential? Also, are you positionining yourself for future growth, OR, are you really driving your associaiton the other way?

In case you don't agree with the way I've grouped the categories, I've provided the crosstabs below so you can perform your own analysis.

I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on this. Do you think its viable? Does it reflect your association? Let me know.


Operating Budget         Less than $1Million          $1 to $5 Million          More than $5 Million

Dues                                       51  43%                      40 35%                       35 31%

Conferences                            23  19%                      22 19%                       21 18%

Certification                               5    4%                      10   9%                       12 11%

Webinars/seminars…                12 10%                        9   8%                         9   8%

Books/products                          6   5%                      14  12%                      13  11%

Affinity programs                        7   6%                         2   2%                         6   5%

All Other…                              14 12%                        16 14%                       18 16%

                                              118 100%                    113 100%                   114 100%

* Data used for this analysis was pulled from the MGI 2013 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report