Member Lifecycle Frameworks

What is a typical profile of a person or organisation as they develop their career (for individual membership associations) or their business (for trade associations)?

Breaking down the development process into typical stages can help you gain a clearer understanding of the different benefits they need from you and how to best communicate with them. Focus on process and issues which must be solved to progress to the next stage.

Once you have mapped this out, engage a few members at each stage to help you confirm your thinking. This is an important process in helping you ensure you matter i.e. have meaning and relevance for members and will help with recruitment and retention.

1. For Individual Membership Associations

1.1 Career Stages

• Stage 1: Novice: What is this career all about?
• Stage 2: Operative: How do I perform tasks?
• Stage 3: Supervisor: How do I best instruct others to do tasks?
• Stage 4: Manager: What are the key tasks? How do I plan what people should do? How do I motivate people to perform well?
• Stage 5: Director: What should we be doing in the future?
• Stage 6: Retiring: How can I give back to the profession? (These are likely to become ambassadors for the association.)

1.2 Family Stages

• Stage 1: Young and single (YUPPIES: Young, upwardly-mobile person)
• Stage 2: Young, no children with double incomes (DINKIES: Double income – no kids)
• Stage 3: Youngest child under six (ORCHIDS: One recent child, heavily in debt)
• Stage 4: Youngest child six or over
• Stage 5: Older married couples with dependent children
• Stage 6: Older married couples or sole survivor, no children living with them (WOOPIES: Well off older persons or COCOONS: Cheap old child-minder, operating on nothing!)
• Stage 7: Retired

For more on this ref: Wells & Gubar (1996) and Murphy & Staples (1979)

2. For Trade Associations

2.1 Business Life Stages

• Stage 1 Early/Infant (Start of the growth phase)
  • Conception & emerging
  • Focus on creating new products and services that result in sales
  • Finding and courting customers to produce more sales and orders
  • Generating cash
  • Becoming profitable, else early death
  • Excitement
• Stage 2: Go-Go
  • Initial success
  • Finding more products and expanding product lines to grow market share
  • Managing inconstant profitability
  • Lack of depth of management
  • Aggressive & quick to react
• Stage 3: Adolescence
  • Professionalism of managers
  • Developing consistent products, training and administrative procedures
  • Confident
• Stage 4: Prime
  • Focus on creating new infants or growth opportunities
  • Profitability
• Stage 5: Stability – The start of the aging phase
  • Focus on process, integration & measurement (new metrics) rather than results
  • Cautious and systematic, predictive
  • Maintaining the status quo
  • New people joining, consensus building & conflict resolution
• Stage 6: Bureaucracy
  • Complacent & risk averse
  • Administrative and rigid
  • Proliferation of middle management
  • Loss of entrepreneurial edge
• Stage 7: Revitalize (or death/decline)
  • Return to basics and rethink roles and skills
  • Managing the people and resolving conflict i.e. old guard v. new player positions
  • Culture change (to revitalise entrepreneurs)
  • Restructuring

3. For Membership Associations

Associations also go through life stages. In ‘Building a Knowledge-Based Culture’ by Tecker, Eide & Frankel, they suggest the stages are:

• Stage 1: Conception
• Stage 2: Infancy
• Stage 3: Puberty
• Stage 4: Young Adulthood
• Stage 5: Adulthood
• Stage 6: Late Adulthood
• Stage 7: Old Age

Fore more information ref: Corporate Life Cycles, by Ichak Adize