Adrian Segar

Mistakes Associations Make — Part 2

Monday, May 26th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

After four decades of founding associations, serving on non-profit boards, and designing and facilitating countless association meetings, I’ve seen a lot. Enough, in fact, to spot patterns—especially when things go wrong. Earlier this year, I documented three common-but-overlooked mistakes associations make. Here are three more “Don’t do that!” from the frontlines of planning association events.

1—Don’t contract your venue before designing your event!

More often than not, clients ask me to help design a meeting after they’ve already signed a venue contract. Here’s why that happens, and why it’s a mistake.

Venue selection typically happens early in the event planning process—before budgeting, marketing, and F&B planning begin. But designing a thoughtful meeting process often gets overlooked or delayed, especially when the people convening the event aren’t familiar with participatory formats. So, they default to traditional workflows and bring me in post-contract, overlooking the need to think about how desired meeting outcomes might affect venue choice..

Meeting planners and venue staff are comfortable determining space needs for traditional events once they know:

the type of event;
the number of attendees; and
the meeting duration.

But they rarely understand what’s required for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings, which typically need:

larger general session rooms, to allow movement and eye contact; and
more flexible and plentiful breakout spaces for small group interaction.

The result? About 95% of the time, the contracted venue requires compromises to accommodate interactive formats. Sometimes I can design around it. Sometimes the contract has to be renegotiated (cue planner shudder). And sometimes, the event just doesn’t deliver what it could have.

Avoid this entirely. Design the event first. Then choose your venue. You’ll save money and frustration, and ensure your space supports your goals.

2—Don’t call your event an “unconference” because it sounds cool!

Lately, I’ve noticed more event marketers using “unconference” to describe traditional conferences. Don’t do this. There’s a meaningful difference.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines an unconference:

“An unconference is a participant-driven meeting.”
“Typically at an unconference, the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting.”
—Unconference, Wikipedia

Sorry, folks, but that’s not what happens when you use pre-event surveys or curate the program in advance. That’s not an unconference—it’s a conference.

I have been convening and facilitating unconferences (I prefer the term peer conferences, but no one else cares) since 1992. Why? Because they provide a far better conference experience. They give attendees what they actually want in real time—something no program committee or conference “curator” can predict.

In 2010, I explained why asking attendees in advance for program suggestions doesn’t work. And a couple of years later, I shared why a program committee or the mythical “conference curator” doesn’t do any better:

“In my twenty years of organizing conferences, I’ve never found a program committee that predicted more than half of the session topics that conference attendees chose when they were given the choice. During that time I’ve seen no evidence that any one person, whether they are given the title of “curator” or not, can put together a conference program that can match what attendees actually need and want.
—Jeremy Lin and the myth of the conference curator, February, 2012

And, as Seth Godin puts it: “We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be.”

Just about every unconference I’ve convened or attended has brought to light participants whose valuable knowledge, expertise, experience, and contributions were unknown to the conveners (and most, if not all, of the attendees). You can’t do this effectively at a traditional conference with a predetermined program.

So, if you’re a marketer, stop using “unconference” as an event marketing buzzword. We’re not selling cereal here. As Robert Kreitner says, “Buzzwords…drive out good ideas.” Unconferences are participant-driven, which involves building the program in real-time during the event. Having (well-designed) discussion sessions during an event is great, but that doesn’t make a meeting an unconference.

And if you’re a conference convener, learn about what unconferences actually are before calling your event one. (Any of my books will give you detailed information about these meeting formats and how well they work.)

I care about how people use the word “unconference” because I’ve met too many folks who believe that an event billed as an unconference must be one. Then they attend and are underwhelmed. I’d hate to see unconferences suffer because marketing folks use the word as a way to make an event sound hip and sophisticated. So don’t call your event an “unconference” because it sounds cool!

3—Don’t run an “unconference track” at your event!

Here’s the problem with offering an unconference track alongside conventional sessions: very few people will choose it.

Why?

Most people have never experienced an unconference session (one shaped on the spot by the needs, experience, and expertise of the people present).
Passive, lecture-style formats comprise the vast majority of people’s formal learning experiences. If you haven’t previously experienced an unconference session, you’re probably skeptical that it’ll be useful to you.
Faced with the unfamiliar, people usually opt for the safer choice.

So what happens? The unconference track is sparsely attended. The skeptics nod smugly: “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

It turns out that when a participant-led session or sessions are the only conference activities going on, people dive in, and nearly everyone likes what occurs. But when you give people a choice between what’s familiar and what’s not, all but the bravest take the safer path.

Want participant-led sessions to succeed? Make participant-led sessions plenaries or simultaneous breakouts.

Don’t treat them as an experiment. Own them. You don’t have to make unconference sessions 100% of your conference, but there should be no other type of conference activity going on at the same time. Dedicate a morning, afternoon, day, or days to well-designed participant-led sessions. Then, you’ll see just how well these increasingly popular formats can work.

Mistakes associations make

These three common mistakes associations make spring from good intentions. But they’re still mistakes. If you want to create meaningful, effective events, you need to rethink the defaults. And start designing from the experience you want to create, not the contracts, categories, or conventions you’ve inherited.

[A version of this article, “Associations: don’t do that! — Part 2”, appeared in Association Chat Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 2, May 2025. This version includes additional links to resources.]

Posted in Associations | No Comments »

Are You Feeling the Squeeze? The Cost of Meetings in 2025

Monday, May 19th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

In a May 8, 2025, post, the always insightful Dave Lutz shared some deeply troubling statistics on the current state of the meetings industry. I’ve emphasized a few of the more sobering takeaways and added a couple of links for context:

“Pre-pandemic, top-performing annual meetings and trade shows that we analyzed yielded a gross profit of 55–65 percent. In 2024, the gross profit for those same events was down by 20 points. For this purpose, gross profit is calculated by subtracting direct event expenses (not including salaries, overhead, or allocations) from gross event revenue and then dividing by gross event revenue.”

“While many major events have nearly recovered on the revenue side, the primary culprit for a lower gross profit is the significant increase — about 30 percent — in expenses. For some associations, this means that millions of dollars of funding for advocacy and member services will therefore need to be cut or reallocated. That results in increased oversight and pressure for event leaders like you.

Most reports claim that our industry has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. While that may be true for our hospitality partners, only 29 percent of the event planner respondents to PCMA’s Annual Meeting Market Survey said attendance at their largest in-person meeting was on par with pre-pandemic levels and one out of five planners said attendance was lower than 2019. On the flip side, nearly half (49 percent) said attendance was higher — a better picture than CEIR’s Q3 2024 Index Results, which found that only 34 percent of events surpassed their pre-pandemic performance levels. In Q2, attendance performed better — 44 percent surpassed their pre-pandemic attendance levels.
—Dave Lutz, Growing Your Credibility

Ouch.

From my perspective as a meeting designer who works closely with event owners, this data is unsettling. In 2025, many are facing a brutal combination: revenues that remain flat, while expenses have jumped by 30%.

The now-normal trend of last-minute attendee registration only worsens the situation. How can you plan confidently when your final numbers arrive days before the doors open?

Something’s gotta give.

And it has.

Yes, we’re holding in-person meetings again, approximately as many as we did before COVID, but most event owners are clearly still in a tough financial bind. With limited, if any, revenue growth, they are being forced to scale back the very services that make their events successful.

I’ve felt it myself. Before COVID, I was often overbooked. In 2025, the demand for my services—designing and facilitating meetings that people love—is down significantly. I still do meaningful, satisfying work with excellent clients. But I’m doing far less of it.

When meeting owners have to trim expenses to avoid going into the red, value-add service providers become easy, if regrettable, cuts.

And I doubt I’m alone.

Are you a meeting owner struggling to make the numbers work? Are you a supplier feeling the impact of today’s leaner events?

Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Let’s learn from one another.

Tags: event professionals, eventprofs, meeting economics| Posted in Event professionals, Meeting industry | No Comments »

Tame the Creative Mind During Meditation

Monday, May 12th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

August 2016. Northern New Mexico. I was deep into a five-day silent meditation retreat, surrounded by quaking aspens, mountain air, and breathtaking wilderness. But my brain wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t tame my creative mind. On the outside, I was the picture of calm.

Inside? A storm of ideas.

Blog post concepts. Fresh angles on my facilitation process. Insightful links between my retreat experience and my ikigai, my reason for being.

Each idea was a gift. And a distraction.

I wanted to grab a pen. If I didn’t write them down, they’d vanish. But that wasn’t why I was there. I wasn’t supposed to be brainstorming. I was supposed to be meditating.

This was a problem.

It took me nine years to solve it.

Meditation Is Tough

Like many people, I’ve struggled to maintain a meditation practice. Lately, I’ve done better—I recently marked a full year without missing a day. But the process itself is hard.

Notice your thoughts. Let them go. Return to your breath, your body, bringing yourself back to your center, the present moment. Repeat, endlessly.

It’s Even Tougher for Creatives

I suspect that mediation is even more difficult for creative minds. Ideas don’t just drift in—they barge in, waving their arms.

Each time a creative idea arises, I face a dilemma:

Do I break my meditation to capture it?
Or do I stay still, let it go, and risk forgetting it entirely?

At multi-day silent retreats, you’re sometimes allowed a short meeting with a retreat leader, your only chance to speak. So, in New Mexico, I used mine to ask for help.

I explained my dilemma. I don’t remember what he said. But I remember this: it wasn’t helpful.

Since then, I’ve asked other experienced meditators. No luck.

If I were going to solve this problem, I’d have to solve it myself.

The Creative Mind Hack That Finally Helped

Creative ideas don’t just ambush me during meditation. They also arrive when I’m daydreaming—walking the dirt roads near my home, taking a shower, relaxing after work.

And daydreaming, interestingly, looks a lot like meditating. From the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference.

This reminds me of the apocryphal IBM story:

An IBM employee sits at his desk, staring into space. His manager walks in and asks, “What are you doing?” The employee points to the “THINK” sign on the wall. “I’m thinking,” he says.

That story lingered in the back of my mind. Then, during a recent meditation session, a new idea popped up—ironically:

What if I just scheduled a “creative daydreaming” session before I meditated?

Meditation helps me surface good ideas. But what if I gave myself space to harvest them first, before trying to let them go?

So I experimented.

I sat quietly for 10 minutes, with the intention to daydream.
When a useful idea surfaced, I paused, captured it, and then resumed.
Only after that did I begin my formal meditation.

And the result?

Daydream First, Meditate Next.

When I do this—when I daydream first, then meditate—I notice far fewer creative interruptions during meditation.

It doesn’t work every day. On weekday mornings, I often meditate early with my wife, and I can’t always carve out daydreaming time beforehand.

But when I meditate later in the day, I do.

And yes, it helps. A lot.

Does This Work for You?

I wonder if others have tried this. Has anyone else found that deliberately daydreaming before meditating tames the creative flood?

Does it reduce that internal tension between insight and presence?

It has for me. I’d love to hear whether it works for you too, and whether you’ve discovered any additional tricks for balancing creativity with stillness.

Feel free to share your experience in the comments.

Tags: Creative Practice, creativity, daydreaming, meditation, Mindful Productivity, mindfulness| Posted in life lessons | No Comments »

Teaching Less, Learning More

Monday, May 5th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

How can we create conditions where real learning can take root?

Whether you’re leading a workshop, teaching a class, or simply trying to help people engage more meaningfully, this question strikes at the heart of what it means to facilitate learning. And the answer often begins with a radical act: stepping aside.

The other day, while rummaging through my collection of articles about group work, I stumbled on two gems—both from 2015—that exemplify this idea beautifully. They’re powerful reminders that sometimes the best thing we can do is…less.

The Silent Professor

Hat tip to Alfie Kohn for pointing me to this first one, written by Joseph Finckel, a professor in the English department at Asnuntuck Community College. He writes:

‘I teach English, and midway through the spring 2013 semester, I lost my voice. Rather than cancelling my classes, I taught all my courses, from developmental English to Shakespeare, without saying a word. Though my voice had mostly returned by Tuesday evening, what I was observing compelled me to remain silent for the remainder of the week. My experience teaching without talking proved so beneficial to my students, so personally and professionally centering, and so impactful in terms of the intentionality of my classroom behavior that I now “lose my voice” at least once every semester…

…Teaching without talking forces students to take ownership of their own learning and shifts the burden of silence from teacher to student. It also forces us to more deliberately plan our classes, because we relinquish our ability to rely on our knowledge and experience in the moment.

At the end of a class during which I did not speak, a student remarked that it had been the best discussion she had yet had. Take the pressure off of yourself to teach, and instead create a situation in which learning will occur. If that means remaining silent, don’t worry—you will not have lost your voice.’
—Joseph Finckel, The Silent Professor

As someone who spent ten years teaching college and four decades facilitating groups, I still catch myself talking too much. It’s a deep-seated habit—and a hard one to break. But Finckel’s approach is a powerful reminder: silence can be one of the most generous and transformative gifts we offer learners.

His advice, “Take the pressure off of yourself to teach, and instead create a situation in which learning will occur,” deserves a place on every teacher’s wall.

The Magic of the Raised Hand

This next example comes from Chris Corrigan, a gifted facilitator, teacher, and steward of the Art of Hosting. It’s elegant, simple, and radical:

‘In the second before you let people get to work you ask the group a question: “Put your hand up if you have enough clarity from the instruction I just gave to get down to work.” Many, many hands should go up. Invite people to keep their hands up, and then utter these magic words.

“If any of you have questions about the process, ask these people.” And then remove yourself from the situation.

This does two things. First it immediately makes visible how many people are ready to get going and that shows everyone that any further delay is just getting in the way of work. And second, it helps people who are confused to see that there are people all around them that can help them out. And that is the simplest way to make a group’s capacity visible and active.’
—Chris Corrigan, The simplest facilitation tip to build group capacity

It’s a move that turns the group into its own resource. A small moment of informational hand-raising that changes the whole dynamic.

Learning Happens When We Let Go

These two stories show how learning can thrive when we consciously let go. Read the full posts to see how these subtle interventions move the work away from the teacher or facilitator and toward the learners. When we remove ourselves—by staying silent, or by redirecting questions to peers—we create the space for others to step in, step up, and own the experience.

So the next time you’re preparing to teach, facilitate, or lead, ask yourself: What might happen if I simply stepped aside?

Chances are, something extraordinary.

Posted in facilitation, Learning | 1 Comment »

Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference

Monday, April 28th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

Do I trust you?

A woman about to enter a glowing teleportation pod. — **If teleportation were free, would you still go?**

I live in rural Vermont, so if I want to go to an in-person conference that isn’t close to me, I need to get on an airplane.

The closest airport to me is a two-hour drive. Unless the event is in the northeastern United States, I need a full day to get there and another to return, even longer if it’s abroad.

For me—and, I suspect, most attendees—getting there is one factor in choosing whether to attend. But it’s only one factor. As Seth Godin says:

“Getting to the conference in Santa Fe isn’t difficult. Someone will drive/fly you there. The hard part is deciding to go. And yet, it might take 8 hours to arrive.

If they invented teleportation and offered it for free, it would be very clear that where we went would simply depend on where we decided to go, not the mechanics, cost or time it took.”
—Seth Godin, At the speed of judgment

Even if we could remove all barriers of travel time, energy, and expense—even if you could snap your fingers and appear there instantly—many people still wouldn’t go.

Why? Because something else matters more.

Here are some obvious reasons people say yes (or no) to a conference:

Relevance of content
Potential personal and employer benefits
Opportunities for meaningful connection
Location
Cost
Time commitment
Sense of belonging or inclusion
Physical environment and experience design
Health and safety considerations
Employer support
Timing and life conflicts
Previous experience or word of mouth
Opportunities to contribute
Event marketing effectiveness

But one factor—quiet, powerful, and usually overlooked—can outweigh them all.

Trust.

If I don’t trust the people convening, designing, or running the event—if I don’t believe the experience will be welcoming, thoughtful, and aligned with my values—I’m not going.

If I suspect the event will be rigid, overly hierarchical, sales-driven, or soulless, no travel convenience, discount code, or high-profile keynote will convince me to show up.

And, if I believe I’ll feel like a passive object to be “delivered” content, rather than a human being invited to participate meaningfully, I’ll stay home and read a good book instead.

What kind of trust matters?

Attending a conference requires multiple kinds of trust. We often don’t articulate them, but they quietly shape our decision long before we hit “Register.”

Do I trust that I’ll be respected—not just tolerated?
If I don’t see people like me in your program, if your language feels exclusive, if your agenda looks like it hasn’t changed in 10 years—I can’t trust that I’ll be seen, and my wants and needs will be met.
Do I trust that my time will be valued?
Will the sessions invite participation, not just absorption? Will the breaks be long enough for real conversation? Will I be treated as a peer, not a lead?
Do I trust that the people there will be open, curious, and generous?
One of the most reliable reasons I choose to attend a conference is because I’ve met someone who’s gone and said, “You’ll love the people there.”
Do I trust that the environment will help me thrive?
This includes the design of the space, the facilitation style, and even the food and seating. Events that center human needs build trust before the first session even begins.
Do I trust the organizers to hold complexity?
In a world full of nuance, competing needs, and uncertainty, I want to be in spaces led by people who don’t pretend everything is simple—or worse, try to sell certainty as a service.

How to build trust?

You don’t build trust with good intentions or glossy branding. Instead, you create it through design, invitation, and experience.

You build it when organizers:

Engage participants as co-creators, not just attendees
Tell the truth about what the event is, and what it isn’t.
Make the invisible visible—by explaining why things are structured the way they are.
Invite vulnerability and model it themselves.
Honor differences while creating spaces where people feel like they belong.

When I design and facilitate conferences, I spend just as much time thinking about how to establish trust as I do creating the event process.

Because without trust, nothing meaningful happens.

With it, almost anything can.

So… do I trust you?

That’s the real question every potential attendee is asking, whether they know it or not.

Before they register.

Before they book a flight.

And before they block out three days on their calendar.

They are deciding whether your event feels like a space where they can show up fully, safely, and meaningfully.

You may think you’re organizing a conference.

But you’re actually designing a trustworthy experience.

And the better you do that, the more likely I am to come.

Tags: event marketing, trust| Posted in Event design | 4 Comments »

The Right Place: Three Encounters with Strangers in Crisis

Monday, April 21st, 2025 by Adrian Segar

In the last eighteen months, I’ve unexpectedly found myself in three very different situations, in three very different places, helping complete strangers in distress. None of these moments lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes. But each one left me shaken, reflective, and—somehow—grateful. Here’s what happened.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: community, help, kindness, strangers| Posted in life lessons | 2 Comments »

Making the human spectrogram map even better

Monday, April 14th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

I get some of my best ideas from my clients. (That’s because consulting—when I listen well—is a two-way street!) So I wasn’t surprised when, during a recent debrief, a client mentioned a simple way to improve the human spectrogram maps I’ve recommended and run for decades.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: human spectrogram map| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

A Participants’ Bill of Rights

Monday, April 7th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

I love the folks (especially my good friend, Jan-Jaap In der Maur) at Masters In Moderation, a company that has been providing meeting and facilitation services and training in the European Union since 2012. Why? Because their core beliefs about what truly matters at events are deeply aligned with mine. We recognize that events should be designed for and with participants rather than imposed upon them. We understand that engagement is not a gimmick but a fundamental right of every attendee. In short, we believe that participants have rights.

The Power of Participation

Too often, conferences default to passive experiences—attendees sit, listen, and leave without feeling seen, heard, or meaningfully involved. But Masters In Moderation and I reject this outdated model. Our work champions interactive, participant-driven approaches that transform meetings from stale information dumps into vibrant, co-created experiences.

Jan-Jaap has eloquently outlined these principles in The Participants’ Bill of Rights, a manifesto that articulates what every attendee deserves from an event. It’s a call to action for organizers, facilitators, and speakers to respect, empower, and prioritize the people in the room.

Some highlights that particularly resonate with me:

The right to be more than an audience, to belong. Participants should be active contributors, not passive spectators. Active engagement grows belonging.
The right to contribute. Events should provide structured ways for attendees to share their knowledge and perspectives.
The right to authentic, useful, and relevant conversations. Surface-level networking isn’t enough; meaningful dialogue should be built into the experience.

Jan-Jaap provides many more important details about participants’ rights in this Bill, which is well worth a careful read. As an event participant, how many of these rights do you find you have at events? If you’re convening events, how many of these rights do you give to your attendees?

Why This Matters

In my decades of experience designing conferences, I’ve seen firsthand how adopting these principles elevates events. When participants feel valued and engaged, they don’t just attend an event—they co-create it. When event conveners design and facilitate events honoring these principles, the result is a richer, more dynamic, more impactful, and ultimately better experience for everyone involved.

Jan-Jaap and Masters In Moderation are doing essential work to reshape meetings for the better. If you’re serious about making your events truly participatory and improving them for everyone involved, I highly recommend exploring their approach—and taking The Participants’ Bill of Rights to heart.

Tags: bill of rights, Masters In Moderation, participants| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Associations: don’t do that! — Part 1

Monday, March 31st, 2025 by Adrian Segar

After four decades of founding associations, serving on non-profit boards, and designing and facilitating countless association meetings, I’ve witnessed my fair share of mistakes associations make. Some are well-known and documented behaviors, such as micromanagement, poor internal and external communications, neglecting leadership succession planning, etc., and I won’t cover them here. Instead, here are three less-common mistakes made by associations, all with the warning “Don’t do that!”

1. Missing or Late 990 Filings

Don’t do that! More importantly, be suspicious of any non-profit that doesn’t file timely tax returns. When associations ask me to work with them, one of the first things I do is to check out their 990 tax returns on Candid‘s Guidestar, the IRS, or ProPublica. 990s provide a wealth of useful information about tax-exempt organizations. The majority of non-profits file their returns on time, with the 990 typically appearing on the above sites within one to two (at most) years.

For example, as I write this in January 2025, a 2023 990, filed in May 2024 for one of the associations I founded is listed on ProPublica, and Guidestar, but isn’t yet posted on the IRS website.
Tip: If you want a more recent 990, many non-profits post them on their website.

A red flag goes up when I discover two or more missing 990s. Why? Because I know only three reasons why 990s aren’t posted in a timely fashion:

1. New non-profits sometimes take a while to realize they need to file 990s, or they struggle to provide the information their accountant needs to file. (Yes, I’ve seen this happen!) Regardless, if you’re working with a new organization, you may want to be cautious.

2. Occasionally, tax preparers for non-profits are behind on their work and file late or request a six-month extension. Again, this can be a warning sign that not all is well.

3. The non-profit is up to no good. When I see several years of returns missing, alarm bells go off. A textbook example of this occurred in 2020. Within 30 minutes of hearing that a non-profit had purchased a college campus in my hometown, a quick check using Guidestar made it obvious that the organization had an opaque financial past. When I confronted the CEO about his non-profit’s missing tax returns, he repeatedly changed the subject. The campus trustees ignored my warnings. It was only after a year of costly mayhem that the FBI arrested the CEO for stealing money from another non-profit to buy the campus! He subsequently went to prison. Here’s the whole sordid story.

The IRS won’t protect you from shady non-profits

Unfortunately, the IRS does a terrible job reviewing and acting on nonprofit filings or non-filings. The IRS can charge penalties for late filings, but, as far as I know, it rarely does. Tax-exempt organizations have to fail to file a 990 for 3 consecutive years before their non-profit status is revoked. And it’s easy for delinquent organizations to get their tax-exempt status reinstated.

So don’t rely on the IRS to police shady nonprofits effectively. (Exhibit A: The Donald J. Trump Foundation.)

And don’t raise suspicions about your non-profit’s finances and activities. File your 990s on time!

2. Losing Focus on Member Wants and Needs

Don’t do that! Sometimes, association leadership loses its way. This happens when leadership creates an association whose commitment to membership becomes secondary to leaders’ focus on pursuing profit (and, possibly, their own consequently generous salaries).

As associations grow, it becomes easier for leadership to forget that organizations and associations are, at their core, a set of agreements in people’s minds about supporting a community that is important to them.

“…organizations exist only in the mind; they are no more than the conceptual embodiments of the ancient idea of community.”
—Dee Hock, the first CEO of VISA, Birth of The Chaordic Age

Here’s how one critic describes what happens when association leadership loses its way [see this link for their detailed critique of a specific association]:

“…instead of being an organisation that exists to promote [X] and help their members, the members are rather regarded as nothing but a source of income, which is then stashed away in investments.”

Unfortunately, there’s no pass/fail test to determine whether association leadership has lost its way. So, I’ve seen associations slowly demote supporting their members to a secondary goal over time, though sometimes this happens abruptly with a change in leadership. Members drift away, and the association may go out of business as it becomes increasingly unresponsive to members’ wants and needs.

There’s no simple prophylactic for this problem. But here are three things that every association should do:

1. Hold regular leadership reviews, informed by member input, of the association’s mission. Assess whether the current mission is still 100% relevant and change it when necessary. Then review, revise, and internalize your association’s strategic goals.

2. Follow up with an honest assessment of how well the association’s current actions align with fulfilling its mission.

3. Make the necessary structural and program changes to reduce or eliminate any lack of congruence uncovered in the previous step.

This is hard, and the work never ends. But remember, the core work of an association is to serve its members. Tempted to stray? Don’t do that!

3. Trusting Consultants Who Never Say ‘I Don’t Know’

Don’t do that! Just about every association hires consultants. By “consultant” I mean independent professionals and companies that provide organization services, e.g., accountants, attorneys, event planners, etc.

The problem with hiring external expertise is that if you need help, obviously, you lack crucial knowledge or experience. So when you seek help, you don’t know if someone who claims to be able to help really can!

The familiar approach to hiring a consultant is to ask for references. Asking for references is helpful, as long as you take the time to check the references you receive! I’m happy to provide references and am amused at how infrequently they are subsequently checked. Sometimes, a consultant’s references will tell you things that cause you to promptly strike them from your list of candidates.

But there’s another test that you should always apply when hiring a consultant.

Check to see if they will say they don’t know the answer to a question when they actually don’t.

Interview the consultant and ask them questions about the work you want them to do. Listen carefully to how they respond to your questions. You are looking for them to show that they know the limits of their abilities and that they are willing to share their limits with you.

If necessary, ask whether they can do something that is a little outside their stated expertise and listen carefully to how they respond. If you hear an unwillingness to admit that they can’t fulfill your request, you are receiving an important warning. Ignore it at your peril!

Are you thinking of hiring a consultant who won’t sometimes tell you “I don’t know”? Don’t do that!

Conclusions and a follow-up

These three less-common mistakes are ones I’ve encountered repeatedly, yet they often go unnoticed, even by experienced association professionals. I hope that my observations are helpful, and I welcome your thoughts below!

In Part 2 of this post, I share more “Don’t do that!” warnings about common mistakes I’ve seen when planning association events.

[I wrote “Associations: don’t do that! [Part 1]” for Association Chat Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 1, February 2025, and have posted it here with additional links to resources.]

Tags: 990s, associations, consultants, mistakes, nonprofits| Posted in Associations | No Comments »

After 16 years of weekly posts, I’m taking a short break

Monday, March 17th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

We all need a break sometimes. Since November 2009, I’ve been writing weekly about meeting design, facilitation, and all kinds of other things that have sparked my interest, and I’m taking a break for a couple of weeks. Don’t worry; I’m hanging out here right now.

I’ll be back!

Have a great day!

-Adrian-

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