I was scrolling through the Associations Now Daily News a few days ago and came across a piece on sustainability and member value from Melissa Musser (link to that article is at the bottom of this post, please read it) that I found myself really drawn into. It introduced me to something called Double Materiality Assessment.
She mentioned it once, without an explanation, so naturally I had to go find out what it actually was. Once I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it applies to nearly every decision associations make.
Not because of the sustainability angle, although I hope every association builds sustainability into their operations and events. But without ever hearing the corporate compliance language, it’s a way of thinking I’ve understood for years. I just didn’t have a name for it.
Melissa was writing about ESG strategy. I want to take the same framework somewhere else: into the question of whether your association is strategically positioned to stay relevant to the people you’re supposed to serve. Same two questions, used in an entirely different conversation. And one I think every association leader needs to have before their next planning session.
The strategic planning session that produces the same plan every year
Most associations hold a strategic planning session every year or two. Good facilitator, good intentions, dedicated board members who cleared their calendars. By the end of the day, the priorities are members, revenue, and visibility. Nobody disagrees. The plan looks solid. And by February it is largely sitting in a drawer while everyone goes back to managing the daily work.
The problem is not the priorities. Members, revenue, and visibility are the right things to focus on. The problem is that two questions nobody asked should have come before all of them. Skip those two questions and you’re not building a strategy. You’re decorating the status quo.
What a Double Materiality Assessment actually is
A Double Materiality Assessment started as an EU compliance requirement and now roughly 50,000 large European companies are currently required to complete one under something called the CSRD. The DMA was built for corporations with sustainability departments and legal teams. Not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when you’re running a 500+ member professional or trade association with one or two paid staff and a volunteer board.
Your association is almost certainly not one of them.
But the thinking underneath the framework is genuinely useful, and it does not require compliance software, a sustainability department, or any knowledge of what CSRD stands for. It requires two questions. That is it.
The two questions, translated for associations
The DMA framework is built on two lenses that its architects call impact materiality and financial materiality. In corporate terms, those phrases sound technical. For associations, they translate into something straightforward and a little uncomfortable.
Question One: What impact does your association have on the profession? Can you describe it and prove it?
Not what you intend to have. Not what your mission statement says. What you can demonstrate. Are you advancing the field, or administering it? Are you training the next generation of practitioners, or are you certifying people who would have gotten there anyway? Are you shaping the standards your profession operates by, or are you hosting the annual conference where those conversations happen to other people?
Most associations have a general sense of their impact but have never systematically asked whether that impact is real, measurable, and meaningful to the people they exist to serve.
Question Two: What is the profession’s future doing to your association?
Not five years from now. Right now. Generational shift in your membership base. Technology disrupting the work your members do. Industry consolidation shrinking the pool of potential members. Regulatory changes altering who needs what credential. The profession your association was built to serve is not static, and neither is the association’s position within it.
Most associations answer this second question instinctively, at least informally, around a planning table. Almost none ask the first one with any rigor. That asymmetry is exactly where strategy goes sideways.
Three things associations consistently miss when they skip these questions
Here is where it gets practical. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are patterns I have watched play out in real organizations.
Pattern one: The silent majority problem
You think you know what your members think because you hear from them when they are thrilled or furious. The other 98 percent go along quietly, because your association is not in their top 100 daily concerns. It is not a criticism. It is just true. When associations do survey, participation is often thin, and the questions tend to be written in ways that avoid uncomfortable answers. What do you value most about your membership? How satisfied are you with our events? Those questions produce polite responses, not honest ones.
The result is that most associations are making strategic decisions based on the loudest voices and the most loyal members, while the quiet majority, the ones whose experience actually represents the health of the organization, remain largely unheard. That is not member intelligence. That is confirmation bias with a survey attached.
Pattern two: The churning floor problem
Your exhibit floor sells out every year. The revenue numbers look fine. What you may not be tracking is how many of those booths belong to first-time exhibitors replacing the ones who quietly decided last year that the investment was not worth it.
If your sponsor and exhibitor churn rate is running above 15 percent, you are on a treadmill. The floor looks full because you are good at finding new participants. But at some point, you run out of companies who have not already tried you and moved on. A full floor is not the same as a healthy floor. Renewal rate tells you something a sold-out event cannot.
Pattern three: The captive member problem
If your association controls access to the continuing education credits your profession requires, your retention numbers probably look strong. Members renew because the math makes sense. A membership costs less than paying full conference price, and the conference is where they get the credits they need to keep their certification. So they join. Every year.
Many of them genuinely appreciate the association. They enjoy the conferences, they value the community, they’re glad something like this exists for their profession. That appreciation is real and it is worth something. But appreciation is not the same as loyalty, and loyalty is not the same as evangelism.
The members who renew because the math works are not yet recruiting colleagues. They are not telling vendors to exhibit because the audience is worth it. They are not calling a peer and saying your association changed how they think about their career. Moving a satisfied, even grateful member to that place takes more than a good conference and a fair price. It takes a reason to believe in the organization beyond what it saves them. That gap, between members who appreciate you and members who champion you, is where most associations have the most untapped potential.
Three questions to bring into your next planning session
You don’t need a consultant, a workshop, a long checklist, or a whole new framework to start applying this. You just need these three honest conversations before your next board strategic planning session begins.
Before the agenda starts, sit with these
What is the most meaningful thing our association did for the profession in the last three years, and do we have anything that actually proves it?
What is the single biggest shift happening in our industry right now, and are we positioned in front of it or behind it?
Of our renewing members, how many are actively telling others to join and how many are simply not getting around to leaving? And while we’re asking the hard questions, how many are here only for the CEUs?
Those three questions will tell you more about your strategic position than days of strategic planning meetings without them. They will also bring around the conversations most boards didn’t know quite how to articulate, or have been quietly avoiding.
One honest note about that last part
The truth is these questions are so much easier to ask than to answer honestly. This conversation is going to take place in a room full of people who have given years to supporting what they are now being asked to critique and potentially criticize. In front of other people who may have written some of the very policies you need to take a good hard look at. That takes a kind of neutrality that is hard to manufacture from inside the organization. That is not me pitching you. It is just the thing nobody says out loud before the meeting starts, and one you need to prepare everyone for ahead of time.
The framework is not the point
Double Materiality Assessment is a useful name for a discipline associations have always practiced in pieces. Usually in response to a present issue rather than as ongoing strategic habit. The framework behind it was built for corporate compliance, not for the people running your industry’s professional home. But the habit it describes, asking both what you owe the profession and what the profession’s future means for you, systematically, before you decide what to prioritize, belongs in every association’s planning process. Because waiting until something is already burning is not a strategy, it’s a response. And your association deserves better than that.
The associations that stay relevant don’t luck into it. They build the habit of asking the questions most organizations skip. That habit, more than any strategic plan, is what keeps an ecosystem in balance.