BuildingValue
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Forbes.com on Oct. 14, 2025. Used with permission.
The membership association sector is changing fast. Marketing General Incorporated’s 2025 benchmarking shows that just 45% of associations grew membership in the past year, and only 11% say their value proposition is very compelling. This is largely because the digital era (now with AI) is so informationdense, with learning, networking and tools all readily available on the internet. That said, certain associations have adapted, generating a clear value proposition to potential members.
Perhaps one of the best examples comes from Lauren Harbert and Laura Last and their team at Life Sciences Trainers & Educators Network (LTEN). In sharp contrast to the association averages mentioned previously, LTEN has seen strong growth over the last several years:
Membership grew 15% per year.
Attendance and engagement with virtual programs spiked by 406% (live and virtual), and they won an ASI Award for Digital Transformation in the process.
Readership of LTEN Focus on Training magazine doubled to more than 12,000 readers per issue.
Since COVID disrupted in-person events and associations as a whole in 2020, LTEN has made a series of calculated adaptations. Together, they make up a kind of reinvention playbook. One that any association leader can borrow to thrive in the AI era.
Before 2021, LTEN operated like most associations: individuals joined one by one. But they noticed something interesting. Many organizations and senior advocates within organizations saw the value before their trainers and educators did. So, LTEN began to offer membership packages to everyone relevant within an organization. This enabled tiered pricing and easy seat management.
“Total membership [has] doubled since LTEN introduced the corporate program,” Harbert noted, “and it’s bringing in not just people with ‘trainer’ titles, but also HR business partners and other allied roles.”
The corporate membership also streamlines the signup process. Last described this effect on her own company, BeOne Medicines, where she’s the executive director and head of global talent development: “Some organizations, like BeOne Medicines, have people all over the company that touch on some form of learning, but it might not be their full-time job. In that case, their manager may not be able to immediately approve the expense for membership. With the corporate membership, anyone who touches on learning at the organization can join. So your potential members face a lot less friction.”
Harbert was quick to point out that “membership growth does not necessarily equal engagement.” The real test was whether members were participating more often and more deeply.
Interviewing Harbert, it became pretty clear that their biggest shift wasn’t a single campaign or even the reinvention of their membership model. Instead, it was the adoption of a measurement mindset. With her finance background, Harbert constantly turns to the data. That was how she saw the opportunity for the membership model. It was also why she pushed for a unified association management system. She wanted to stitch together engagement data across all of their channels: webinars, conferences, the magazine and virtual programs.
Equipped with the right data presented in a clear way, her team could see the full picture and execute more effectively: “Metrics provide the basis of a story: what we’re seeing, how we can grow, evolve and improve.”
She brings data into meetings with the board, advisory council and her team. Then, the data drives creative thinking, decision-making and discussion.
One example outcome: They saw that attendance consistently dropped on the final day of their annual conference, so LTEN used the attendance data and their engagement data in combination to reimagine a day that would drive much higher attendance. They called it “AI Day” and focused on all things AI in life sciences training and education.
Key to a thriving association is the idea that relevance isn’t built by staff alone. It’s built by the community members themselves.
In the past two-and-a-half years, LTEN has continued to grow its board, advisory council and member committees as a main strategy for strengthening engagement.
“We’ve brought in new voices, new ideas, and every single board member is highly engaged with LTEN, sharing on social media, helping with marketing and staying focused on growth and change,” Harbert explained.
Advisory council discussions have surfaced ideas like AI Day. Committees drive scholarships and charitable programs.
To grow these councils and committees, board members are tapping their best-fit team members to join. This kind of work compounds year to year. When members become makers, they also become your best marketers.
Another way LTEN strengthens engagement and connection is through in-person networking.
“The percentage of members attending our live events has actually increased over the last couple of years,” Last noted. “With so many people still in remote roles, they actually crave that one-on-one live interaction even more.”
In-person events satisfy that need and then echo digitally as members recognize each other on virtual events from meeting in person.
Rather than rest on the laurels of their success over the last several years, LTEN continues to innovate and look for new ways to create value. Moving into 2026, one of their most ambitious and promising plans is to create learning and training certifications that are specific to life sciences.
“I want us to be able to differentiate ourselves as learning professionals in life sciences,” Last explained. “I want us to be able to say we are the experts in the life sciences, and this is why you should hire me versus a learning leader from another industry or someone from the business without learning experience and expertise.”
The LTEN certifications will help participants establish their relevance and expertise within the life sciences. This will help those certified to grow in their current positions while also forging future value.
You can think of LTEN’s playbook as consisting of three main pillars:
1) Make value measurable. Move beyond vanity counts (memberships sold) to track what matters (participation across programs, repeat behaviors, referrals). If your system can’t show this in one view, that’s your first project.
2) Repackage access for scale. Consider corporate or enterprise memberships with clear seat management. The aim is to make it easy for companies to involve a greater number of their employees. This also improves the community experience for those members as they attend events and learn together.
3) Build a member-led flywheel. Refresh governance bodies (boards or councils) for diversity of thought. Give committees real mandates (scholarships, content, fundraising). Invite members to co-create sessions, case studies and social promotion. Ownership drives engagement, which drives growth.
As Harbert and Last prove, associations don’t need to compete with the internet so much as they need to distinguish their value from it.
Kevin Kruse is the founder and CEO of LEADx and a former executive director of LTEN. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author of “Great Leaders Have No Rules,” “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management” and “Employee Engagement 2.0.” Email him at kevin@leadx.org or connect through linkedin.com/in/kevinkruse67.
