Membership
Marcus Bennett
Director of MembershipAmerican Outdoor Industry Professionals Association
Marcus put eight members and four staff in the same room every month, wrote down everything, and built the discipline that makes those conversations actually change what the association does.
Boise, Idaho
Why we love this
Why We Love What Marcus Is Doing
Every association says it listens to its members. Most mean an annual survey, a board that used to be members, and the conversations that happen at the reception on the first night of the annual meeting.
Marcus Bennett wanted something with a heartbeat. Since 2022 he has convened a group of eight members and four staff on the third Tuesday of every month — different members each time, always the same format, always ninety minutes.
The remarkable part is not the meeting. Plenty of associations hold member calls. The remarkable part is what Marcus built around it to make sure the meeting has consequences.
The Challenge
The association had a member advisory council. It met twice a year, had eighteen seats, and the same eleven people had held those seats for most of a decade.
They were good people who cared deeply. They were also, by the time Marcus arrived, unrepresentative in a specific and predictable way: they were the members who could afford to spend two days a year on association business. Which meant the association was hearing almost exclusively from owners of established, profitable businesses.
“We had built a listening structure that automatically filtered out anyone having a hard year. Those are the members who need us most.”
What They Changed
The new format is deliberately small and deliberately easy to say yes to. Ninety minutes, on video, one evening a month. Members are invited individually, and Marcus tries hard to fill each session with a mix: two people in their first three years of membership, two who have been members more than fifteen years, at least one who has recently told the association it got something wrong.
The ninety minutes
- Fifteen minutes — each member says what their last month has actually been like. No association topics allowed.
- Thirty minutes — one thing the association is working on, shown in an unfinished state.
- Thirty minutes — open floor. Staff are not permitted to defend anything during this section.
- Fifteen minutes — Marcus reads back what he heard, out loud, and members correct him.
That last fifteen minutes is the piece Marcus says other associations skip and shouldn’t. Reading it back in the room, badly summarized, forces members to sharpen it. "About a third of the time, what I write down first is wrong. They fix it while they are still on the call rather than in a survey six months later."
Listening to Members
The public list turned out to be the hardest sell internally. Publishing "not doing it" next to a member’s request felt, to some staff, like inviting a fight.
The opposite happened. Members overwhelmingly respond well to a clear no with a reason attached. The complaints Marcus receives now are almost never about decisions — they are about items sitting too long in "still thinking."
- Sessions held since 2022
- 46
- Members who have sat in one
- 312
- Items resolved from the public list
- 89
- From session to published notes
- 10 days
Marcus tracks one number more closely than any other: the share of session participants who have never previously interacted with the association beyond paying dues. It sits at 41%.
What Happened Next
The sessions have redirected real money. The annual conference moved from a resort to a college campus after four consecutive sessions surfaced the same complaint about cost, cutting the member registration fee by a third and lifting attendance to a record.
A planned insurance benefit was cancelled outright after members explained, patiently and repeatedly, that it duplicated something most already had through their state associations.
“The most valuable thing that has come out of these sessions is the things we didn’t build.”
The advisory council still exists. It now spends its two meetings a year reviewing the public list rather than generating ideas — a role its members say they prefer.
What Other Associations Can Learn
- Rotate who is in the room. A standing committee eventually stops being a sample and starts being a constituency.
- Show unfinished work. Members give better feedback on something that can still change.
- Read your notes back in the room. Members will correct you in real time, and they are usually right.
- Publish the "no"s. A clear decline with a reason builds more trust than a polite silence.
- Put an expiry date on "we are still thinking about it."
You can’t love your members if you aren’t listening to them.
The Member Impact
What changed for members
Member feedback at the association is no longer an annual event to be interpreted — it is a monthly obligation with a published, expiring list of decisions attached.
- Members in a listening session since 2022
- 312
- Participants who had never engaged beyond dues
- 41%
- Items resolved and published
- 89
Beyond the numbers
- Conference costs fell by a third after four sessions surfaced the same barrier.
- A planned member benefit was cancelled before spending began, on member advice.
- Every raised item receives a public status, including a plain "no" with reasoning.
- The advisory council shifted from generating ideas to holding staff accountable for them.
“I told them their pricing was pushing out small outfitters. Ten days later I read my own words in a note that went to seven thousand people. Nobody had ever done that.”
In their words
Hear It From Marcus
Marcus Bennett on ninety minutes a month that changed an association
8 min
Marcus walks through the format of a member listening session, why staff are barred from defending anything for thirty of those minutes, and what happens to every idea afterwards.
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