Stop Selling Content, Start Selling Journeys: What Associations Get Backwards About Growth

Most associations are working incredibly hard. The events get delivered, the newsletters go out, the webinars run on schedule. And yet, for many Executive Directors, there's a nagging feeling that the hamster wheel keeps spinning without the organisation actually getting anywhere.

Jim Young has spent years thinking about why that is — and what to do about it.

Jim is the Founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Product Community®, the leading authority in product development for associations. In a recent conversation with Intuto CEO AJ Sallis, he made a point that stopped us in our tracks:

"Membership and revenue should be outcomes of great value creation — not goals in themselves."

If you've ever sat in a board meeting where the entire conversation revolved around membership numbers and event revenue, you'll recognise the model he's describing. And if you've ever felt like that conversation was somehow missing the point — you were right.

Watch the full conversation here →

The Model Most Associations Are Running

Jim describes a common pattern he calls the short-term trap. Associations organise around what they can measure easily - new members, event attendance, monthly revenue; and those metrics quietly become the purpose rather than the signal.

The result? Tactical thinking crowds out strategic thinking. Staff energy goes into delivering the next thing rather than building something that compounds over time. And members increasingly feel like they're receiving content rather than experiencing genuine value.

"The old model is a burnout model," Jim said plainly. "It's not sustainable."

The alternative he proposes isn't a radical reinvention of what associations do. It's a shift in orientation — from serving members transactionally to owning what he calls the forever member journey.

Thinking in Journeys, Not Transactions

The forever member journey is Jim's central idea, and it's deceptively simple. Rather than asking "how do we serve members this quarter?", associations should be asking "how do we serve someone across their entire professional life?"

In practice, he puts a number on it: the 50-year learner journey. From the moment a young professional joins a field at 22, through the arc of their career, to retirement — that entire span is an association's territory. Most organisations only engage meaningfully with a fraction of it.

"It doesn't mean we're not still serving the member in the short run," Jim clarified. "It absolutely does. But it changes how we think about connecting value together over time."

This reframe has immediate practical implications. It means the conference recording from three years ago isn't dead content, it's potentially a building block in a structured learning pathway. It means the annual meeting isn't just a revenue event, it's an incubator for the next three years of member engagement. And it means membership itself stops being the product and starts being the outcome of a community people genuinely don't want to leave.

"Put that membership on autopay," Jim said. "That's the goal. A community so valuable that people can't imagine not being part of it."

Your Content Isn't the Problem

One of the most reassuring things Jim said, and something that will resonate with any association leader who feels like they're constantly behind, is that most associations already have what they need. The problem isn't a shortage of content. It's a shortage of product thinking.

"We are addicted to single-use, one-and-done content and experiences," he said. "It's not a criticism of what we do, but it is harming us."

The question isn't whether your association has valuable knowledge. It almost certainly does. The question is whether that knowledge is organised in a way that draws people forward — through a pathway, across time, in connection with others.

Jim's one-word answer to building something new with limited budget? Leverage. Start by taking stock of everything your association has already created. Look for what's evergreen. Find the overlaps between different offerings. Then think about how you might string experiences together so a member does three things in a row rather than one isolated thing.

The shift from content to product isn't about production quality or technology. It's about design — specifically, designing for the journey rather than the moment.

The Unmet Need Nobody Is Talking About

When asked what the sector is consistently ignoring, Jim didn't hesitate: the 25-to-40-year-old professional.

"We keep relying on the idea that when people turn 40, when their kids are a little older, they'll start showing up," he said. "I don't know how many generations we can last with that thinking."

The problem, he argues, is that associations are trying to attract younger members using an old model — a benefits-centric, events-driven structure built for a different era. What younger professionals want isn't more benefits. They want to feel like they're part of something. They want to solve problems alongside peers. They want skin in the game.

Jim calls this shift moving from a value-for-exchange model to a participation system. It's a meaningful distinction. One says "pay your dues and receive your benefits." The other says "come build something with us."

The associations that crack this, that figure out how to bring younger professionals into genuine co-creation rather than passive membership, will have a pipeline of engaged members for decades.

When Different Parts of Your Association Don't Talk to Each Other

Nearly every association has a version of the same structural problem: the Events team and the Education team operate in silos, often barely aware of what the other is doing. Jim is sympathetic to how this happens — organising by department is logical, familiar, and easy to manage — but he's direct about the cost.

"Our members do not care about membership or professional learning or advocacy or volunteer leadership or the foundation," he said. "They want to be part of a community and they want to experience the world as a professional journey."

Serving that journey requires the whole organisation to move in the same direction. Not in a kumbaya, let's-all-hold-hands way — Jim is clear that cross-functional collaboration is genuinely hard and involves real tension. But he offers a useful reframe for that tension:

"Bridges are held up by tension."

The goal isn't to eliminate disagreement between functions. It's to redirect that energy toward a shared question: how do we, together, better serve a rapidly changing market?

Who Gets Left Behind

Jim's closing thought was characteristically direct. The associations that will fail, he said, are the ones that remain service-centric and content-centric — the ones that try to compete on volume and production rather than on community and journey.

"If our content and our experiences are not differentiated in the market, we will not be able to compete on capacity and capability. We will not."

The differentiation he's pointing to isn't about having better speakers or slicker webinars. It's about owning something that can't be replicated by a for-profit platform or an AI content engine: the ongoing, trusted, peer-validated relationship with a professional community across their entire career.

"We own community and we own the 50-year learner journey," he said. "That's our space. And if we think that way and evolve that way — exciting times ahead."

Watch the Full Conversation

This article captures some of the highlights, but the full conversation goes considerably deeper — including Jim's Product Community Maturity Model, how to use your annual meeting as a product incubator, and a practical framework for measuring compound value before the revenue numbers tell you anything.

Watch: Stop Selling Content, Start Selling Journeys →

Intuto helps associations turn their expertise into learning — deepening member impact and sustaining their mission. If you'd like to explore what a forever member journey could look like for your association, we'd love to talk.

Follow Jim Young's work at productcommunity.us and subscribe to The Innovative Association newsletter at productcommunity.substack.com.