Your association probably offers more benefits than it needs to. But which ones factor into the decision to join? Get in the habit of market analysis to find out.

Ask a mom and dad which of their kids is their favorite, and they’ll tell you they love all their children equally. Now ask an association executive which of their association’s member benefits is their favorite. Do you get the same answer?

Dean West, FASAE, president of Association Laboratory, Inc., suggests associations need to learn some tough love.

“When we study the number of benefits that are essential to the decision to join or engage, most of our clients are astounded by how small the number is,” West wrote in a post in ASAE’s Collaborate discussion forum two weeks ago. “Just because an association offers 25 different things doesn’t mean the prospective/current member cares about 25 things. Rarely do we identify more than four or five key benefits that influence the decision. The result is a lot of wasted effort on benefits that don’t improve member value or corresponding membership business metrics.”

Maybe you don’t have 25 kids, but the point remains: Not every product or program your association offers can be a special snowflake. In fact, many of your member benefits are probably more like barnacles accreted to the hull of your ship, slowly building drag below the surface because you haven’t taken care to clean them off.

West recommends a variety of analytical methods for prioritizing member benefits, such as “member build a membership” (members surveyed to build hypothetical bundles of benefits, with associated costs), quadrant analysis (plotting benefits by both satisfaction and importance), and total unduplicated reach and frequency (TURF).

The final method involves asking members to rank benefits and, based on those responses, analyzing which combinations of benefits will earn, or “reach,” the most members. West offered a couple examples of associations for which he has conducted TURF analysis: In one association with 24 benefits, the top nine earned 70 percent of its members; in another, with 15 benefits, the top four delivered 85 percent of its members. The remaining benefits could be, in theory, simply eliminated or at least better understood to serve niche needs that may be strategically important to the association but not crucial to the decision to join.

In short, West says associations need to improve at matching benefits to a clear understanding of member needs. “A mistake that associations make is they determine member categories based on either outmoded or outdated information,” he says, “or they base it on legacy issues—’Oh, we’re going to have a difference between Company A and Company B because we’ve always done it that way’ is an example—but oftentimes the market knows what they want out of the association, and they don’t care whether or not you bundle it in the membership as a way to get it, if it’s of value to them. So, by doing a market-driven approach, instead of creating a member category that you sell to people, you allow the market to tell you what would be a logical configuration of benefits.”

This question of configuration of benefits is important for any association, but it’s particularly crucial for associations building tiered benefits packages.

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This article was originally sourced from Associations Now here and was written by Joe Rominiecki.