If you’re feeling the year-end holiday stress, just remember that your members feel the same way. So respond accordingly. Also: Don’t cut corners, but don’t give away too much, either. This time of year—the days immediately before the holidays hit—might feel like your busiest. Do you remember when associations used to reliably enjoy a “slow time of year”?

National Fluid Power Association CEO Eric Lanke does. “One of the painful realities of losing the slow time of year for associations is the negative impact it has on [an organization’s] ability to engage productively with its members,” he writes in a blog post this week. “Because we association staff are not the only ones who have lost our slow time. Our members have lost it, too, and they likely lost it long before we did.”

And that means your members have less time to volunteer. The lesson for execs: Your staff needs to keep a sharp member focus and make time to ensure members have meaningful volunteer experiences. Check out Lanke’s post for more thoughts. It’s a bad idea to keep cutting corners. It’s an equally bad idea to set expectations so high for your organization that there’s no turning back when you reach the summit.

Both are bad places to be, marketing guru Seth Godin explains, and can lead to a death spiral of sorts if you’re not careful. “The productive professional realizes that keeping promises is often enough,” Godin writes. “Randomly exceeding those promises is magical. But the key is ‘randomly.’ Unexpected delight is priceless, and something you can deliver on.”

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now and written by Ernie Smith.