What if you knew what every member wanted and what to do next?
I don’t mean in a strategic planning session. I don’t mean in a dashboard you review once a month. I mean in the moment a member raises their hand, clicks into something specific, or answers a simple question about what they are trying to accomplish this year.
Most associations I talk to are not struggling because they lack data. If anything, the opposite is true. You have an AMS full of history. You have email engagement metrics. You have event registrations, certification records, committee involvement, website activity. There is no shortage of intelligence.
The challenge is translating that intelligence into timely action.
A membership director said something to me recently that perfectly captured this tension. She said, “We know a lot about our members. I just don’t feel like we’re doing anything meaningful with it.” They were running solid campaigns. Their onboarding sequence existed. Their renewal emails went out on schedule. From the outside, everything looked organized.
But every new member received the same follow-up. Every prospect received the same value messaging. If someone clicked into certification content three times in two weeks, that activity lived quietly in a report. Nothing shifted because of it.
That gap between knowing and doing is where most engagement strategies stall.
Associations are incredibly thoughtful about collecting information. We survey. We analyze. We build reports. What is harder is creating a system that responds dynamically to what members tell us and show us. Without that system, the burden falls on staff to notice patterns and manually intervene. In small teams, that simply is not realistic.
This is where AI becomes useful in a practical way.
There is a lot of noise right now about AI writing emails or generating content. That is interesting, but it misses the bigger opportunity for associations. The more powerful application is decision support. It is the ability to evaluate signals from multiple sources and determine what should happen next for an individual member.
Signals can be behavioral. A member attends an advocacy webinar and then downloads a policy brief. A new joiner clicks on networking opportunities but ignores education content. A long-time member suddenly stops engaging in the months leading up to renewal.
Signals can also be declared. When you ask members what their primary goal is, what challenge they are trying to solve, or what stage they are in professionally, you are capturing intent. That intent provides context that pure behavioral data cannot.
When you bring those two types of information together, you begin to see a fuller picture. The question becomes how to act on it consistently and at scale.
At PropFuel, we think about this through a simple lens. Ask smart questions. Capture meaningful signals. Act on them in a way that guides the member forward.
In practice, that might mean that a new member who joins for career advancement is automatically guided toward a specific set of programs and networking opportunities aligned with that goal. It might mean that someone who indicates interest in certification receives tailored follow-up and resources before they ever fill out an application. It might mean identifying renewal risk months in advance because engagement patterns shifted and proactively starting a conversation.
None of that requires doubling your staff. It requires building logic into your engagement engine so that next steps are not dependent on someone remembering to check a report.
For Executive Directors and CEOs, this is about confidence. Confidence that engagement efforts are not generic. Confidence that value is being reinforced throughout the year rather than crammed into a renewal notice. Confidence that growth initiatives are supported by real member intent.
For membership and marketing leaders, it is about focus. When the system handles the routing of next best actions, your team can spend time refining strategy, improving programs, and having higher-value conversations instead of manually segmenting lists and guessing at what might resonate.
The associations that will stand out in the next few years are not the ones sending more messages. They are the ones responding intelligently to what their members are already signaling.
So I’ll come back to the original question.
What if you knew what every member wanted and what to do next?
That question is not aspirational anymore. The data already exists. The opportunity now is to connect it, interpret it, and act on it in ways that feel personal, timely, and intentional.
When that happens, engagement stops feeling like a campaign calendar and starts functioning like a guided journey. And that shift changes how members experience your organization every single day.
Meet the author: Brittany Lancor, Senior Marketing Manager at Propfuel
About Propfuel: PropFuel gives association membership and marketing professionals the tools to improve member insight and engagement - leading to a more personalized member experience, greater member value and higher retention.