A helpful playbook to counter declining membership.
Sladek outlines why and how associations must re-tool to be member-centric in this nonfiction guide.
According to the author, who has “volunteered and worked for, consulted with, and researched membership organizations for two decades,” these organizations, many of which have experienced declining membership for years, must take an obvious yet surprisingly overlooked strategic action: putting the needs and interests of their members first. In this book, Sladek highlights an organization that does this—the home services contractors association Nexstar Network—and discusses the ways an association can move toward the desired objective of making “at least 80 percent” of its work exclusively focused on its membership. Tactics include putting the word membershipinto staff titles to underscore their member-centric responsibilities; regularly surveying membership, including via quick polls and small-group meetings, to continuously tailor and refine programs and services; and engaging all generations of members, including putting younger members on boards and offering student memberships. The author also emphasizes the importance of the “EIOU test” when creating member benefits: Make them “Exclusive” to members; “Include” benefits in the price of dues; be accessible “Online” in order “to match the pace of the talent economy”; and address “Urgent” needs. At the end of each chapter, Sladek offers workbook-style sets of questions to assess current operations and map out next steps. The author builds on the warnings that she sounded in The End of Membership as We Know It (2011) in this new, self-described “wake up call” urging hidebound member associations to adapt to the times or risk extinction. Sladek provides ample demographic evidence to support her case, detailing how emerging digital-native generations have different criteria for joining and participating in associations that differ from those of generations past. Her discussion of the various dysfunctions that associations fall prey to (including toxic boards and excessive non-member-focused events) will be wince-inducing yet recognizable to many, with her mantra to “put members first” serving as an effective guiding principle to help drive this critical organizational transformation.
A helpful playbook to counter declining membership.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798886360295
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Authority Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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