Kitchen's Ink

The assumption is usually that associations go quiet between their flagship event and the next promotional cycle. That’s not quite right. Most associations are communicating between events. They’re just not connecting.

There’s a difference worth naming.

The Communication That’s Already Happening

Between major events, most members hear from their associations regularly. The emails go out. The posts get published. The inbox gets touched.

But look at what those communications are actually doing: calling for volunteer nominations, reminding members that a deadline is approaching, asking for abstract submissions, promoting the next event, recruiting for open committee seats.

Every one of those is the association showing up with a need. Not one is the association showing up with value.

That’s not going silent. That’s something more subtle and, I’d argue, more damaging: training your members to see your communications as a transaction. You reach out when you want something. They’ve learned that. Whether they’ve said it out loud or not, they’ve learned it.

The Cost of Transactional Communication

The problem isn’t any individual email. Volunteer recruitment matters. Event promotion matters. Deadlines matter.

The problem is the ratio. When the overwhelming majority of your member-facing communication is an ask, the relationship becomes defined by those asks. Members don’t hear from you. They hear from you when you need something. Over time, that pattern erodes the warmth your community actually has.

A 73 Net Promoter Score (NPS) – the mark reached by SSH’s 2026 International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) – is world-class by any benchmark, not just association benchmarks. It means attendees (including members AND non-members!) genuinely love what SSH does when they’re in the IMSH room. The potential gap is what happens when they’re not. The warmth is real, but it has the potential of being asked to carry the non-transactional heat eleven months a year.

It’s possible, but it’s a risk – especially when repeated over the years.

What Non-Transactional Communication Actually Is

I want to be precise here, because “add value” is advice that means everything and nothing.

Non-transactional communication is not a newsletter roundup. It’s not a resource highlight. It’s not a “have you tried this benefit?” email. Those are still organization-centric. You’re deciding what’s worth surfacing. You’re determining what members should find useful.

The real shift is centering the member, not the organization.

Let’s create a hypothetical example that embodies this. You develop a program called Breakout. The concept: solicit member stories about a breakthrough — a moment in their professional program that happened, in part, because of something they learned with or through your association. The member is the protagonist. The association resource is the supporting character. The story is theirs.

The solicitation is direct: Share your Breakout moment — a breakthrough that happened, in part, because of something you learned with or through the association. Tell us what changed, and what you had in your hands when it did.

No form with five fields. No formal submission process. A direct, personal ask that says: your work matters, and we want to hear about it.

Why This Works Harder Than a Standard Spotlight

A standard member spotlight is still organization-centric. The organization picks the member. The organization frames the story. The organization publishes it. The member gets a moment of recognition.

A Breakout story inverts that. The member chooses the moment. The member describes the transformation. The association asks the question and tells the story honestly. That’s a different relationship signal entirely. Not “we’re celebrating you.” “We see you, and we want others to.”

The resource surfaces naturally in the telling. The connection between the tool and the outcome is the member’s own words, which are more persuasive than anything the organization could write. And it does double duty: prospective members read it and see real evidence of return on membership, not promotional copy.

The Practical Starting Point

This isn’t a full program overhaul. It’s a ratio correction.

Audit the last 90 days of member-facing communication. Count the asks versus the gives. If you can’t find a clear example of your organization showing up with something that wasn’t ultimately a request, you have the evidence you need.

Pick one communication per month where the only goal is to make a member feel seen. A Breakout story. A community spotlight that asks nothing. Content that exists entirely for the reader.

One per month. Consistent. Then watch your open rates, your replies, your community group engagement.

The ratio is fixable. Start there.