In 2024, I presented at the ASAE Annual Conference in Cleveland. The session was called “Lean MarComm Staff, Big Association Voice.” It drew a reasonably full room, and the questions I took after told me everything I needed to know: it was (and is) a continuing challenge a lot of association communicators were (and are) living.
The Problem With How We Usually Staff Association Marketing
Most small and mid-size associations are running their marketing and communications function with one to three people.
Those people are expected to hop in from the beginning and immediately pickup and/or produce what a five-person department at a larger organization produces — newsletters, social media, conference promotion, member communications, advocacy content, press relations, brand management — often simultaneously, often without a defined budget, and almost always without a clear strategic mandate.
Consistency across all channels is what makes a brand feel bigger, stronger, and more put together to the public.
What I came to understand and then effectively manage over the almost 13 years is that staff size was and is never the constraint. Structure was.
Why can I confidently state this?
At the National Auctioneers Association, the communications function was me, one full-time coordinator who handled sales and, at the end of my tenure, a social media and digital content coordinator position shared between the Communications and Educations Departments. At the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, it is me, a digital and website coordinator, the occasional intern, and contracted partners on an individual (typically event-based) basis.
Combined, that effort has – to date – achieved 18 national awards, helped drive membership growth from 4,000 to 5,300, and helped grow an annual conference from 2,500 to nearly 5,000 total attendees.
It all has worked because, yes, we work and produce hard, but I learned early that when you spend the time up front to align any pending work to strategic goals, and then form your deliverables to current (and future) needs within those goals, you maximize your precious time – keeping all of your production or “doing” work on course. Hardly any of your effort is wasted, and that means everything at the end of a day, a week, and a year.
What happens on the other side – a lot – is that the instinct, when you are in that position, to just work harder takes over. Get faster. Find more efficient tools. Say yes to every request from every department (especially when they’re all good or great requests).
That instinct is wrong. Working harder in a broken structure might work for a bit, but it just produces burnout faster in the long run.
The Framework That Actually Works
The associations with lean teams that consistently punch above their weight share a common approach. It is not about tools. It is about three decisions made at the structural level:
Department Ownership vs. Support
First, successful small departments define what marketing owns versus what it supports. There is a difference between the marketing department creating a strategic campaign and the marketing department formatting a PDF for another department. The first is leverage. The second is a tax on your capacity. Lean teams that perform well have drawn that line and defended it.
Systems vs. Deliverables
Second, they build systems instead of producing deliverables. A template is worth ten individual pieces of copy. A documented process for how conference emails get written and approved is worth the time saved across every conference cycle for the next five years. Lean teams that cannot escape the production trap are usually the ones that never invested the time to build the infrastructure that removes them from it.
Always Brief
Third, they develop a brief habit. Every piece of content starts with a written brief — audience, goal, one thing the reader should feel or do. That brief is what allows a small team to produce at scale without losing coherence. Without it, you are not running a communications function. You are running a request queue.
And when you start doing all of those three things well, it’s time to start working on that Big Voice.
What Big Voice Actually Means
Big voice does not mean loud. It means coherent. It means that whether a member reads your newsletter, sees your social post, or opens your conference email, they are encountering the same organization — the same values, the same tone, the same sense of what you stand for.
It’s that consistency that makes a brand feel bigger, stronger, and more put together to the public.
The irony is that coherence is harder to achieve with a larger team, not easier. More people means more interpretation of brand. More interpretation means more drift. The lean team has a structural advantage here that most of them do not leverage: when one or two people touch everything, consistency is easier to maintain — if those people have a clear enough mandate to impose it.
The organizations that do this well have a documented voice. Not a lengthy brand standards document that lives in a shared drive nobody opens. An actual guide — what we sound like, what we do not sound like, examples of both — that a new vendor, a new staff member, or a board chair writing a foreword can use to stay in range.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting in This Position Today
Define your lane before you fill it because the requests will come from everywhere in a small environment, and fast.
The budget will never be enough. The ask will always exceed the capacity. None of that changes unless you make a structural decision about what your association’s relationship with “marketing & comms” actually is — and then ask to open that communication clearly with leadership before you are too busy to have the conversation.
And, always: Lean is not a limitation. It is a constraint that forces prioritization.
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