Nonprofit Membership Associations: Serving Members Today or Shaping the Field for Tomorrow?
The latest post from Angie Kim’s blog Private Foundations Plus:
What make membership-based intermediary organizations so important are the same reasons that they are not that exciting to talk about: Membership associations are the glue connecting the people that comprise the nonprofit sector together; they are a primary piece of infrastructure that enables the sector; and they are the ‘institutional memory’ of their fields helping to retain past knowledge while ramping up new professionals. In fact, researchers have attributed the “carrying capacity” of a community’s nonprofit sector (i.e., how many nonprofits a community can sustain) to how well a community has developed an infrastructure of “network exchanges” (Paarlberg and Varda, 2009). In other words, yes, nonprofits need money, but if you want to see results, take a look at how well nonprofits are networked. A nonprofit working in isolation is less capable of realizing its mission than one that is connected to others.