How to Know If Your Association Content Is Working, And What to Do When It Isn't

Associations publish more content now than they did a few years ago. The output has grown, often including podcasts, newsletters, videos, and social media. The effort to engage members is genuine. But when someone asks, “is our content working?” the answer tends to be some version of “I think so?”

Metrics like page views, email open rates, and social likes can tell you that numbers are going up or down, but they don’t tell you whether your content is engaging your members. And that means you don’t know if it’s supporting your mission or draining your resources.

The trouble is, most associations are measuring activity rather than impact. Knowing the difference is where it starts—and knowing what to do about it is what we’ll cover below.

What “Working” Means for Association Content

Start with what success looks like for your association. It may sound obvious, but this step is often skipped. Consider the KPIs you track in other aspects of your association. If you don’t have them, it’s incredibly difficult to take actionable steps.

The most commonly watched numbers, page views, email open rates, and social engagement, tell you whether people noticed your content. They don’t tell you if it did anything useful. According to Higher Logic’s 2025 Association Email Benchmark Report, average email open rates across the sector sit around 33.5%.  But your open rate means nothing if members aren’t being directed towards something.

The best way to measure your association’s content performance is to connect it to your organizational goals. They don’t have to be specific goals, but the broader concepts like member retention and engagement, non-dues revenue, and event attendance would all work. Content that doesn’t connect is just noise.

And since the 2025 Association Benchmarking Report from Naylor and Association Adviser found that 52% of associations see combating information overload as a top challenge, you can’t afford to be adding to the problem. That means making what you produce connect to your goals and asking, “What is the goal behind this content?”

That’s where you evolve from a publishing calendar to a strategy.

Why Association Content Underperforms

I feel the need to say this upfront: Your content isn’t underperforming because it’s bad.

More often than not, it underperforms because of one of these two patterns:

The wrong format for your audience

The wrong format means the content is effectively invisible. So, while a dense report has a ton of valuable information, your members may not get past the key insights section. But if you take that information and break it down into a series of short videos, or a podcast episode, or even a newsletter feature series, you’ll reach more people and drive engagement.

A lack of promotion

“If you build it, they will come” is a movie quote, not a content philosophy. A single eblast the day that your new piece of content goes live likely isn’t enough. If you’re familiar with sales, then you know that it takes a minimum of 8 touchpoints for someone to take action. Your content will work in a very similar way. Members need to encounter it multiple times across multiple channels before it registers. Create once, and distribute repeatedly.

The good news is that both of these issues are preventable; it just takes a little bit of preparation.

The Four Questions Every Piece of Content Should Be Able To Answer

The questions that make content work aren’t mysterious. We ask different versions of these in every content brief we build with clients. They’re worth asking for every piece of content you create, video, article, newsletter, podcast, and even webinars.  

If your association has a magazine or trade publication, your editorial team is likely already asking versions of these questions. The goal is simply to apply that same discipline to every format you produce.

Before creating anything, answer these four questions:

1. Who is this content for?

And you need to be specific in your answer. You have different segments within your membership, so you should be able to narrow down your target audience. A first-year member and a veteran have different needs, so why would you give them the same content?

(Obviously, there are exceptions. Announcements like industry-wide updates or new membership perks will be useful to everyone, but you may see a greater engagement if you create variations suited to each of your membership segments.)

2. What tension or question are they trying to resolve?

A good piece of content will answer a question, solve a problem, or help your target audience. Striving for utility means you’re less likely to be adding to the noise.

For example, you may think: “I wonder if associations know how to tell if their content is making an impact?” Then decide to write a whole article about it because you’re pretty sure it’ll be of use to marketing and content managers.  👀

3. Would someone outside your organization care about this topic?

And yes, I know this one is tough to answer honestly. You’d love to think that all of your members care about organizational announcements and committee recaps, but they likely don’t. If it doesn’t serve a purpose outside of your HQ, keep it out of your editorial pipeline.

4. Does this serve the industry?

There’s a difference between content that advances your field and content that documents your activity. Both have a place, but only one builds the kind of authority that makes members proud to belong and keeps them renewing year after year.

If a piece of content can’t pass all four questions, it isn’t ready for production. If it does pass, you’re another step closer to content that engages.

How to Do an Association Content Audit

Before you overhaul your content strategy, understand what you’re working with. You just need an inventory of what you’re producing, how it’s performing, and if it’s connected to your organizational goals.

The first step is to list the content you’ve published. How far back you go depends on how much content you produce—anywhere from a month to a full year works.

Then, for each piece you’ve recorded, answer these three questions:

Does it connect to a goal? Remember, if it’s not connected to an organizational goal, it’s probably just adding to the noise.

Is it reaching the right people? Who is consuming this content? Who was it intended for? If something is only being seen by staff and board members, that’s useful information.

Is the format working? If something you produce has a high bounce rate and a low time-on-page, the issue is probably the format. You can look into reshaping it into something more digestible.

You don’t need any fancy tools to complete a simple content audit. It can be done with your content analytics, a spreadsheet, and a bit of time. You’re looking for patterns that will let you make decisions about what to keep, cut, and transform.

And transformation doesn’t always mean starting over.

Transforming Existing Content Into a Year-Round Strategy

The Material Handling Institute (MHI) was producing a lot of valuable information for its members, including a comprehensive Annual Industry Report in conjunction with Deloitte. Released at their annual events, the report covers trends, updates, and issues facing the material handling industry. It was full of information members could use—but it wasn’t connecting the way they wanted it to.

The report was tied to a goal and was reaching the right people, but the format needed to be changed. That is how we started working with MHI, turning their annual report into a video series. This kind of content repurposing—taking existing assets and transforming them for better reach—is underused in association publishing. It’s how this one series with MHI grew into a full content strategy and a year-long editorial calendar, collecting insights from thought leaders at live events and repurposing them into a video series. 

The information and expertise didn’t change; it was transformed to better connect with an audience.

From Noise to Signal

It’s a noisy world. Your members are being pulled in every direction by content competing for their attention. Your response shouldn’t be to publish more content; it should be to create and share purposeful content.

Your goal is not to fill a calendar, it’s to cut through the noise. That’s what a fully realized content strategy does.

FAQs About Making Your Content Work

How often should we be publishing content as an association?

Publishing consistently is more important than frequency.  So you need to start with what your team can sustain, whether that’s once a week or once a month. In fact, releasing a piece once per month, as long as it’s clearly targeted and promoted, is more effective at engaging your audience than weekly or even daily publishing that has no clear strategy behind it.

What’s the difference between a content strategy and a content calendar?

It’s a pretty simple difference. A content calendar will simply tell you what is being published and when, while the strategy tells you why. They can both live in the same spreadsheet; you just have to add columns like Target Audience, Pillar Topic, Organizational Goal, and KPI to a publishing calendar.  

How do we get internal buy-in for changing our content approach?

Start with data. Do a content audit first. That will give you the information you need to make a case for change. If you can show that something isn’t performing, or that a new format is performing very well, it’s easier to get buy-in (and budget).

We’re a small team and don’t have time for a full content audit. Where do we start?

Don’t try to audit everything at once; that way lies madness and burnout. Our suggestion is to pick one content series you produce on a regular basis—like a newsletter, or blog—and run it through the audit questions first. That way, you’ll know if your flagship series needs an overhaul or if it’s good to go. Then you can move on to the next one. Small steps and incremental changes are more sustainable. 

How do we know when our content strategy is actually working?

When your content is consistently tied to organizational goals, and you can point to specific pieces that contributed to member retention, event attendance, or revenue—that’s when you know. It won’t happen overnight, but the audit gives you a baseline to measure against.