June 22, 2026
Most associations have some version of open content. An article or two, a podcast episode, maybe a report summary sitting outside the gate where anyone can find it. And in some cases, everything is out in the open, publicly accessible. The intention is solid—give people a reason to engage with the association.
Access is a good thing. Non-members can find and read your article. Some will end up on the membership page, or at your event—but most won’t make that jump without a clear path. Do you want to leave that up to chance?
If you listened to our recent podcast episode about gating, you heard Marcus and Breanna discuss how content can fit into a recruiting strategy. What they didn’t have time to get into was exactly how to make your content more effective at recruiting. That’s what we’re covering today.
Open Content and a Membership Funnel Aren’t the Same Thing
I’d like you to consider the last piece of open content you published (open meaning, not gated). Where did you guide the reader/watcher/listener afterward?
Recruitment is a funnel. And a funnel has direction. Each piece of content you publish should be drawing your audience further into the funnel.
Open content can make up part of the recruitment funnel. It’s most effective at the top, where discovery happens. From there, you guide them toward membership, one step at a time.
The Discovery Stage: Where Association Membership Recruitment Starts
We’re at the top of the funnel, where people haven’t considered membership yet and may not even know who you are. In most funnel diagrams, this part is labeled “discovery”.
It’s exactly what it says on the tin. People are discovering who you are and what you have to offer. This is your first impression. If they like what they see, they may stick around. If they like what they see and you point them towards more useful information, they’re more likely to explore.
That’s the job of open content. To earn attention and encourage the next step.
What Associations Can Learn from Consumer Platforms
How do you get someone to commit before they’ve experienced the full value? Consumer platforms have spent years working on this—here’s what you can learn from them.
Open content needs to be useful; LinkedIn does this well. Their free tier includes networking and job searching. Premium membership offers additional features, and some users want them. As a result, premium revenue surpassed $2 billion in 2025, up 50% in 2 years. All because the free tier built an audience worth converting.
Use engagement as a signal. A non-member who attends multiple webinars is a warm lead. This is who you approach with a trial offer. Duolingo does this for early users: hit a 7-day streak and you get 3 days of premium access as a reward. No pitch. Just: you showed up—here’s a look at what you’re missing. Your version of this? Discounted event registration, or maybe a trial membership.
Strategic gating is often used by publishers, and there are two common ways they use it. Some, like The Economist, cut off after a paragraph or two. You can read the beginning of the article, but once you scroll to a certain point, you need to subscribe to continue. Others, like The Harvard Business Review, give you a certain number of articles per month before the gate appears. In both cases, the reader is getting real value before being asked to commit.
Building a Membership Funnel With Content
Your association can mimic what the above platforms are doing. Offer a report summary or the first three minutes of a webinar, then require membership or an email to access the rest. You’re likely already doing some version of this—a free article here, a gated resource there. The question is whether someone who finds your open content has a clear path that leads all the way to membership. That path is what turns content into a funnel. Here’s how to build it.
1. Find out what your prospects are searching for.
When creating content for recruitment, start with foundational knowledge. The things that “everybody knows,” because that is where your prospects will find you. This is the stuff you make freely accessible at the top of your funnel.
This is also where SEO and AEO matter. Creating content around what prospects search for only works if that content is findable—optimized for search engines and the AI tools your prospects are increasingly using to find answers.
2. Decide where to add gating.
It can’t all be free, so you need to decide where to start gating your content. Marcus and Breanna outlined four levels in the podcast that you can use as a baseline: free, email, membership, and paid access. So you start with free content and move to email gating, usually via event registration or a resource download, as the next step. The gating needs to happen after people have seen some value; otherwise, why would they give you contact information?
3. Lead people to the next step, every time.
Every piece of content you create should have a call to action. You are actively guiding people to the next logical step. In your recruitment funnel, the last step is becoming a member. The first step is a free article. A free article leads to a video series, then to an email-gated webinar, and then to a members-only certification course. The ask scales with where they are: small at the top, bigger as they go deeper.
And here’s what separates a funnel from a content archive: you can see who’s coming back. Most website platforms let you track return visitors. Someone who has read three of your articles in a month is not the same prospect as someone who bounced off the homepage. Set up an automation that recognizes that behavior and responds to it—a trial offer, a discounted event registration, a direct invitation to join. “You showed up three times. Here’s what’s next”
Once your content funnel is running, you’ll want to know if it’s working. We covered how to measure the performance of your association content in this article.
Where to Start With Your Association Content Funnel
Content can be one of your most effective recruitment tools—all it takes is some strategic gating. These two questions can tell you a lot about where your funnel currently stands: does a non-member who finds your content have anywhere to go? And do you know who’s already been back to your site more than once?
Someone is going to find your association for the first time today. What happens next is up to you.
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