Modernizing Member Models

In this episode of Membership IQ, host Sarah Sladek talks with Curtis Nunley, a leader at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), about navigating and leading through transformational change. Curtis shares insights into ASCE’s recent decision to consolidate its multiple membership grades—combining full, associate, and affiliate categories into one unified level. This change aims to make ASCE more inclusive and reflective of the full spectrum of professionals contributing to civil engineering, including technicians, non-licensed practitioners, and those with varying educational backgrounds.

Curtis explains the cultural and strategic factors behind the decision, including its potential to engage historically underrepresented groups, such as graduates from HBCUs and community colleges. He emphasizes the importance of involving stakeholders in the change process, tailoring member experiences to generational preferences, and simplifying volunteer roles to support community building. The episode also touches on ASCE’s efforts to better engage younger members, especially Gen Z, through tools like social media, mobile accessibility, and flexible payment options.

This conversation is packed with practical advice for any organization looking to evolve membership structures, promote diversity, and build stronger intergenerational communities.

Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Membership IQ. This is where you go to get smart about membership and I am so excited to be joined today by Curtis Nunley from the American Society of Civil Engineers. We're going to delve into some questions about leading in a time of change and learn a little bit more about Curtis's role in leadership. And it is just a time of change. So Curtis and I have a lot to unpack and talk about, right? So welcome to the show, Curtis. Do you want to just give a little intro of yourself to our audience, please? Sure, sure. I'm Curtis, been with the ASCE now since 94, so just over 30 years, and I'm responsible for ASCE's membership that requires or includes, I should say, acquisition of members, retention of members, and research on members and products and services that influence the members' interest in retaining their ASCE membership. Yeah, and I know ASCE has been interested in engaging those younger generations, and we can talk about that in our time together too, but I want to start because it is a time of change and I just want to know what is really top of mind for ASCE right now? And I like to ask this question because sometimes people in leadership or other associations, they think no one else is facing what we're facing. We feel alone. We are unique, or whatever the case may be, and sometimes it's nice to just chat about what's our common ground, what challenges are you facing, and maybe other people can relate to that. So one of the challenges that I'm pleased to report is that we just had a board meeting about a week ago, and they approved a motion to consolidate member grades. And so that was narrowly approved by about 70% of the board. It required 66%, so literally down to one board member would have changed that. But this change will consolidate our associate members, our affiliate members, and our full members into one membership grade, making us a more inclusive organization, and so that is very positive. It's a good step in the right direction. The thing that makes it top of mind is that now we have to prepare a ballot and prepare the individual member to understand what's about to occur, so that will also take some energy and we'll have to conduct the election to get the approval of the membership body on this change. So it aligns quite eloquently, I think, with the way the profession is going. And so that will be very helpful for us. And it'll, I think, potentially over time help us to have an opportunity to attract a larger group of allied professionals. So that's very positive. All right. So I just want to, for our audience, because some people might not refer to it as member grades, membership grades, they may use other words. So my first question is, if you could just define that for our audience, what that means. And my second question is, why do you say this will be more inclusive? And my third question is, what inspired this change? So the first one is, what is grades? So, yeah, for scientific and engineering organizations, quite often those organizations are founded just focused on the core individual with a particular set of scientific or engineering skills. In our case, the core group would be just civil engineers. For ASCE, over time, that core group of civil engineering skills became synonymous with licensure. So the vast majority of ASCE full grade members are licensed engineers. So that's what I mean by member grades. So the affiliate person is a person who is an allied professional, but not necessarily a classically trained engineer. I see. Like me, for example, I work with civil engineers and have worked with them for 30 years, but I am certainly not a classically trained engineer. And then we have associate members who are classically trained engineers, but have not yet become licensed. 50% of civil engineers never become licensed. So it's a good set of population there that don't go ahead all the way through that licensure process. And so that's that member grades concept is really distinguishing between a person's educational background and what they do. You might think of it similar to the difference between a lawyer and a person that works in law that's not a lawyer, say a paralegal or something like that, that supports lawyers. I see. So that would be similar to a certain extent, probably not exact, but kind of similar. So that was one question. The second one was, how does this create more inclusion? Excellent. So in actual engineering practice, what we're finding is that everyone working on the engineering team is not a licensed engineer, right? So, but ASCE's sweet spot for the last probably 50 years has been the licensed engineer. Okay. So the vast majority of our members are the licensed engineer. So with this change, we now have an opportunity to attract the entire engineering team to ASCE, particularly those folks that are working hand in hand on engineering projects. In some cases, the work that engineers used to do in the past, and then working with technicians that might be a lot working with computers, CAD programs, or things of that nature, part of the engineering process, where in the past they believed they could not be members of ASCE. I've been at several conferences where people tell me, I don't qualify to become a member of ASCE. And so we've seen that occur many, many times. The other factor is, in today's working world, many of the professionals that are begin in the profession have only a junior college education. And this gives us an opportunity to attract that group of people as well, as opposed to just those with a full four-year degree or graduate degree. I see, okay. So our audience just got a little crash course on engineering and all the various membership aspects of ASCE. Fantastic. So tell me what inspired you. I just thought about one thing I wanted to add to it. Yeah, please do. There are over 100 HBCUs by that historically black universities, colleges and universities. There are about 10 of them that have certified engineering programs. Historically, just the schools that had the certified engineering programs would be the individuals that we would go after. If this is approved, this would open the door for the vast majority of those types of schools. And there are those types of schools for Native Americans as well as Latino Americans. So this is a great opportunity to reach beyond just the classically trained engineer. All right. So then my follow-up question was, what inspired this change? So I'm guessing part of it was that inclusive piece to be able to expand and build community. But maybe you have another answer. Am I guessing right or was it something else? You are. You are guessing right. There was actually, you know, as often occurs with volunteer organizations, there was a committee that worked on the engineering team and they provided some great information. And as a result of that basic information that they provided on the engineering team and defining the engineering team, we had some board members who took that information and took it to the next level and said, you know, why not move forward with this concept? So this was definitely led by our active volunteers, leadership volunteers from our board that were very interested in making sure the organization is forward looking. Yeah, right. And so that's that's the dramatic change. And it's, I think, very helpful when the board sets its eye on things of that nature and follows through. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so all too often, you know, board members kind of get stuck in the minutia and they forget that they're there to provide that vision and that leadership and to take action. They're responsible, ultimately, for the care of the organization. OK, so big change. And whether we're talking about the current change that you're, you know, this this big switch up internally or we're talking about other changes, you've been at this organization for 30 years. Amazing. So what have you learned about, you know, whether it's just in general, what has been effective, what's an effective strategy you can pass along or advice on how to lead in a time of change? I would say, you know, obviously that, you know, change can can be a challenge. Right. Nobody likes to have their cheese moved. Right. So with that said, the best thing we can do is within the context of change, involve the stakeholders in as many of the processes as is possible so that they have interest and a stake in its success in being implemented in the change. And so ideally, we would work to understand what each individual from a volunteer perspective or from a leadership perspective or from a staff perspective, what do they vision as how this change might affect them or how this change might be shaped better and to include them all along the way so that moving forward, they are really involved and really want to have some success. And so that would be my my suggestion is to involve as wide a swath as possible and keep them so involved that they believe it's their initiative. And you already said a phrase earlier about a committee. Do you feel like the best way to do this is through committees or what's the best ways to engage people, their ideas and opinions? What have you seen be really effective? Yeah, I've seen committees be remarkably effective and not. Yeah. But, you know, as as as an organization that works primarily with volunteers and ASE is an organization that has volunteers doing many, many things. And I've seen associations that that, on the other hand, have volunteers doing very, very little at a high level. So for our culture, that's not the case. Right. And so I guess it depends on the culture of the association. Can it be effective to have a leader that just, you know, makes decisions or a small group? In some cases it can. But my experience has been that culture will really drive whether change is successful or not, or optimally successful. And so what you can do to influence that culture and work within the culture, if you can't influence it, it's going to give you success. Mm hmm. Absolutely. That's great. Great information. Great reminder, the importance of cultivating your culture. As that saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Right. All right. So we had conversations a few years ago related to generations. And I am curious to touch base and learn about what is new and happening in terms of generations within ASCE. What kinds of gaps or opportunities are you observing, whether in engineering or in the membership itself? Sure, I would say not necessarily that do we see gaps per se. We've had some of the same challenges for the last 20 years, being that with younger generations, they often get an engineering degree, civil engineering degree and may not actually practice civil engineering. Right. So that has not changed. They present very effective professionals and can go almost into any field. So one thing that is changing is that the salaries for entry level civil engineers are rising disproportionately to other engineering professionals. And so that helps to make the civil engineering group more attractive, at least from a early career perspective. And so that is one of the things that helps us to not to not lose them too early. And we have continued to try to engage with our younger professionals and the younger professionals are doing just that. And they are really taking a great job in our local areas of leading. We have not yet cracked the challenge of having them formally as part of our board. But our board has been talking most recently of a new vision for itself, and that could change how it functions moving forward. And I'm hopeful that this new process will give an opportunity for younger professionals to also have opportunities to lead at every level of ASCE. So critical, right? It is. Yeah. And and I remember, you know, a few years ago, the hot topic in ASCE was we got to engage those millennials with a little bit of an eye towards students in Gen Z. And now this last year, there are now more Gen Z's in the workforce than boomers. So we've really seen a shift in that regard. What differences are you seeing or are you seeing any in regards to Gen Z? What have you kind of learned or observed about that generation? I would say that they're the requirements for membership based upon their experiences with having effective experiences online are huge. That's a big part of it. Social media plays a bigger part in how we can attract and retain. I would also say different options in terms of payment makes a huge difference. In the last year, we started something like membership installments. We started membership installment payments, and that has grown profusely as well as auto renew. Those types of activities. These are not things that we did in the past. I know a lot of associations have done it, but not ASCE. ASCE has been pretty conservative with that process. So our experience is very different and it's dramatically changing how we make the organization accessible, as well as understanding how important the mobile experience is. It's easy to underestimate just how that can dramatically change a person's experience and their likelihood to retain membership. Yeah, absolutely. It's no longer a nice to have. We're moving towards, you know, that's a must have to have that accessibility. All right. And your community is very age diverse, and as we learned just a few minutes ago, you have people at different career stages and different levels of the profession and all that as well. So what are some tips you can pass along to our audience about effective community building and bridging gaps, especially in a time of change? Yeah, I would say one of the biggest things that we've learned is, one, for the active volunteer, take the administration out of the process. Make it so easy for them to do what they need to do as an administrator, that they can focus more on serving their communities and being involved with their community. And so I think that's one of the areas where we're improving, making the job of being an active volunteer much easier. And so we're continually working at doing that. And I hope that we can get to a point where our experience is more standardized across the various opportunities that we have. So the administration almost becomes a non-issue for our active volunteers. The next thing I would say is we have a lot of different constituencies that are somewhat siloed. And what we've been working to do is to to join them and have them be able to work with each other. An example might be a group of authors that generally communicate only with other authors. And then we have the consumers of what the author's products are who generally communicate with each other, whether it be students or whether it be professionals that are using the content, but not necessarily communicating with the authors. So I think that also presents a great opportunity for us to bring all of these groups together and have them have a greater opportunity and more well-rounded community. And so we're trying to do more of that activity. The same thing could be said for our active volunteer experience with other active volunteers that do things that are similar, but across different types of experiences, whether they be in technical groups versus geographical location groups. They have some of the same experiences, but not often get the opportunity to communicate with each other and work to figure out how to address some of their similar volunteer challenges. That's good. Something I really admire about ASCE is that you also you work on workforce development. You've done a lot of creative things. You you have fun. You have very vibrant student chapters. I don't know if fun encapsulates it, but I just think it's a really inspiring organization. My familiarity with fun. You could say we actually have student competitions and they actually have fun at those competitions. So I think it is it is a great profession. It is fun and it's competitive and it makes a difference in the world. And so these competitions are teaching our students as young professionals how they can succeed in the profession and to help the environment and the humanity. So it's fun. I've been on this mission just kind of with all my clients lately, just reminding them, you know, are you having fun? Is this are all these meetings and all these things you're doing the tedious tasks? Wait a second. If you're not having fun, are your members having fun? And that's that's part of member value, too. If people are bored, uninspired, overwhelmed, stressed, they're going to disengage. So I think that element of fun is so critical. Yeah. All right. So my last question for you, Curtis, has been very helpful. And I just like to ask, what do you have a knowledge bomb to drop here at the end of our time together? Do you have a success story or a best practice, a strategy that you can share before we conclude our time together? I would say since you said success bomb, there's a lot of data available. And by that, I mean big data. And if you can figure out how to mine that data, there's a good chance that you could develop the tools to attract people that you may not realize are interested in your organization. One of the things that we've been working with a third party vendor is to mine the data of people who are visiting our website to see if they have an interest in our products and services and if they would come back to our website maybe and buy a product or service. We know they browsed it, right? But they didn't complete the process. And in learning how to do that over time, we've gotten better and better at encouraging them to come back and make a purchase. And so I think that is a great opportunity for ASCE. In some cases, we've increased their likelihood to purchase by 30 to 40 percent. Wow. So that as far as an opportunity, I think to understand your browsers of your website and of your communities, there's a great opportunity to re-engage with those folks at a deeper level. And ideally, turn them into members and customers. Yeah. And I take away from that, that, you know, knowledge is power, dive in, do the research, have the data. But I also take away from that, that it is critical to nurture your leads. And I think it used to be enough for associations just to kind of have their doors open and people would join and it was kind of automatic and it was a social expectation. But now we're realizing we have to really focus on cultivating those relationships. And so kudos to your team for really looking at, OK, how about the people who are visiting us? How do we cultivate that relationship and nurture that lead? It's so important. It's not enough just to kind of be there. You have to take initiative. Yeah, indeed. All right, Curtis, it was fantastic chatting with you. Learned a lot. Nice chatting with you as well. Nice chatting. Always great. Always great. So a special thanks to our audience for tuning in for another episode of the Membership IQ. We'll see you next month.