12/17/2018

How’s Your Pricing Strategy?

Success in some areas can lead to a false sense of satisfaction

No money, no mission, the old line in nonprofitdom goes. Alas, that line contains no guidance on how, exactly, to earn that money. And, more precisely, how to price what you’re selling.

But if you’re struggling with that issue, you’re not alone. As I was working on my feature for the latest issue of Associations Now on pricing strategy, it quickly became clear that there are few hard and set rules about how to think about pricing. Except, perhaps, that you should be more confident about experimenting with pricing than you perhaps have been.

There are two reasons for that. One is that the lack of a coherent pricing strategy risks alienating members. Jay Younger, FASAE, president and CEO of McKinley Advisors, lamented the way that associations often handle pricing at the department level, rather than holistically. It creates “a dynamic in which your customer doesn’t really know what to expect,” he says. “And over time it lends itself to an opportunity for decreased satisfaction from your customer base or your member base, because it becomes apparent that the left hand and the right hand don’t know what they’re doing.” So thinking about the cost and value proposition of membership, meetings, publications, and other products and services is an opportunity to more sensibly price them.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.