A defined population of firms who will fill in a survey is the rarest thing in B2B, and you have one. It is a source of membership leads that costs you nothing in media spend, and it makes you the natural owner of your sector’s benchmark, which is the one question your members cannot answer from their own books and the one no publisher can build without your list.
Not open yet. Ours scores your own recruitment and renewal revenue rather than your sector, and it takes about four minutes.
Why this one
Not because associations are the biggest buyers in the study. They are not, and they rank last of the 25 segments. Because the benchmark is the only one of these that gets stronger every year it runs.
2.8
13 and 9
“How do we compare to firms like us?” is the single most valuable question a scored instrument can answer, and it is the one your members ask each other at your own events because there is nowhere else to ask it.
A member who learns their answer has just been told what their subscription is for. That is your renewal revenue, and it stops being an argument.
What we would build
Members answer once a year on the numbers they already manage. Each one receives a personalised position against a real peer cohort, and non-members see enough of the picture to want inside it.
The metrics are agreed with you and with a few members who will argue about them, not lifted from a template. Fees, utilisation, headcount, retention, margin, whatever your sector actually runs on. Then they stay fixed, because a question that changes wording between editions quietly destroys the series it was building.
Percentile position, not authored bands. The comparison is to real firms who answered, which is the difference between a benchmark and a personality test with a graph on it. It is also why a member forwards it rather than deleting it, and forwarding is where your renewal revenue is actually decided.
Why it compounds
Every other instrument on this site is as good on the day it launches as it will ever be. This one is the exception, and the discipline it needs is boring rather than difficult.
You agree the metrics with a handful of members who will tell you the truth, and run it. The cohort is thin, the comparison is honest about being thin, and members still get something they have never had.
The hardest year. Also the only one that needs nerve.
Not a word of it changes, which is the whole discipline. Now there is a direction of travel as well as a position, and “up or down on last year” is the line that gets quoted back to you.
Change one word here and you lose the series.
The cohort is deep enough to cut by size, region and specialism, so a member stops being compared to the sector and starts being compared to firms genuinely like them. That is the version people pay to be inside.
Nobody can replicate this without your list.
Three editions in, the dataset is the association’s most valuable property, the hardest thing in your sector to replicate, and the cheapest source of new-member leads you will ever have. Nobody can build it without the population you already have.
What comes back
The member wants their position. The non-member wants to know what they are missing. You want the renewal line to stop being an argument.
The member
The non-member
You
The recruitment half
A non-member who has read the sector picture and been told their own position is withheld has just had the clearest possible account of what membership is worth.
Where it runs
The renewal cycle, your events and member referral are three distribution channels most organisations buy traffic to replace, and they cost you nothing in media spend.
Packages
The first edition built and live, the funnel around it, or the programme that runs the series year after year and keeps it stable.
Associations run on a subscription line and a small team, and our own research flags willingness to pay as the real risk in this segment. So the honest framing is this: the version worth building is the one that pays for itself in renewal revenue and new members, and if the first edition cannot be justified on those two lines, it is not the right year to start.
Prices are not published yet because they are not final. When they are, they go on the pricing page as numbers.
Questions
Your turn
Ours scores the four things that decide whether the attention you already have turns into members, renewals and revenue, and hands back a number, a band and a report. It is the same instrument your members would meet, aimed at you.
Not running yet. The report is yours whatever the score says.