Logos reinforce marketing messages – they aren’t messages by themselves.

A sponsor once laughed when I offered to print his logo on 200,000 brochures. He said I could offer 2 million and it wouldn’t matter. But he grabbed the 200,000 offer when it was combined with other, more valuable, entitlements.

You are correct, though, that aside from advertising, an associaton might also find something that it could do for one audience ,outside its core customer base, that that audience is willing to pay a lot for (some sort of software program, data, or knowledge, like you suggest) — and then live off that revenue in order to give away everything else to your members for free.

Ultimately, I don’t think you and I are saying very different things. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with finding alternative revenue streams — whether it’s the old-school kind of advertising that you seem to have in mind when the word is used, other innovative sponsorship programs, or selling something to someone who is outside your core constituency. All may be very valid ancillary revenue streams to pursue.

The problem comes when this sort of aim moves from ancillary to focal. It changes who the customer is. It changes where you focus your energies. It makes you, for example, stop and think before opposing a policy position taken by someone who underwrites your operation.

And it makes me wonder, if nobody is willing to pay for whatever it is you’re doing, how valuable can it be? How sustainable can an association’s mission be if it can’t figure out how to get the people whose mission it is to pay for it?

Not all of the additional is advertising, either, as your comment suggests. In answering the question “What would Google Do?”, selling pay per click is only one possibility.

The Google lessons for associations include, I think, capitalizing on what you have in abundance (data? specialized knowledge? membership numbers?), developing products that are flexible enough to allow for customization by the users and getting out of the way of how they use them, and looking at a variety of alternatives to funding by direct pay per use.

I don’t think there’s anything new here to association managers. These concepts aren’t based on huge numbers of people, either: in fact, they stand up well in organizations of extremely limited resources. And ‘free’ doesn’t mean without quality: Google’s business products wouldn’t attract anybody if there wasn’t quality involved. Nor would Open Office, Wikipedia, or any open source or creative commons idea.

Advertising can make some nice ancillary revenues for most associations, but I believe it to be a terrible business model in and of itself, for a lot of reasons that I have written about before. Every morning (especially over the last year) I get up and thank god that I’m in the business of serving members and customers by selling them things they value, and NOT in the business of selling my members’ eyeballs to someone else.

If what you offer is of general interest to a huge number of people, like Google, then advertising is a business model worth exploring. If what you offer is of specific interest to a specialized group of people, like most associations, then advertising is a nice little ancillary stream but it ain’t gonna get you all that far (and is too unstable to be relied upon — as I think we’ve all plainly learned over the last couple of years).

Free is not, of course, free. It is a business model which recognizes that there are better returns on investments than charging the consumer directly. Google knows this and makes considerable revenue in ways that are invisible to the search engine user and the g-mail subscriber. It’s a lesson that membership associations, particularly, need to explore.

And psst, here’s a secret: We’re not necessarily starting an association soap opera, but our plan for 2010 is to set all of the case studies at the same fictional association so we can actually follow an organization as it changes over time. I’m working to develop the staff/cast of characters now. Maybe one of them will have an evil twin … or amnesia …