President’s Column: Energizing Tomorrow: Rethinking Membership

If you read 2025 President Olivier Houzé’s February 2025 JPT column or heard him speak in the past year, you likely saw his statistics on the decrease in younger professionals joining SPE or continuing their membership. Such is obviously a concern for a variety of reasons as it goes to the long-term viability of SPE as a membership-based society. I’m not sure if the following is good or bad, but it turns out that SPE is not alone in this situation. Many nonprofit professional membership associations are reporting decreases in overall membership numbers, especially in the Millennial (born 1981–1996) and Gen Z (born 1997–2012) age groups. In fact, a recent study indicated that 28% of associations reported a decrease in membership in 2025 (actually down from a 47% decrease in 2021), and while the Millennial and Gen Z generations account for 58% of the world’s overall workforce, on average 67% of an association’s membership is comprised of members over the age of 45. This is what I mean by not being sure whether this is good news or bad news. The bad news is that associations, including SPE, are seeing declines in membership and an aging member base. The good news is that we’re not alone in this situation, so it’s not necessarily a reflection of something SPE is or isn’t doing. When I first began my incoming president’s year, I attended some training with Simon Seaton, SPE’s CEO/EVP, designed for association leadership and specifically geared toward the chief staff executive (Simon) and the chief elected officer (me) to get to know each other and align on how such partnerships can work most effectively for the good of the organization. The training was offered through the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which is comprised of professionals and organizations involved in association management. In essence, an association for associations like SPE. Not only does ASAE offer training such as what Simon and I attended, but the organization also keeps its pulse on the issues its members are dealing with—and declining membership is a major, ongoing discussion point that ASAE and similar groups are seeing across the board. As I was drafting this column, I received the most updated SPE professional membership numbers presented in Table 1. We ended last year (31 December 2024) with a total membership of 67,243 professional members, so overall we are down around 10% in membership this year to date. Not only is this overall decrease a concern, but so is the pipeline feeding into that overall membership number from the young professional (YP) standpoint. And while SPE breaks things down a bit differently from an age standpoint compared to my reference points above, we are still in the general trends mentioned—decreasing overall membership and low percentages in the younger age groups. Please note that I am not arguing that membership should go up. We might be at the right number for the current state of the world; however, we still need a pipeline feeding the future.