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At the Trade Association Forum’s Best Practice Exchange (BPEx), Cantarus CEO Lee Adams explored the hidden cost of disconnected member journeys. His central point was that every system can be working while the overall member experience still fails. This article draws on his presentation to examine how those gaps affect trust, member value and renewal, and where organisations can begin addressing them. Cantarus is a proud sponsor of TAF and the digital partner behind its refreshed brand, website and online community.
Individuals may move between a website, CRM, events platform, learning system, online community, email communications, mobile app and other services. Internally, these may be treated as separate channels, managed by different teams and supported by different budgets.
The individual experiences them as one relationship with one organisation.
Consider the journey surrounding an in-person event. Someone may discover it through an email, visit the website to learn more, sign in through a member portal and complete a payment. They then attend in person and return online to access the slides or continue the conversation. Technology supports the online stages and underpins much of the offline experience too.
Members are central to this, but they are not the only people forming that impression. Membership organisations also engage politicians, policymakers, partners, researchers, sector influencers, journalists, academics and members of the public. These audiences are unlikely to know who owns each channel or which system supports it. They simply notice whether the experience feels relevant, consistent and easy to navigate.
The question is therefore not simply whether each platform works. It is whether the complete journey helps people access value, feel understood and trust the organisation behind it.
Disconnected journeys do not always appear as obvious technical failures. The website loads, the CRM stores records and the events platform processes bookings. Viewed separately, every component may appear to be doing its job.
The problems become visible when those components form part of the same journey. A member may face repeated logins, enter information the organisation already holds or manage different profiles across separate services. The design may change between platforms, while communications promote irrelevant opportunities.
Each instance may seem relatively minor. Together, they create an experience that feels fragmented and impersonal. The individual can see the joins between systems and is required to work harder than necessary to receive value. Generic content and inappropriate recommendations can also leave people feeling that the organisation does not understand their role, interests or needs, making an emotional connection harder to build.
In more serious cases, the consequences can be deeply damaging. Organisations have continued sending marketing communications to people after being informed of their death. The systems may be doing what they are supposed to do in isolation, but not every system knows to stop.
The immediate cost may be an abandoned transaction or additional support request. Over time, however, high-friction experiences can contribute to lower brand trust, fewer referrals and increased churn. They also make growth more difficult. Attracting new members has limited impact if existing members continue to leave or remain unconvinced that the relationship delivers enough value.
This is where emotional connection becomes important. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that, on a lifetime-value basis, emotionally connected customers were more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. They were also more likely to buy, engage with communications, follow advice and recommend the brand.
Although the research focused on customers, its implications are highly relevant to membership. A strong emotional connection can help membership feel essential when budgets tighten, rather than becoming one of the first costs to be dropped.
An organisation may offer extensive benefits, valuable resources and high-quality services. But members must know those benefits exist and be able to access them easily. From their perspective, value they cannot reach may as well not exist.
This distinction also matters when measuring engagement. Email open rates, website visits and other activity metrics show that an interaction took place, but they do not confirm that the member received anything valuable from it. An email can be opened without its content being relevant, while a page visit can end without the person finding what they need.
The most important questions are harder to answer: do members feel understood, connected to a shared purpose and confident that the organisation is essential?
Trade associations whose members are organisations have just as much reason to prioritise member experience. Their relationships depend on the people within those organisations who decide whether to join, participate and renew. One person may authorise the annual invoice, but colleagues across different roles need to recognise and experience the value of membership if they are to advocate for keeping it.
Relying on one or two contacts creates a risk. People leave, change roles or lose control of the relevant budget. Building connections with several people across a member organisation creates broader awareness of the value available and a stronger group of internal advocates for renewal.
Few organisations deliberately design a fragmented member experience. Disconnected journeys usually emerge over time as systems, teams and priorities change.
A new platform may be introduced to solve a particular problem. One department may improve the channel it owns while another works within a separate budget. Processes may be adapted to meet an immediate need, and new services may be added without reconsidering how the complete journey fits together.
Individually sensible decisions can collectively create a fragmented member journey.
Different teams may also have different priorities and measures of success. One stage might deliver an excellent experience, only for the next to feel outdated or difficult. Fragmented data can also leave the organisation without a single view of each person and their interactions across its services.
A new platform may be necessary, but existing technology may already be capable of delivering what the organisation needs. Replacing it without first understanding the problem risks reproducing the same issues in a different system. The cost extends beyond the replacement itself: unresolved problems can continue to limit recruitment, retention and revenue while the organisation invests time and money in technology.
The causes may sit within people, processes, data, capability or ownership. Organisations also need to examine whether their value proposition is clear and whether the experience helps people discover and use what membership offers. Before deciding what technology is needed, leaders should establish what must change to deliver value through a connected member experience.
During the BPEx presentation, only two organisations in the room indicated that they had a senior individual responsible for member experience. Delivering a consistent end-to-end journey becomes extremely difficult when nobody has responsibility across the teams, systems and budgets involved.
That responsibility needs sufficient seniority, authority and budget to coordinate improvements across departments and resolve competing priorities. Decisions should be informed by data and evidence from online, offline and in-person interactions. Without clear ownership, problems can persist between teams because nobody has responsibility for improving the complete journey.
Addressing the complete member experience can feel daunting, but organisations do not need to redesign every journey at once. A practical starting point is to choose one important journey, such as joining, renewing, registering for an event or accessing professional development.
Then:
Looking at one journey from the individual’s perspective often reveals problems that remain invisible when each team focuses only on its own responsibilities. It also creates an opportunity to show that improving experience can reduce friction, strengthen value and deliver measurable organisational benefits.
Members and stakeholders experience one organisation. Creating journeys that feel equally connected requires the organisation to view them in the same way.
We help membership organisations examine the complete experience across technology, data, processes and individual touchpoints. Whether reviewing an existing digital ecosystem or planning future investment, the right starting point is understanding where friction is hiding value and which improvements will make the greatest difference.