Two Models of Member Value
Making the Shift from Passive Consumption to Deep and Long Lasting Contribution
Summary
Most associations offer benefits in exchange for dues or time (called value-in-exchange). This age-old practice works, but is no longer sufficient to meet rapidly changing member needs.
This article is about the new way: building and providing value-in-use which has the potential to restructure how we design content, deliver value, and create community. The concept comes from marketing theorists Christian Grönroos, Stephen Vargo, and Robert Lusch. The implications for associations are profound and largely untapped.
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Value-in-Exchange vs. Value-in-Use
“Value really emerges for customers when goods and services do something for them. Before this happens, only potential value exists.”
Christian Grönroos
Most associations have a traditional concept of value: we identify, produce, and package something of value and deliver it to members in exchange for money, dues, or time. The value is embedded in the product. It exists before the member arrives and the transaction is made. This is the logic of the conference brochure, online course catalog, or annual membership invoice. We produce content and deliver; the member receives. Transaction complete and value delivered.
The problem, as Christian Grönroos observes, is that this model contains a fundamental misunderstanding: value doesn’t live in the product. It only emerges when the product is used. A drill sitting in a box creates no value; neither does a journal article that goes unread, a conference session that prompts no new action, or a certification program someone completes but never applies. The value-in-exchange model has nothing to do with engaged use.
This is the key structural reason why we struggle with member engagement, renewal conversations, and the persistent question: Why isn’t anyone showing up? We’ve been designing for exchange and members conclude the exchange isn’t worth it.
Value-in-use shifts the orientation. Before a member engages, we’ve only offered potential value. Actual value is co-created when the member integrates our resources (content, network, community, guidance) with their knowledge, relationships, and professional goals. This means we’re not a vending machine for benefits; we become a resource integrator with the member driving long-term value.
In a value-in-use model, actors cannot deliver value, they can only participate in creating it. The most indispensable associations have figured this out, even if they couldn’t name the theory. They have stopped trying to produce value in advance and started designing conditions under which value gets continuously co-created.
The trigger? Value is determined by the beneficiary. That means each member’s experience of our community is shaped by their professional context, career stage, relationships, and aspirations. The same event can be transformational for one person and irrelevant to another because value doesn’t transfer, it emerges differently for each person.
This is why my fifty-year journey model becomes the strategic prerequisite for value-in-use thinking. If value only emerges in context, we have to understand the context. We have to know where members are in their career, what problems are live for them, what relationships they need, and what kind of growth they’re ready for. Without that knowledge, we are still designing for exchange: packaging content and hoping it lands.
The Five Principles
“Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, all let customers and collaborators add to the value co-creation process. The result is a system in which all actors evolve together.”
Oana-Maria Pop
I write frequently about community, compound value, and what it takes to become an indispensable association. Value-in-use builds on these ideas; each principle maps directly to the deeper model.
Contribution. If value only emerges through use, then consumption alone is inherently limiting. A member who only consumes (reads, watches, attends without engaging) captures only a fraction of the value available to them. A member who contributes (shares expertise, mentors a peer, challenges a working group’s assumptions) integrates their resources with the community’s resources. That integration is where value lives. The shift from consumer to contributor is both a community norm and the mechanism of value creation itself.
Co-creation. Value is co-created by multiple actors, always including the beneficiary. We cannot do it alone and neither can our members. When a community of engineers collaborates on an emerging standards problem, the value that emerges belongs to no single party. It was created together and it would not exist without the integration. This is why co-design, participatory programming, and member-led problem-solving transcend engagement to build the architecture through which real value is built.
Community design. In value-in-use terms, what we call community is really a service system: a configuration of people, capabilities, and resources that interact to create mutual value. The design question is not “What content should we produce?” but “What conditions enable members to integrate resources in ways that increase their well-being and capability?” This is the ecosystem model at its deepest level. A well-designed community creates compound value over time because each interaction creates new resources (relationships, knowledge, reputation, trust) that become inputs into future interactions. As fallen leaves become soil nutrients, member expertise becomes community infrastructure.
Business model. Value-in-use liberates because it breaks the old model of value as transacted, exchanged, and consumed. Price reflects willingness to pay for discrete value. In the new model, value is ongoing, relational, and context-dependent which means the business model can be too. Subscriptions, cohort memberships, peer-learning communities, and tiered contribution models become coherent when we stop pricing for discrete value and start focusing on ongoing relationships. Charging the same for access to a PDF library and for access to a curated, high-engagement professional community uses the wrong model. New business models are structural responses to an accurate theory of where value lives.
Energy + belonging. This is where value-in-use becomes most alive. Because value is experienced uniquely by each member in their context, the highest-value thing we can offer is a context for experiencing belonging to something larger than oneself. In the circular member journey model, belonging is structural. Members who feel needed and valued as contributors develop meaningful membership. They stop asking what we can do for them and start asking how they can help the community thrive. This becomes the natural outcome of a community where value-in-use has taken hold: where each member’s contribution becomes a resource that other members integrate into their own value-creation process.
The old system is the dues invoice that shows up without any account of what was created. It is the conference agenda designed for passive consumption. It is the annual survey that asks “How satisfied were you?” rather than “What did you accomplish with what you found here?” We sense the old model is incomplete, but don’t have the language to say why. Here it is: the old model mistakes potential value for actual value. It mistakes the exchange for the creation. Until we replace that mental model with the board, staff, and volunteers, we will keep building elaborate vending machines and wondering why members are disengaged.
What This Demands of Us
“Anything that just costs money is cheap”
John Steinbeck
The shift from value-in-exchange to value-in-use is a redesign of our core operating model.
It demands that we know our members deeply enough to understand their context (more than demographics): their career stage, active challenges, current relationships, and the form of growth they’re ready for. It demands that we design for ongoing, iterative engagement rather than episodic consumption. It demands that we think of our role less as content producer and more as community architect and resource integrator.
It also demands that we stop measuring success at the point of exchange. Registrations, revenue, and renewal rates are lagging indicators of the old model. The leading indicators of value-in-use are harder to capture but more revealing: Are members contributing as well as consuming? Are relationships forming and deepening across modalities? Are the problems that brought people into your community getting solved? Is the community getting more capable and more valuable as it grows?
The best content library or largest conference hall are legacy metrics. Leading associations have figured out how to design communities where value is continuously co-created, where the act of participating makes you more valuable, makes the community more valuable, and makes the association itself indispensable in ways that no catalog of benefits ever could.
A garden does not produce value when you plant seeds. It produces value when the seeds grow, when the roots deepen, when the ecosystem becomes self-sustaining. The gardener’s job is not to manufacture flowers. It is to design conditions in which things grow. That is our job. Design for use, not for exchange.
I lead the product community; we are a learning community because we believe great relationships help us create the value our members want. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us