If you ask someone to serve, they will appreciate it and become even more loyal to you. This is something that practically every good university fund raising establishment understands. Membership associations need to understand this, too.

We will have bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality.

Ask them what three things would make them come to an association meeting. And then think creatively about expanding or developing the things at the top of the list, and about integrating them with core offerings at the meeting.

The number of targets is proliferating faster than the increase in the rate of joining all across the nonprofit economy. I'm convinced that if we look at the membership rolls of the associations that are complaining about membership, they're getting a lot of people rotating off and that's absolutely a function of competition.

It seemed to me that professional associations might be a substitute for community associations in people's lives, and that is, in fact, what I found. Younger people are working harder, are less involved in their neighborhoods, and are more likely to be involved in workplace communities, most notably professional and trade associations.

There's a general intuition around the nonprofit world these days that younger generations are less likely to join. But I have found in my research that that's quite wrong.