Over the past few months, one topic has dominated almost every conversation I've had with not-for-profit leaders: AI.

Boards are asking about it. CEOs are exploring it. Marketing teams are experimenting with it, all searching for an edge. That's understandable. The sector is under real pressure. Australia's charities employ around 1.6 million people — 11% of the national workforce — yet more than half operate with no paid staff. Organisations are expected to do more with less.

AI promises efficiency, faster content, and better engagement, but are we starting the question in the right place?

The first question people ask is how do we use AI? The better question is are we clear about who we are before we ask AI to communicate on our behalf?

AI doesn't create a brand. It accelerates one.

There is a growing assumption that AI can solve marketing challenges on its own. It can't. Before AI writes a single sentence, an organisation needs to understand what the people it serves value, what they experience, and what makes it genuinely different. AI can express that insight at scale. It cannot yet discover it.

That's why I believe human insight has to come before AI. It's where brand actually starts.

Brand isn't your logo

One of the most common misconceptions I see is that brand is a logo or a communications exercise. It isn't. A strong organisational brand connects four things:

• Purpose — why you exist

• Culture — how staff live it, day to day

• Experience — what the people you serve actually experience

• Expression — how you communicate that value

When those four are aligned, brand becomes a strategic asset. When they aren't, marketing starts compensating for a deeper organisational clarity problem. This isn't simply intuition. Decades of service quality research identified the same failure point: the gap between what leadership believes people expect and what they actually experience, and the gap between what an organisation promises externally and what it consistently delivers.

This is a pattern I've seen play out again and again.

Without insight, brand work can get handed to agencies, designers or AI tools relying on outdated research, survey data, or generic assumptions. This approach can produce something polished, fast. But what often comes out the other end is an update that's good enough, without quite achieving the cut-through needed.

With insight, it looks different. I led a brand and communications strategy for an organisation navigating a service transfer and a merger. We used human-centred principles, bringing employees, clients, and communities into the process rather than presenting it to them afterward. That's when brand becomes a driver of growth rather than simply an exercise in communication.

Research into charitable giving points to the same conclusion. People support organisations when what they say aligns with the experience of the people they serve — not simply because the organisation has strong brand recognition. The same holds for membership renewal, resident retention, and long-term partnerships.

When that alignment is missing, it shows up fast: in fundraising, in partnership conversations, and in how confident and connected a team feels, at any level.

AI scales whatever already exists

AI is already finding its way into almost every not-for-profit. Whether it's writing grant applications, drafting newsletters, generating social media content, or helping teams work more efficiently, the question is no longer whether AI will be used. It's what it's actually scaling.

If an organisation has strategic clarity, a well-managed brand, and a shared understanding of who it is, AI can improve productivity and consistency. If those foundations aren't in place, AI simply produces more content, not necessarily more connection.

Brand is becoming a strategic capability

For boards and team leads, this shifts brand from being a communications discussion to a governance discussion.

Most of the conversations I'm having aren't really about marketing. They're about trust. How do we attract and keep the residents, members, clients, or donors who stay. How do we recruit good people without the salaries of commercial counterparts. How do we build partnerships that hold up under scrutiny. How do we demonstrate impact in a way people actually believe.

The answer lies in treating brand as a strategic asset, not a communications line item. It means putting human insight at the centre of strategic decision-making and testing it properly: going directly to residents, families, frontline employees, and partners, and checking what they actually experience against what's assumed. It doesn't need to be a major undertaking, but it needs to be honest and it usually needs outside eyes. That's the investment that makes every other investment work harder, marketing, fundraising, and AI included.

The work that can't be outsourced

Perhaps the right question for not-for-profit teams isn't how quickly they can adopt AI. It might be whether they've done the work to make sure AI reflects the organisation they actually want to be. AI can help you communicate at scale. It can't tell you who you are. That remains human work — and human-centred leadership.

I work with not-for-profit boards, leaders, and teams to build that clarity before they invest in branding, marketing, communications, or AI. Whether it's a broader strategic reset or preparing for the next campaign, I'd welcome the conversation. Book a discovery call, or pass this on to someone wrestling with the same question.

Sources

• Australian Charities Report, 12th Edition, ACNC — 2026

• Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1985). A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research. Journal of Marketing, 49(4), 41–50. Overview

• Reflections on brand image: the influence of donor ideal and perceived charity brand congruence on charitable giving, Frontiers in Communication — 2025

• In Pursuit of Effective Charity Advertising: Investigating the Branding and Messaging Execution Tactics Used by Charity Marketers — 2020, analysis of advertising collateral from 40 Australian charities

The brands your members love know things about them that many organisations don’t. Not just demographic segments or engagement metrics – but what people value, what builds trust, what signals relevance, and what makes them feel like they belong.

That difference is not about becoming more commercial or behaving like consumer brands. It is about something more fundamental: a disciplined capability to understand human motivation and design around it.

And in a context where expectations of authenticity, relevance, and belonging are rising – that capability is becoming central to the future of membership organisations.

The shifting expectations of younger professionals

Across multiple workforce and consumer behaviour studies, a consistent pattern is emerging among younger audiences (particularly Gen Z and younger millennials):

• Authenticity is expected, not rewarded

• Belonging is a primary driver of engagement and loyalty

• Values alignment strongly influences participation and retention

• Institutional or overly generic messaging is quickly filtered out as irrelevant

Research from organisations such as McKinsey and Deloitte has repeatedly shown that younger professionals are more likely to disengage from organisations they perceive as impersonal or inauthentic, and more likely to gravitate toward communities where they feel recognised, represented, and understood.

Importantly, this does not mean they expect entertainment or “marketing polish.” It means they expect clarity, honesty, and relevance to their lived experience.

For professional associations, this matters deeply. Membership has always been about more than services or credentials – it is about identity, belonging, and professional self-concept.

The pattern in professional associations

In conversations with marketing and communications leaders across professional associations, a consistent set of constraints emerges:

• Small and overstretched teams

• Budget pressure limiting long-term investment

• Communications designed for an “average member” that no longer exists

• Limited capacity for research, insight, or journey design

• Fragmented ownership of brand, communications, and member experience

The 2025 Associations Forum Membership and Services Survey reinforces this reality. Among 191 Australian associations:

• The median association operates with just five full-time staff

• Professional associations have seen significant reductions in staffing capacity

• 69.1% cite budget constraints as the primary reason members do not renew

But the most telling reasons sit beneath the surface: retirement and lack of perceived value.

Research from the Marketing General Incorporated 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report found that only 11% of associations describe their value proposition as “very compelling,” highlighting a persistent challenge across the sector in clearly articulating member value.

When members don’t see value, it is rarely because value doesn’t exist. It is because it is not clearly experienced, understood, or felt.

That is not only a communications issue. It is a design and organisational capability issue.

What stronger organisations do differently

The organisations that consistently maintain strong engagement do not start with messaging. They start with understanding.

Not assumptions – but structured insight into:

• what members are trying to achieve at different life and career stages

• what drives identity, confidence, and professional pride

• what barriers prevent engagement

• what moments matter most across the member lifecycle

• what “value” actually means in practice, not theory

From there, they align four interconnected capabilities:

• Offering design – what is actually provided and why

• Experience design – how value is experienced over time

• Communications and messaging – how value is expressed and reinforced

• Organisational alignment – how teams, decisions, and investment support the above

This is not about adopting consumer marketing tactics.

It is about building member understanding as a core organisational capability, rather than treating it as a campaign activity.

Thinking in journeys, not transactions

Many associations still operate as if membership is a linear process: join → renew → repeat.

But member engagement is rarely linear.

A prospective member might:

• first encounter a profession at university

• engage years later through a webinar or article

• download a resource during a career transition

• interact intermittently over time

• only later convert when timing and need align

Yet communications and investment are often concentrated at the point of conversion, rather than across the long period where perception and relevance are actually formed.

The organisations improving engagement are not simply communicating more. They are designing coherent member journeys informed by real insight into behaviour, motivation, and context.

What good looks like

Two Australian organisations demonstrate how insight-led thinking can strengthen relevance and trust in different but connected ways.

NAATI launched We All Deserve to Be Understood, developed with SBS CulturalConnect. The campaign was grounded in a simple but powerful human insight: being understood is not a technical need – it is a deeply human one, often in high-stakes environments such as healthcare, education, and community services.

Rather than leading with certification or institutional positioning, NAATI reframed its value through lived experience. The campaign focused on what is at stake when communication fails, and what becomes possible when it succeeds. Delivered across multiple languages and communities, it reached both end users and the broader public, reinforcing the importance of certified interpreters and translators.

Importantly, this was not awareness for awareness’ sake. It was a strategic use of brand and insight to shape public understanding – strengthening demand for certified professionals and, in turn, increasing the perceived value and relevance of NAATI accreditation.

In this way, brand becomes more than communication. It becomes a mechanism for strengthening the legitimacy and future of an entire profession.

As NAATI Strategic Engagement Manager Lee Yacoumis noted: “This campaign marks a turning point in how we articulate the purpose and public value of NAATI certification.”

Read more

A second example is Chartered Accountants ANZ’s Make Epic Things Happen platform, developed from research into how younger audiences perceive accounting, which found that students are more motivated by their passions and interests than by predefined career pathways. Rather than describing the profession in technical terms, the campaign uses this insight to reposition accounting around ambition, impact, and personal purpose – framing professional identity in a way that aligns with how Gen Z and emerging professionals think about work and contribution.

Read more

Why this is hard for associations

None of this is straightforward.

Most associations are operating with:

• constrained budgets

• lean and multi-functional teams

• growing service demands

• legacy systems and structures

• competing expectations across member cohorts

In that environment, investment in research, brand clarity, and experience design is often deprioritised in favour of immediate operational needs.

But the organisations making progress are not necessarily better resourced.

They are more deliberate about how they use limited capacity:

• investing in understanding before communicating

• designing experiences rather than producing content in isolation

• aligning internal teams around member value rather than functional silos

This is where the real shift sits—not in adopting external marketing models, but in building internal capability around insight, experience design, and organisational alignment.

The opportunity

If you lead marketing or communications in a professional association, the challenge is not a lack of value.

It is ensuring that value is understood, experienced, and reinforced in a way that reflects how members actually think and behave today.

That requires three connected shifts:

• From assumptions → to structured member insight

• From disconnected activity → to designed member journeys

• From siloed messaging → to aligned organisational capability across brand, communications, and experience

When these elements come together, members do not just understand value intellectually – they experience it consistently over time.

And that is what drives relevance, retention, and advocacy.

Links: 

https://associations.net.au/news/media-releases/association-membership-and-services-survey-2025-findings-released.html

https://www.associationsnow.com/2025/06/report-associations-anxious-to-preserve-membership-growth/

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/true-gen-generation-z-and-its-implications-for-companies

https://www.deloitte.com/au/en/issues/work/genz-millennial-survey.html