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33% of members rate NACMA a 7 or 8
Share of members who called themselves satisfied or very satisfied, averaged across the three programming pillars.
25 members are still undecided
Large enough to cut the results by tenure, career goal, gender, and age with confidence.
Members love NACMA. Our Net Promoter Score is 51, with 59.0% saying they would strongly recommend us and only 8.1% giving a low score.
Institutional support is strong. 93.3% of members say their employer pays for their membership.
The biggest value drivers are the professional network and convention access. Opportunity to broaden professional network is rated critical or very important by 91.0% of members.
Only 57.0% of members know about the Online Library Tools. That is a clear awareness gap we can close.
Members rated how likely they are to recommend NACMA membership to a colleague, on a scale from 0 to 10.
How satisfied members are with NACMA's tools and training in each pillar, plus how relevant each pillar feels to their day-to-day role. Lower average rank means more relevant.
Benefits ranked by the share of members who rated them critical or very important.
Topics members want to see in future programming, ranked by critical or very important ratings.
76 members shared why they have not participated. See Member comments.
How members feel about companies that support social justice initiatives.
Why: About 1 in 3 first-year members would recommend NACMA. Among 11-plus year members it's closer to 3 in 4. Only 13% of first-year members even know the Online Library exists — most of what they pay for, they never see.
Do: Pilot a 90-day welcome sequence
Why: The 4-5 year group would recommend NACMA less often than any other tenure group.
Do: Ship a “Coordinator to Director” track: promotion-readiness content, revenue deep-dives, and a facilitated peer cohort.
Why: 89 of 207 members don't know the Library exists. The content is already built. The distribution isn't.
Do: Run a 30-day awareness push: a pinned Slack post, one featured asset per Gameplan email, and a one-slide callout at the next Convention.
About half of members have never heard of the Online Library, even though it holds the brand guides, job descriptions, and operating documents they routinely ask for.
Run a 30-day awareness push. Pin a Slack post, feature one Library asset in each Gameplan email, and give it a one-slide callout at the next Convention general session.
The written comments on Slack and the reasons members skipped mentorship are the richest data in the survey. Read together, they name specific fixes: members want an on-ramp into Slack, and they want mentorship to respect their time and clean up past bad pairings.
For Slack, give new members a guided first week and one channel to start in. For mentorship, address the time cost and the awareness gap first, then rebuild trust with members who had a bad pairing before asking them back.
Networking and the Convention dominate what members care about. The magazine and other print-era products sit well below.
For each low-ranked benefit, decide: relaunch in a new format, retire it cleanly, or fold it into a stronger channel.
Members are satisfied with each of the three programming pillars, but the share who call themselves very satisfied never gets above 22.9%.
Pick one standout upgrade per pillar. Then go straight to the members who rated NACMA a 7 or 8 and ask what would move them to a 9.
Members told us clearly what they want more of: leadership, career growth, sales and fundraising, and networking. DEI and mental health still matter to them, but not as headline topics.
Anchor the 2027 development calendar around the top four. Keep DEI and mental health on the schedule as supporting tracks, not marquee sessions.
The four findings below only show up when we split responses by tenure or career goal.
Recommend rate climbs with tenure — 41 in year one, 46 at 2-3 years, a dip to 36 at 4-5 years, then 77 for members with 11-plus years. Library awareness follows the same shape: only 13% of first-year members know the Library exists, versus 85% of veterans. New members like NACMA. They just haven't found most of what they're paying for yet.
Build a deliberate 90-day onboarding: a board welcome, a one-page tour of the Online Library, a warm introduction into Slack, and an invitation to be matched with a mentor. Track this cohort in next year's survey.
The 4-5 year cohort scores lower on recommend than any other tenure group, including first-years. This is the stretch when marketing professionals push for the next title — coordinator to assistant director, assistant to associate — and current programming isn't built for that jump. They need different content than a first-year, and they aren't getting it.
Design a mid-career track: promotion-readiness content, revenue-generation deep-dives, and a small facilitated peer cohort.
We tested whether satisfaction with one pillar predicts recommend rate more than the others. It doesn't. Fan Development leads at 0.53, but Revenue (0.51) and Brand (0.50) are effectively tied. Improving any pillar lifts the score about the same, so the choice of where to invest should come down to which fixes are cheapest and most overdue.
End the internal debate about which pillar drives loyalty. Sequence improvements by cost and by how far each pillar sits below member expectations today. Re-check the correlation next cycle after we standardize the response scales.
Leadership development is universal — 83 to 87% of members in every top career-goal group rate it highly. Everything else splits cleanly. Associate ADs strongly want career-management content (90% vs 74% for sitting ADs). Senior Associate ADs are hungry for sales and fundraising (79%). A single one-size calendar under-serves both groups.
Segment the 2027 development calendar by career stage. Aspiring ADs get leadership-heavy content, Associate ADs get a promotion-readiness track, and Senior Associate ADs get revenue and campaign playbooks. Same speakers, different framing.
Member comments