One piece of data that is often over looked from an association’s 990 is when their fiscal year ends. This is a valuable piece of information for sales professionals to know as a few months before the year end, the association will be budgeting for the next year.

Having this data across thousands of associations we can see a preference for a few particular months in the industry.

From the data, we see that around two-thirds of associations end their fiscal year in December, while June comes in second at around 20%.

So December is a good guess, but you’ll probably want to ask a prospect when their year end is and budgeting is done, if you aren’t tracking it already.

With over 9000 associations’ technologies tracked, we can examine what Content Management Platforms (CMS) are in use by associations. WordPress is the obvious leader with over one third of these associations using that as their CMS.

The next largest group would be those organizations using the CMS platform that comes with their AMS. Since AMSs like YourMembership, Wild Apricot and MemberClicks have large numbers of clients, they have large numbers of associations using their CMS platforms. Across them, roughly 75% use the CMS that comes with their AMS.

After that, Drupal has around a 5% share of our associations, and the remainder are split across a number of platforms. Looking at the revenue of the organizations, those with more revenue may have Sitecore, Sitefinity, HubSpot CMS, or Adobe Experience Manager; while those with smaller revenues will typically use the Squarespace, Wix, or GoDaddy CMS.

At the time of this posting, we are tracking over 80 different CMS platforms used by associations. Obviously the CMS needs to work with how you manage your membership, be that one that is integrated with your AMS, comes with your AMS, has plugins to manage your membership, or just has an ecommerce platform.

With over 20,000 validated contacts at associations, one thing we can examine is the email address format used by staff at an association. It is very common for staff members at an association to use different email address formats, particularly VPs and those in the c-suite. However, if you want to guess at someone’s email address, this should give you a good starting point.

Email Format	Percent of Organizations
FLast	58.21%
First	23.41%
First.Last	9.86%
FirstL	3.27%
Last	2.21%
FirstLast	1.35%
LastF	0.60%
F.Last	0.54%
First_Last	0.34%

From our data, it seems that over 80% of association will format their email addresses as either first initial plus last name or just their first name. So if you are trying to guess someone’s email address, you probably want to try one of those.

Smaller associations tend to use just the first name. When they have more staff, the possibility of two people with the same first name becomes more probable, and thus first initial plus last name becomes a better option.

And if you are trying to choose and email format for your association and don’t want people to easily guess your email addresses, you might want to use one of the other formats.

What is the relationship between an association’s revenue and the number of employees? The number I had heard in the past was $150,000 per employee, so if you knew one value, you could guesstimate at the other. Let’s see how close that is with the data we have at AssocIntell.

Looking at 2019 990 data (pre-pandemic), and focusing on associations under $50M in revenue and 1-300 staff (n=5355), we can see a relationship of $250,000 per employee.

You will notice that many associations are under 100 employees and $10M in revenue. Focusing on this range (n=3007) we get $200,000 per employee.

Finally, looking at those under 40 employees and $4M in revenue (n=1342), we also see $200,000 per employee.

Obviously, the average employee at an association isn’t making $200,000 per year. It relates to the salary, benefits, infrastructure, support, and other expenses an average employee requires. Plus, although associations are non-profits, that doesn’t mean their expenses must match revenue and they can’t make a profit, many do.

So if you are trying to guestimate revenue or employees at an association, you can use $200K/person to get a rough value. If you want to hire a person for your association, you now have a rough guess at what it costs (but very rough). And if you need something to talk about at your next industry happy hour… there you go.