Questions association leaders actually ask 

Younger professionals are not rejecting community. They are rejecting formats built for someone else. Most associations still run on a model designed decades ago: annual dues, an annual meeting, committees that take years to join. Gen Z and Millennial professionals look at that and cannot see themselves in it. They make up just 36% of professional association memberships today. (MGI, 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report.) By 2030, they will be 74% of the global workforce (Deloitte, 2025). The gap is not a marketing problem. It is a design problem.

It is the model Kingen Kush Solutions uses to help associations work on today and tomorrow at the same time. Horizon 1 is resilience now: steadying membership, revenue, and engagement under today's pressures. Horizon 2 is relevance by 2030: redesigning how the association welcomes, engages, and keeps the generation that will soon be most of the workforce. Associations that only work on Horizon 1 stay busy but fall behind. Associations that only dream about Horizon 2 do not survive long enough to get there. The framework keeps both moving.

Start by finding out where you actually stand. Most leadership teams have a feeling about their generational readiness but no shared picture of it. The free Generational Readiness Scorecard takes about eight minutes and gives you that picture. From there, the work is practical: ask who is not in the room at your events and in your membership, pick one place to reach them, run a pilot, and train your team to keep it going. You do not need a five-year transformation plan. You need a first move that actually happens.

A hybrid pilot is a small, well-designed test that opens one of your events or programs to people who were never going to travel to it. It is not about copying the in-person experience onto a screen. It is about reaching the members you do not have yet: younger professionals, people in other regions, people whose employers cut the travel budget. A pilot is small enough to be safe and real enough to teach you what works. Jennifer works alongside your team to design it, run it, and learn from it, then trains your team to own it.

Association executive teams: CEOs, Executive Directors, Chief Membership Officers, and senior leadership groups. The best-fit organizations are feeling pressure on two fronts at once: managing today's instability while sensing the generational transition is a bigger threat than they have a plan for. KKS is not an event management company and does not work primarily with event planners or technology vendors.

KKS operates in both the United States and New Zealand. Jennifer spent 25+ years inside and working with US associations, including as a vice president at PCMA, and now also works with associations across New Zealand and Australasia. For US clients, the time zone difference means work delivered overnight. For Australasian associations, it means a strategist with global association experience in your own region.

Every engagement starts with a conversation, not an RFP. From there it might be a strategic debrief, a defined project like a generational readiness assessment, an ongoing advisory retainer, or a keynote or workshop for your board or conference. All of it points at the same outcome: an association that is resilient today and built for the workforce arriving by 2030. A strategy that never gets used is just a document, so every engagement ends with your team trained and owning the work.

Two ways. Take the free Generational Readiness Scorecard to see where you stand. Or just reach out and tell us what you are seeing. Let's talk.