At the ASAE Revenue Summit this June, I had the chance to sit down with two association leaders I admire and ask a question I think every association should be wrestling with. What happens when you stop treating the certification exam as the destination, and start building for the whole professional journey?
The framework we call the Learning Revenue Ladder gave us a shared starting point, but the real value came from Rachael DeLeon and Reno Deschaine, who brought years of doing the work. Rachael is Executive Director of AFCPE, the organization behind the AFC certification in financial counseling. Reno is CEO of CFRE International and has spent more than fifteen years building credentialing programs across the association world. Together, we dug into some questions that matter for any association building its learning portfolio.
Most of the Journey Is Going Unserved
Most associations have figured out two moments well. The first is the beginning, when someone discovers the profession. The second is the top, when they earn a credential. Everything in between, the years of learning and growing that make up most of a career, tends to be left to chance.
That middle stretch is the longest part of the member journey and the least served. It is also, not coincidentally, where members go looking for help somewhere else. The principle I keep coming back to is a simple one, and it is the heart of why this matters.
Serving members well is a revenue strategy. The ladder is not something you pursue instead of your mission. It is what happens when you pursue your mission well.
What is the Learning Revenue Ladder?
The Learning Revenue Ladder is a framework for building a connected learning portfolio that earns revenue at every stage of the member journey. It has four rungs, and the quickest way to understand it is to walk up it once.
Assessments are the on-ramp. A short, low-barrier set of questions based on your industry body of knowledge that shows a learner where they stand and points them toward what comes next. An assessment is also the first thing you learn about a member: where their gaps are and what they want to close. That first data point is where personalization begins. Because almost anyone can take one, assessments reach prospects, employers, and people who have never engaged with you before.
Preparation programs turn intent into readiness. They capture value in the gap between the assessment and the certification exam, a stretch where candidates are already spending money, usually with a third party if not with you.
Microcredentials let learners go deep on one topic and earn recognition for it. They are faster to launch and lower cost than a full certification program, and they reach specialists and adjacent-role professionals who may never sit for the full credential.
Certification sits at the top. It carries a different kind of weight because it is third-party validated and tells the world that the professional who holds it meets a defined standard in their field. That trust is exactly why it anchors the ladder. Earning the certification is not the end of the journey. Recertification, advanced microcredentials, new specializations, and leadership pathways all follow, turning a one-time achievement into a lifelong relationship. Not every association has a certification, and the framework does not require it. A deliberate three-rung strategy can be every bit as strong as a four-rung one.
The harder and more interesting question is what to do with this, and that is where Rachael and Reno came in.
Four Lessons from Association Leaders
Start by Listening, Not Building
When I asked Reno how an association should decide what to build next, he pushed back on the premise. The mistake, he said, is starting with the product at all.
Don’t start by building something. Start by listening. Talk to people who recently became certified. Talk to the ones who started and never finished. Talk to employers. Talk to the people buying learning products somewhere other than you.
Only after that listening, he said, do you turn to the data and ask where people are getting stuck, where they are disengaging, and where they are asking for help you are not providing. Then you pilot something small, learn from it, refine it, and scale. His closing line on the subject stuck with everyone: when you solve a real professional problem, the revenue tends to follow.
The System Matters as Much as the Content
Rachael offered a reminder that the way you deliver education matters as much as the education itself. For years, AFCPE ran its self-study program the hard way, shipping physical books and materials, carrying the inventory, and getting almost no visibility into how learners were actually doing.
By rebuilding the curriculum with subject matter experts and moving off that model, AFCPE did more than cut shipping costs. It gained practice questions, learner data, and marketing insight it had never had before, and that data is now shaping decisions about instructor-led programs and where to expand next.
Rather than seeing these as separate products, we see them as really interconnected. They help people enter the field, build readiness, earn the certification, and continue developing throughout their careers.
The platform you deliver education on shapes what you are able to learn from it. Investing in systems that produce trustworthy data is as important as the content itself.
That data is also what makes personalization possible, and this is where the real opportunity lives. Netflix does not show every subscriber the same homepage; it knows what each person watches and serves up what they are most likely to want next. An association should be able to know its members the same way, understanding which skills each one is trying to build and meeting them with the right learning at the right moment rather than a one-size-fits-all catalog. You cannot do that without the data, and you cannot gather the data without the system. The two are inseparable.
Can You Sell the Prep and Own the Exam?
This is the question that makes association leaders nervous, and someone asked it directly. Can an association offer exam preparation and the certification itself without a conflict of interest? Reno’s answer was yes, with a condition he was firm about.
Certification measures competence. Preparation develops confidence. The line you can’t cross is compromising the independence of the certification program.
As long as the exam blueprint, the psychometrics, the item development, and the passing standards stay walled off and protected, preparation becomes a natural extension of the mission rather than a threat to it. To learn more about offering certification and preparation, check out our free guide.
The data backs the value, too. Learners who complete a pretest and a practice exam pass at a seventeen-point higher rate, and across thousands of records, engaging with prep was the single strongest predictor of passing.
Momentum Is Not a Launch-Day Problem
Rachael was candid that AFCPE has built microcredentials that met a real need and still saw slow adoption, usually because the end user was not clearly defined up front or the format and pricing did not match how people actually wanted to learn. Good content was not enough.
Reno put the fix plainly. Once you know what members need, your internal partners, especially marketing, have to be part of the journey from the start, not pulled in the day before launch. Momentum takes alignment, not just a good product.
Why the Middle Is Worth the Effort
It helps to see what a connected learner is actually worth. Picture someone who meets you through a hundred-dollar assessment, takes a webinar two weeks later, signs up for entry-level training, comes back for cert prep, earns a microcredential, attends the annual conference, becomes a member, and finally passes the exam. Over three years, that single relationship generates roughly $3,650, and that is only chapter one. Recertification, advanced credentials, mentoring, and leadership roles follow for anyone who stays.
The flip side is just as telling. MGI’s Membership Marketing Benchmark Report found that half of associations point to a lack of engagement as the reason members do not renew, and members who do not engage in their first 90 days churn at a 73% higher rate. A connected learning portfolio is one of the most reliable ways to close that gap, because every rung is another reason to come back. But engagement doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the next step feels relevant to that specific member. What turns that portfolio from a catalog into a relationship is personalization. When each interaction is informed by what a member has already done and what they are trying to achieve, the next step always feels like it was built for them. That is how a learning portfolio keeps delivering value, and keeps the member coming back, year after year.
Where to Start
If any of this resonates, the first move is not a new product. It is an honest look at what you already have. Use our free interactive worksheet to score your rungs and mark where you are strong, partial, or missing across assessments, prep, microcredentials, and certification. Find the widest gap between where you are and where you could be. Then name one concrete first step and the data you would need to be sure it is the right one.
I closed the session with a question, and I will leave you with it here.
The question isn’t whether your association could earn revenue at every step of the learner’s journey. It’s this. At which steps are you currently handing that person off to someone else?
Your association already holds the expertise, and more importantly, it holds the trust. Serving members well means meeting them at every stage of their professional journey with learning that’s industry-vetted and built for where they actually are. That’s not a revenue argument. It’s a mission argument.
If you’d like to explore how learning programs can meet your members’ professional needs while driving engagement and revenue, we’d love to talk. Visit holmescorp.com or email us at [email protected].
