The Long View
The Long View: what the 1980s got right
I am going to start this column with a claim I can defend across thirty years of running membership bodies, and it is this: a mid-size institute in 1987 knew more about why its members stayed than most institutes do in 2026, despite owning none of the tools we now consider essential. It knew because the tools it did have, a card index, a quarterly journal, a committee cycle and one annual gathering, forced a kind of attention that our systems have quietly made optional.
I ran that kind of institute. Not in 1987, I was still junior then, licking envelopes for the AGM mailing, but close enough to have inherited its disciplines, and long enough afterwards to have watched them dissolve. This column, which the editor has agreed to let me write from retirement in Cheltenham, will be about what the past of this sector has to say to its present: what earned praise, what it cost and who it locked out.
Before the AMS, the website and the engagement score, UK associations ran on paper records, the printed journal, the committee cycle and the annual conference. That era enforced four disciplines the digital era lets bodies skip: knowing members by name at small scale, the immovable print deadline, committee papers as the single agreed record, and presidents who had actually done the job. Each skipped discipline carries a cost that shows up later as churn, drift or weak governance. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but some of what the paper era made compulsory is worth re-imposing on purpose.
Start with the card index. Ours lived in a bank of grey Kardex cabinets behind the membership secretary’s desk, one card per member, with the join date, the grade, the branch and, in the secretary’s own pencil, the annotations that made it worth anything: “widowed 84, waive”, “wants Sheffield branch”, “ring before invoicing, employer pays”. When a member rang in 1989, whoever answered pulled the card and knew, in thirty seconds, the shape of the relationship. I am not romantic about it. The cards were incomplete, illegible in places and a data protection officer’s bad dream. But the system had a property our current arrangements often lack: the record and the relationship were maintained by the same person, so the record was tended like a garden rather than mined like a quarry. Today I sit as a trustee of a body with a proper AMS and an engagement score, and at our last meeting nobody could tell me, without a report being commissioned, the name of a single member who had lapsed that quarter or why. The 1987 version of me would have been ashamed of that. The 2026 board treated it as normal, because it is.
Second, the print deadline. The quarterly journal ruled the calendar. Copy closed on a date that did not move, because the printer had another customer after you and the mail shot had to catch the second-class post before the committee’s meeting. Around that immovable date the whole secretariat organised itself: the editorial board, the president’s column, the notices, the accounts summary. A deadline that cannot slip is a governance instrument, though we never called it that. It forced decisions to be taken in time, copy to be approved or killed, and the president to sit down four times a year and address the membership in prose that would still be on their shelves in a decade. When I became chief executive I kept the discipline after we moved the journal online, and I watched it leak away within two years. A web page can always be updated tomorrow, so everything is. The result is a publication schedule that is perpetual and a publication that is never quite due. Nobody’s copy gets the four-times-a-year seriousness any more, including, I would wager, this column.
Third, the committee papers as the single record. Once a quarter, a buff folder went out by post: agenda, minutes, accounts to date, the secretary’s report, the papers for decision. If a fact was not in the folder, it did not officially exist, and if a decision was not minuted, it had not been taken. This produced a rigour I have come to miss acutely. The secretary’s report, two pages of typed A4, answered the same questions every quarter: how many members, how many joined, how many left, what the money did. Every council member read the same numbers in the same format for years on end, so drift was visible. Compare the modern board portal: six hundred pages of well-designed PDF, a dashboard that changes its definitions between meetings, and papers uploaded at midnight before the meeting. We have infinitely more information and considerably less shared knowledge. When I chaired a governance review a few years ago, at a body I will not name, I found three different retention figures in three different board papers from the same year. The buff folder did not permit that. It was one document, one set of numbers, one account of the truth, and the council argued about the numbers rather than about whose numbers to use.
Fourth, and I will tread carefully here, the president who had actually done the job. The route to the chair in the bodies I knew ran through the branch committee, the examinations board, a stint as honorary treasurer, the council. By the time someone put on the chain, they had marked papers, organised dinners that lost money, sat through planning rows and answered members’ letters. The system was slow, self-perpetuating and, I will come to this, exclusionary. But it produced presidents who knew what a member’s week looked like and what the organisation’s work felt like at the counter, and that knowledge disciplined every council discussion it entered. Modern governance, correctly, wants boards chosen for skills and diversity rather than long service. What it has not fully replaced is the operational memory the old ladder supplied for free. The volunteer leadership pipeline problem is, at root, the question of how you rebuild that memory without rebuilding the closed shop that used to produce it.
Now the counterargument, because it deserves better than a sentence. The paper era excluded people. It excluded women from professions that were male by habit and sometimes by rule. It excluded the young, who waited decades for a hearing, and it excluded anyone who could not get to a branch meeting in Stoke on a wet Tuesday, which is to say carers, the shift-working and the poor. The committee ladder that produced experienced presidents also produced identical presidents, and the card index that remembered everything remembered it about the people the secretary happened to know. The digital era’s democratisation of access is real: the member in Inverness now attends what only the member in London once could, the student reads the journal on a phone that her predecessor borrowed from a library, and a board can recruit a trustee from a background the old networks never touched. Anybody who tells you 1987 was better across the board is selling you something, probably a consultancy.
And yet. The question this column exists to ask is not whether the past was better. It is whether the disciplines the past imposed for free are worth re-imposing at a cost, now that technology has removed the machinery that enforced them. My answer, after thirty years, is that four of them are, and that none requires a single sheet of paper.
Re-impose the immovable deadline. Pick the publication or communication that matters most and give it a date that does not move, quarterly at minimum, with the chief executive’s name attached to whatever goes out. The membership model briefing on this site makes the strategic case that the model’s components survive by changing format; my point is narrower. Whatever the format, the deadline is the discipline, and a deadline that slips is a decision that nobody noticed being taken.
Re-impose the single record. One set of numbers, in the same format, every meeting, owned by one named officer, with definitions that change only by board resolution. If your membership operations team cannot reproduce last year’s retention figure to the same definition this year, you do not have a retention problem first. You have a record problem first.
Re-impose knowing members by name, at whatever scale you can afford. When I ran the institute, I kept a private list of fifty members I would ring in a year, chosen at random from the renewals file, and I rang them. Nothing I commissioned told me as much as those calls, and the modern version costs less than the research it replaces.
And rebuild the ladder, deliberately, with the doors open. Short terms of office, proper remuneration of expenses, branch and committee roles advertised rather than inherited, and a published route from first volunteering to the chair. Keep what the ladder produced, operational memory and tested judgment, and scrap what it required, time, money and the right handshake.
A word on method, once, and then the subject can have the stage back. Everything praised from the past in these pages comes with its price tag attached: who it excluded, what it cost and what evidence exists beyond one man’s memory. Where the evidence is a survey or a register, it is cited. Where it is one man’s recollection of a card index, it is labelled as such, and you may discount it accordingly. I trust my memory for the smell of the Kardex cabinet and the weight of the buff folder. I would not trust it, unaided, for last year’s retention figure, and neither should you.
The deadline for the next one is immovable. The editor has my copy date, and now so do you.
- Give our most important member publication an immovable deadline with the chief executive's name on it; a date that slips is a decision nobody took.
- Adopt one set of membership numbers, one format and one named owner for every board meeting, with definitions that change only by resolution of this board.
- Publish the route from first volunteering role to the chair, with expenses paid and terms short, so the ladder produces memory without the closed shop.