From the President: Reflections on Legacy: A Shared Journey
- Cambria Happ, MPA, CAE
- 31 minutes ago
- 3 min read
This past year, I’ve found myself reflecting deeply on the concept of legacy—both personally and professionally. What does it mean to leave a legacy? Is legacy always about the individual or is it about a larger entity?
I recently attended the 2025 ASAE Annual Meeting & Expo in Los Angeles, CA. An annual gathering of 5,000 association management professionals, the content delivered helps us build and advance not only our individual professional legacies, but also the legacies of the associations we manage. As association executives, we are stewards of something larger—organizations that exist to serve professions, industries, and communities. Our work is not about individual recognition, but about ensuring that associations not only endure, but thrive.
Associations are ripe for legacy traps that may prevent an association from best serving its purpose. One example is the trap of a defining legacy for each board chair. To introduce the concept, association governance is fundamentally different from corporate or political leadership. In the corporate world, CEOs often have long tenures and clear accountability, while in associations, board chairs typically serve for just one or two years.
As described in David A. Westman’s Board and CEO Roles for Achieving Association Goals, this short tenure can create a situation where each new chair feels compelled to “make their mark” by launching a signature initiative or shifting priorities. The result? “Organizational whiplash! Volunteer and staff time, as well as money, are diverted from other aspects of the strategic plan to ensuring progress is made on the new priority, which may or may not be valued by the majority of an association’s members.” After the chair’s term ends, the impact of these initiatives can linger, continuing to drain resources and distract from core goals, or they may be abruptly abandoned, damaging the association’s credibility with stakeholders.
I’ve heard associations likened to giant ships and the board leadership, namely the board chair, as the captain of the vessel. The goal of the association is to achieve its mission, the ship needs to reach its port, and the captains, as they change throughout the journey, should all have the same goal of helping the ship arrive at the agreed upon port. The journey is not about any one ship captain. A captain deciding to sail to a new port that they’ve always wanted to visit or that they envision will make them memorable to the ship’s passengers will severely impact the ship’s ability to reach its intended destination. Associations that wildly change direction each year — or that build unnecessary or incomplete programs, services, and infrastructure — will find it difficult to achieve their mission and to utilize their resources appropriately.
Another legacy trap is related to donors to 501(c)(3) associations and the desire to create named donor funds with overly specific and limiting usage restrictions. Having a scholarship or a fund named after you evokes status and wealth. However, unless this gift is at least $25,000, the fund is often too small to make an impact, will not earn enough in investment returns to be useful beyond a few years, and creates an administrative burden beyond its impact.
Donating to an association’s general fund will often times have the greatest impact for an association and its stakeholders. The associations have an opportunity to create policies outlining minimums for named donor-advised funds to minimize distractions and to create messaging on the impact that unrestricted donations provide the association.
According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) study, “Breaking the Mold: The Transformative Effect of MacKenzie Scott’s Big Gifts,” unrestricted funding to a nonprofit “enhances recipient organizations’ resilience and their capacity to adapt and respond to sudden crisis or long-lasting challenging contexts; allows organizations to invest in their human resources, as well as in their growth and institutional development; and enables organizations to think and plan strategically and in long-term and boosts organizations’ financial resilience and security.”
I’ll leave you with this question, what do you, as stewards of an association, want the association to be remembered for and how can the association advance the profession and ensure a future for the collective?
Until next time!
Cambria Happ, MPA, CAE
President