Your Pipeline Is Shrinking. Your Recognition Program Hasn't.

See how to build a recognition program that actually reaches your newest, fastest-growing membership segment — before the profession's shrinking pipeline makes them even harder to replace.

Millennial and Gen Z professionals already make up more than a third of most association memberships, and for most of them, recognition genuinely matters — 83% say it directly affects whether they stay with an organization, and they're 73% more likely than Baby Boomers to want recognition at least a few times a month. Here's the disconnect: 76% believe they're "seldom to never" eligible for the awards their own organization already runs. The desire for recognition isn't the problem. Access to it is.

That gap matters more for CPA societies specifically than it might elsewhere. New CPA candidates dropped to a record low in 2024 — 27,994, roughly 42% below the 2016 peak of 48,004 — and exam completions fell 35% year-over-year. The profession has fewer new members coming in behind the ones already in the door, which means whichever members a society keeps engaged now matters more than it used to. A recognition program still built around categories that reward tenure and established practice isn't reaching the segment the profession can least afford to lose.

The structural cause is a well-documented pattern in association research, not a mystery: organizations that struggle to engage early-career members usually aren't failing at marketing to them — they're offering what longtime members already value (service tenure, established-practitioner recognition) instead of what early-career professionals actually need: visibility, career momentum, and proof they're on a real trajectory.

If your next awards cycle, annual meeting, or member engagement review is coming up, this is the moment to ask whether your recognition program reflects who your membership actually is now, not who it was fifteen years ago.

This session is for CPA society staff, chapter leaders, and member engagement teams responsible for running awards, scholarships, or recognition programs. Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the full recording. Want to talk through your society's specific member engagement numbers first? Reach out and we'll set up time to walk through it directly.

What You'll Learn

• How to create categories around what younger members actually value — emerging professionals, students, leadership, service, career development, and the other qualities that resonate with early-career members
• How to make participation easier with mobile-friendly applications, streamlined forms, automated communications, and clear instructions
• How to modernize volunteer judging with structured scorecards, weighted criteria, reviewer assignments, and AI-assisted summaries
• How to run awards, scholarships, competitions, and other opportunities within one platform instead of a patchwork of separate processes
• How to use participation reports to understand which programs and member groups are actually engaging, so the next cycle is built on data, not assumptions

Your newest members already told you recognition matters to them. The only question left is whether your program actually reaches them.