The Future of Membership
Building members in an era that sells subscriptions.
We're Rottman Creative. The membership people.
A focused agency working out of Jacksonville, Florida. We work with mid-to-large associations whose leaders know something underneath has to change. They want a partner who'll find the gaps, name them, and show how to fill them.
Associations change lives. We help them prove it.
Most of the groups we work with are doing real work that matters. Members' careers shift because of them. Members' businesses ride out hard years because of them. Every so often, a member tells us flat out that they wouldn't be where they are today without one.
The problem isn't the work. The problem is that when it's time to grow, the story goes missing. Behind benefits lists. Behind renewal notices. Behind whatever the team is panicking about this quarter.
We exist to fix that. We find the story that already lives inside your organization. We bring it to the surface. We put it to work everywhere a member touches you. Acquisition. Onboarding. Renewal. Content. The whole thing.
Most associations we meet have read every blog post, sat in every conference session, and stacked up every framework. They've consumed more best practices than they could ever apply. Most of our work isn't telling associations something they don't already know. It's helping them do, consistently, what they already know to do. In every email. On every landing page. In every renewal cycle.
Our clients tend to share one trait. They know something needs to change. They want a partner who'll find the gaps, name them, and show how to grow past them.
Membership is not a subscription.
Who's here
Senior leadership
Gary
Founder & CEO
Gary started Rottman Creative more than twenty years ago in Washington, DC. He kept watching good associations market themselves badly. He works directly with senior leadership. His default move is to find the real issue, name it out loud, and build something around it worth the investment.
Mary
Principal & Chief Client Officer
Mary runs the client side of Rottman Creative. She leads the editorial work and shapes the day-to-day relationship with every account we take on. She's the one who turns RCG's thinking into the kind of writing clients actually want to read.
Luke
Strategy Director
Luke is Strategy Director at Rottman Creative. He works with associations across the full member lifecycle (Join, Onboarding, and Renew) and on the strategic decisions that shape long-term retention. His work centers on the distinction between Members and Subscribers, and what it takes to build associations the next generation will actually stay in.
Heidi
VP of Marketing
Heidi leads the discovery side of every engagement. She runs the interviews with boards, members, and anyone who can tell us what membership actually feels like inside the organization. Her line on what RCG does: "We grow people."
Jacken
VP of Marketing
Jacken runs marketing operations and the architecture under each engagement. Marketing automation, lead scoring, campaign delivery, and the systems that connect attention to action. He's the one keeping the work moving between the strategy and the result.
Logan
Creative Director
Logan is Creative Director. Every campaign, deck, ebook, and landing page that goes out under the RCG mark goes through his hands. His job is to make sure what you read on the page is what you feel when you see it.
Who we work with
Mid-to-large professional and trade associations
The associations we work with sit on real value: a profession, a trade, a movement, a community. The work isn't rethinking what membership means. It's pulling the story out from under the benefits PDF. Putting it back where a member can feel it.
Subscription and member-driven businesses
Subscription-shaped organizations face the same long arc associations do: acquire, retain, grow, repeat. What keeps an association together at year five is what keeps a subscription business together. We don't pretend otherwise.
Leadership with a growth mandate
Our best engagements start with someone in the corner office. A CEO, a VP, a chief membership officer. Someone who already knows the number on the dashboard isn't the real problem. They want a strategic partner, not another deck. If that's you, the conversation tends to move quickly.