Senior Director Member Experience and Growth

Brief Description

The Senior Director, Member Experience and Growth provides enterprise leadership for CAP's membership growth, retention, engagement, member experience, community, portfolio, and international market-development priorities. The role is accountable for creating a connected, career-long relationship with CAP by aligning membership, education, professional development, community, volunteerism, advocacy, events, and digital experiences around member needs and organizational strategy.

The Senior Director leads integrated planning across the member lifecycle, translates insights and market shifts into portfolio priorities, and recommends where CAP should invest, partner, pilot, scale, consolidate, or discontinue. The role serves as the primary staff strategy partner to the Council on Member Experiences and promotes effective integration across councils, committees, reporting units, and cross-functional teams.

The Senior Director establishes measurable growth and experience goals and works across CAP to strengthen member value, belonging, loyalty, learning impact, and sustainable growth in domestic and international markets.

Source of Supervision

Reports directly to: Vice President, Member Experiences

Direction Exercised

Directly supervises the Director, Member Engagement and Community. Also leads assigned membership growth, lifecycle, portfolio, and international market-development staff and may supervise additional directors, managers, employees, contractors, vendors, or project resources as assigned.

Demonstrates CAP people manager expectations, including establishing priorities, aligning work to strategy, coaching and developing leaders and staff, monitoring performance, supporting succession planning, allocating resources, and fostering an inclusive, collaborative, accountable, and member-centered culture.

Primary Responsibilities

1. Membership Growth and Retention

• Establish and lead integrated strategies for member acquisition, conversion, renewal, retention, loyalty, and reengagement in alignment with CAP strategic and financial priorities.
• Define growth priorities by member segment, career stage, geography, practice setting, and engagement profile.
• Strengthen pathways from medical student and resident engagement into long-term CAP membership and leadership participation.
• Partner with Strategic Communications and Marketing on audience segmentation, value propositions, positioning, campaigns, and conversion strategies.
• Use membership trends, market research, external benchmarks, satisfaction data, and member feedback to identify growth opportunities and retention risks.
• Identify drivers of loyalty, engagement, renewal, attrition, and lapse and sponsor coordinated interventions across the organization.
• Guide development and evaluation of membership benefits, pricing approaches, dues structures, categories, and packages in partnership with appropriate stakeholders.
• Establish measurable goals and dashboards for recruitment, conversion, renewal, retention, reengagement, satisfaction, engagement, and financial performance.
• Communicate membership insights, progress, risks, and recommendations to executive leadership, councils, committees, and cross-functional teams.

2. Member Experience and Lifecycle Strategy

• Own the enterprise member experience and lifecycle strategy across the full pathology career continuum, from prospective pathologists and trainees through senior practitioners and laboratory leaders.
• Define audience-specific journeys and value pathways that connect education, professional development, community, volunteerism, advocacy, events, publications, and digital experiences.
• Ensure member needs and expectations are translated into coordinated experiences rather than isolated programs or transactional touchpoints.
• Sponsor member journey mapping and lifecycle analysis to identify unmet needs, transition points, experience gaps, friction, and opportunities to deepen value.
• Create clear experience principles and standards that guide member-facing programs, services, communications, communities, and digital touchpoints.
• Partner with analytics, assessment, technology, operations, marketing, education, publications, advocacy, and customer service teams to improve the end-to-end member experience.
• Champion accessibility, inclusion, personalization, and relevance across member segments and career stages.
• Monitor member sentiment, satisfaction, participation, and experience performance and use findings to prioritize improvements.

3. Member Experience Portfolio Strategy

• Lead integrated annual and multi-year portfolio planning for member experience priorities across Membership, Education and Publications, and enabling functions.
• Translate member needs, strategic objectives, practice changes, market shifts, competitive intelligence, and performance data into portfolio recommendations.
• Guide prioritization of enterprise member-experience opportunities, including emerging areas such as precision medicine, artificial intelligence, digital pathology, quality, practice leadership, professional development, and career pathways.
• Define portfolio objectives, target audiences, intended outcomes, success measures, investment assumptions, and decision criteria.
• Recommend where CAP should invest, partner, pilot, scale, consolidate, redesign, or discontinue based on member value, mission alignment, feasibility, impact, and financial sustainability.
• Promote a matrix operating model in which portfolios define priorities and functional teams contribute the specialized capabilities required for execution.

4. Member Engagement and Community

• Lead the strategy for participation beyond transactional membership, strengthening belonging, professional connection, contribution, and loyalty.
• Oversee communities of practice, peer learning, mentoring, networking, informal engagement, and other community-building approaches.
• Establish pathways that help members progress from participant to contributor, author, faculty member, mentor, ambassador, volunteer, committee member, or leader.
• Integrate engagement and community opportunities across career stages, specialties, practice settings, and geographic segments.
• Use the CAP Annual Meeting, virtual programs, communities, professional development, and volunteer experiences as catalysts for sustained year-round engagement.
• Partner with Education and Publications to connect content and learning experiences with community, networking, and ongoing application.
• Guide the design and evaluation of recognition, champion, mentoring, leadership, and volunteer-engagement programs.
• Monitor community adoption, participation, health, engagement, and member outcomes and sponsor continuous improvement.

5. International Growth and Market Development

• Lead CAP international growth and market-development strategy through coordinated education, membership, community, ambassador, and partnership approaches.
• Partner with the International Market Development team and International Advisory Group to define priority markets and target audiences using demand, market, member, partner, operational, and financial insights.
• Oversee country and market pilots from opportunity assessment and planning through implementation, evaluation, and recommendations regarding expansion, refinement, or discontinuation.
• Own the strategy for international ambassador programs and in-country engagement pathways.
• Provide strategic direction for relationships with pathology associations and other relevant organizations, coordinating with professional alliance and content-acquisition leaders on implementation.
• Guide the development of market-specific value propositions, member pathways, communities, educational offerings, and engagement models.
• Ensure international initiatives are aligned with CAP mission, brand, quality standards, resource priorities, and broader organizational strategy.
• Evaluate demand, feasibility, scalability, impact, risk, and financial sustainability before recommending expansion.
• Create governance, measures, and review cycles for international initiatives and communicate progress and recommendations to leadership.

6. Council and Committee Integration

• Serve as the primary staff strategy partner to the Council on Member Experiences and support effective governance of the integrated member experience portfolio.
• Translate council direction, member-leader expertise, and committee recommendations into an integrated portfolio, annual priorities, and coordinated staff plans.
• Facilitate cross-committee collaboration on shared member needs, strategic opportunities, and portfolio priorities.
• Ensure council and committee work is connected to member insights, organizational strategy, portfolio decisions, implementation capacity, and measurable outcomes.
• Clarify the respective advisory, governance, prioritization, and execution responsibilities of councils, committees, staff leaders, and cross-functional teams.
• Partner with committee staff leads to establish goals, agendas, decision points, materials, workplans, action items, and progress reporting aligned with CAP standards.
• Promote an effective transition from program-by-program planning toward integrated problem solving and member-centered portfolio stewardship.
• Monitor portfolio and committee performance, surface dependencies or conflicts, and recommend adjustments to improve alignment and impact.
• Collaborate with councils and committees across CAP to connect member-experience priorities with scientific, educational, quality, innovation, technology, and advocacy efforts.

7. Insights, Measurement, and Financial Stewardship

• Establish an integrated performance framework for growth, retention, lifecycle experience, portfolio health, engagement, community, and international market development.
• Partner with analytics and assessment leaders to define measures, dashboards, segmentation, research, testing, and evaluation approaches.
• Use quantitative and qualitative insights to identify opportunities, diagnose performance issues, assess pilots, and inform investment decisions.
• Prepare executive-level reports and recommendations that communicate outcomes, trends, risks, tradeoffs, and required decisions.
• Develop and manage assigned budgets, forecasts, business cases, investment proposals, and resource plans.
• Assess financial performance and sustainability alongside mission impact and member value.
• Promote disciplined experimentation, clear pilot criteria, evidence-based scaling, and timely discontinuation of initiatives that do not demonstrate sufficient value.

8. Cross-Functional and Team Leadership

• Lead and develop the Director, Member Engagement and Community; and other assigned leaders and staff through clear goals, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and professional development.
• Provide strategic direction and performance expectations for Member Engagement and Community, ensuring communities, networking, mentoring, volunteer pathways, and engagement programs advance belonging, participation, retention, and member value.
• Facilitate alignment of the Education and Membership functions around shared member-experience priorities so learning, community, and engagement reinforce one another rather than operate as separate program channels.
• Create an integrated leadership rhythm across Member Experiences Reporting Unit while partnering with Marketing, Advocacy, Finance, Governance, and other partners.
• Build shared accountability for member growth and experience outcomes across organizational boundaries.
• Ensure roles, decision rights, dependencies, and escalation paths are clear across portfolios and functional teams.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, inclusion, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Represent CAP and the member experience portfolio in internal leadership forums and, as assigned, at professional meetings, partner discussions, and industry events.
• Other duties as assigned.

Contacts

• Council on Member Experiences and related committee leaders and members
• CAP members, prospective members, medical students, residents, fellows, laboratory leaders, volunteers, ambassadors, and community participants
• CAP executive leadership and staff across Membership, Education and Publications, Analytics and Assessment, Technology and Operations, Marketing and Communications, Advocacy, Finance, Governance, Customer Service, Events, and the CAP Foundation
• Domestic and international pathology associations, professional societies, academic institutions, strategic partners, consultants, and vendors

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Leadership and Personal

• Enterprise-minded, member-centered leader with strong strategic judgment and the ability to connect vision, portfolio choices, and execution.
• Demonstrated ability to lead leaders, develop teams, and build accountability in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Exceptional executive communication, facilitation, relationship-management, influence, and change-leadership skills.
• High degree of professional judgment, discretion, curiosity, adaptability, collaboration, and comfort navigating ambiguity.
• Ability to balance member value, mission impact, operational feasibility, organizational capacity, and financial sustainability.

Professional

• Deep knowledge of membership growth, retention, lifecycle management, member experience, community, engagement, and value-proposition development.
• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise portfolio planning, prioritization, innovation, pilots, and investment decisions.
• Strong understanding of market segmentation, journey mapping, experience design, performance measurement, and data-informed decision-making.
• Experience partnering with councils, boards, committees, volunteer leaders, and senior executives.
• Ability to integrate education, professional development, community, events, volunteerism, advocacy, publications, and digital experiences into a coherent member journey.
• Experience developing international or geographic growth strategies, market-entry pilots, ambassador programs, partnerships, or global communities preferred.
• Strong financial acumen, including budgeting, forecasting, business cases, performance monitoring, and resource allocation.
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and mobilize cross-functional teams around shared outcomes.

Technical

• Strong proficiency with Microsoft 365 collaboration and presentation tools and enterprise project or portfolio-management tools.
• Experience with association management systems, customer relationship management platforms, community platforms, marketing automation, survey and research tools, and business-intelligence reporting preferred.
• Ability to interpret membership, engagement, market, financial, and experience data and translate findings into strategic recommendations.

Education and Experience

Education

• Bachelor's degree required in business, marketing, association management, healthcare administration, education, strategy, or a related field.
• Master's degree in business administration, association management, marketing, healthcare administration, organizational leadership, or a related field strongly preferred.

Experience

• Minimum of fifteen years of progressively responsible experience in membership, member or customer experience, growth strategy, association management, community, portfolio leadership, market development, or a related field.
• Minimum of ten years of leadership experience managing managers, multidisciplinary teams, or complex cross-functional portfolios.
• Demonstrated success developing and implementing growth, retention, engagement, lifecycle, community, or customer-experience strategies with measurable outcomes.
• Experience leading strategic planning, portfolio prioritization, business cases, pilots, measurement, and continuous improvement.
• Experience working with councils, boards, committees, or volunteer-led governance structures.
• Experience in healthcare, medical associations, scientific or professional societies, or pathology and laboratory medicine preferred.
• Experience with international growth, market development, partnerships, or global member/customer engagement preferred.

Related Certifications

• Certified Association Executive, customer or member experience, strategy, change management, project or portfolio management, or related certification preferred.

Additional Criteria

May require domestic and international travel, including occasional evenings and weekends, for leadership meetings, council and committee meetings, the CAP Annual Meeting, market-development activities, partner meetings, and other organizational events.

Candidates must reside within 75-miles of Northfield, IL and meet in office requirements.

Salary: $140,000 - $175,000