5 Leadership Lessons from AABB's CEO on Building a Business-Minded Association

This post summarizes Episode 1 of Built To Connect, RallyBoard's monthly podcast featuring enterprising association leaders who are changing the business model. Our inaugural guest is Debra BenAvram, CEO of AABB (the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies).

Debra BenAvram has done what most association CEOs only dream about: she took an organization with 45% staff turnover and brought it down to 5-6%. She guided a global rebrand during COVID. She launched a first-of-its-kind biotherapy certification into a skeptical market. And she did all of it while running a $20M global association.

In our inaugural episode of Built To Connect, Debra sat down with RallyBoard co-founder Jackson Boyar to unpack what she's actually learned — not the polished board-meeting version, but the real stuff. Here are five takeaways every association leader should hear.

1. Culture Eats Strategy — But You Have to Define It First

When Debra joined AABB, she didn't know the field (she's not from blood banking). She didn't have existing relationships. She didn't have credibility built up over years of industry work. What she did have was a clear personal framework.

Her first move? One-on-one meetings with all ~60 staff members. She asked each person to bring a picture, drawing, or graphical representation of what a great culture would look like. The exercise wasn't just icebreaker theater — it gave her a window into the existing culture, revealed where the real institutional knowledge lived, and forced her to listen before she acted.

She also took down all the translucent film off every glass office wall in her first two months. A small symbolic move that signaled, loudly: transparency is real here.

"I still have somewhere in here all the old pictures that everyone drew. They were quite impressive and sparked great conversations early days and over the years."

Editorial note: The instinct to "come in and fix things" is one of the most dangerous traps for new CEOs — association or otherwise. Debra's 90-day listening investment kept her from making fast decisions she'd later regret, and it bought her credibility with staff who needed to believe change was real. The ROI on one-on-ones is enormous and almost entirely invisible on a budget spreadsheet.

2. Associations Are Businesses. Act Like It.

Debra was unusually direct on this point, and it's worth sitting with: "Associations are a business. We just have a unique business model."

The tension she's describing is one most association CEOs know intimately. Boards are made up of practitioners — not business executives — who built their careers serving the profession, not growing an organization. That's a feature of the model, not a bug. But it creates real friction when a CEO needs to make business decisions that not everyone will like.

Her advice: get comfortable with the fact that your job is to optimize for both business results and mission results — not every individual member's preference. Associations that try to make everyone happy end up doing nothing particularly well.

"Associations worry too much about making every single person happy and not enough about finding the best opportunities that deliver both business results and mission results."

Editorial note: This isn't a new observation, but it remains one of the hardest things for association leaders to act on. The governance structure of most associations — where members elect board members who oversee the CEO — creates structural pressure toward consensus and away from strategic focus. The CEOs who navigate this best tend to be exceptional at pre-work: building board relationships, sharing data early, and never walking into a vote cold.

3. New Revenue Requires a Real Business Case (and Board Champions)

AABB launched the CABP — its first biotherapy certification — under Debra's tenure. She described the process of building the business case to the board with real candor: it's part storytelling, part data, part relationship management.

A few things she got right:

• Positioned it as a strategic investment, kept outside the annual operating budget so the board could track it in isolation

• Built the case around market gap: there was no way for biotherapy professionals to credibly signal expertise — no defined body of knowledge, no certification

• Made sure key board leaders were pre-sold before walking into the room: "You have to know what your board thinks before you walk in the room."

She also acknowledged a hard lesson: market adoption of something brand new takes longer than you plan for. The CABP has grown, but slowly. Managing team morale during that adoption curve is its own leadership challenge.

Editorial note: Certification programs are one of the most defensible non-dues revenue strategies available to associations — but only when they're tied to genuine credential value. The PMI/PMP is the gold standard precisely because it signals something real to employers. AABB's bet on the CABP reflects the same logic: build the credential that the profession actually needs. The patience required to wait for market adoption is often underestimated.

4. Rebrands Only Work If You Do the Pre-Work

AABB's name used to stand for "American Association of Blood Banks" — a mouthful that became irrelevant as the organization expanded into biotherapies. When a member told Debra they struggled to explain what AABB stood for to surgeons and clinical partners, the urgency became real.

The rebrand went smoothly. That's rarer than it sounds. Debra attributes it to:

• Identifying non-negotiables early: The acronym was written into legislation and regulations — changing it was never on the table

• Engaging the community throughout: Not just at the end, but all the way through the process

• Not presenting options you'd hate to live with: If you float an idea to the community and it catches on, you're stuck with it

• Accepting that the association belongs to its members: "If people feel like a decision of great importance was made without them, no matter how excellent the design, it will flop."

Notably, they launched during COVID — not ideal, but it actually created energy and excitement during a challenging time for the field.

Editorial note: The association rebrand failure pattern is almost always the same: staff and leadership fall in love with a direction, don't adequately engage the community, and then face backlash during launch. Debra's willingness to slow down the pre-work is what made the outcome possible. That said, rebrands done well can signal meaningful transformation — AABB's shift from "Blood Banks" to "Blood and Biotherapies" is a case study in how a name change can unlock adjacent markets.

5. Year-Round Connection Is the Only Insurance Against the Next Hurricane Ian

In 2022, Hurricane Ian forced AABB to cancel its annual meeting with 6,000 expected attendees — and pivot to virtual with almost no runway. It was devastating. And it was the third consecutive disruption after COVID.

What Debra took from the experience wasn't just "get better insurance" (though she did) or "build a virtual backup plan" (though she thought carefully about that too). It was something more fundamental: the annual meeting can't carry the full weight of member connection.

"Only doing that once a year also isn't healthy for a connected community. What would this look like if we were connecting people all throughout the year and not just at a single point in time?"

She pointed to their existing mentorship program as one model, and flagged study groups as another. The thread connecting them: structured peer-to-peer connection that doesn't require flying anywhere.

Editorial note: This is the insight we built RallyBoard around. ASAE's research shows that associations enabling multiple meaningful interactions per year outside of events build the most loyal member bases — and Marketing General's 2024 benchmarking found that associations seeing membership increases were more likely to have increased their member engagement budgets and created multiple annual touchpoints. The annual meeting is irreplaceable. But 361 days of dormancy between conferences is a business risk, not just a missed opportunity.

Final Thought

Debra BenAvram is the kind of leader the association industry needs more of: clear-eyed about the business model, ruthless about pre-work, and willing to make unpopular decisions in service of long-term health. Her parting challenge to every association CEO was direct:

Stop trying to make everyone happy. Start finding the best opportunities that deliver both business results and mission results.

That's the job.

Listen to the full episode on the Built To Connect podcast. New episodes drop monthly, featuring leaders from across the association industry on how they're changing the business model.