Trust Is the Opportunity: 5 Takeaways from Brittany Carter

In 2019, Brittany Carter took over a company operating across a stack of industry verticals, as many as eleven at the peak, and started cutting. Columbia Books and Information Services, founded in 1969 as a directory publisher, was making money in most of them. She exited several of them anyway, on the grounds that profitable and core are different tests, and pointed what remained at a single market.

That decision produced the 2022 acquisition of CEO Update, the more recent acquisition of NonProfit PRO, and a company that now reads less like a publisher than like a membership organization. Brittany, President and CEO of CBIS, sells information to association executives at precisely the moment information stopped being scarce. Her response has been to spend less of her attention on the newsletter and more of it on rooms.

She joined Built to Connect to talk about what she has heard in those rooms, drawn from what she estimates is well over a hundred sit-downs with association CEOs and senior leaders since the acquisition. Five things stood out.

1. Information got cheap. The room did not.

CBIS owns a database called Association Insight, and Brittany is unusually candid about what it is. Much of the underlying information is public. The product was always the synthesis. That is also the exact task generative AI compresses from a week into a minute, and she does not pretend otherwise.

I think when you get to this part of your career, it’s much more than research and going out and trying to get answers. It’s the talking to your peers in a safe space.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

Her roundtables run under Chatham House Rule, which is not a detail. It is the product. What members are buying is the willingness of eight other people to say the true version of something out loud, and that willingness is contingent on the door being closed. “Things get really intense and really serious when you close the door, and you have a bunch of leaders who can talk to each other,” she said.

She also named a structural advantage the association market has over most CEO peer groups: almost nobody in the room competes. Each leader operates inside their own vertical, so the usual reason to hold something back is absent. In a corporate CEO forum, two members may be bidding on the same contract next quarter. In an association roundtable, the head of a medical society and the head of a construction trade group have no reason to posture.

Why it matters: the share of association work that AI can do is rising fast. ASAE’s first State of Associations report, released in March 2026, put AI use for content at 87.5% and for data at 44.3%. Every one of those tasks is a thing members used to pay an association to do. The hour members cannot get anywhere else is the one spent with six peers and no transcript, which is the argument we made in why associations can’t win the content war.

2. The trust collapse is an opening, not a casualty

Most of the AI conversation in this industry is defensive. Brittany’s framing was the opposite, and she arrived at it by way of something darker.

Trust is going away fast. You don’t know what you’re reading is real. You don’t know if the photos you’re seeing are real. And associations have this really unique opportunity to be that kind of impartial group in the middle that has a long history of gathering information and connecting and convening people.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

The data under that is worse than most leaders realize. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, fielded across nearly 34,000 respondents in 28 countries between October and November 2025, found that close to seven in ten people fear institutional leaders are deliberately misleading them, and that 65% worry foreign actors are injecting falsehoods into their national media.

What is interesting is where trust went instead of away. In that same study, net trust rose over five years for coworkers, for neighbors, and for family and friends, each by 11 points. Trust did not evaporate. It got smaller and closer. That is a precise description of a cohort, and it is why convening is the asset to press on rather than the cost line to defend.

Why it matters: an association’s claim to impartiality is a hundred years old and nearly impossible for a new entrant to manufacture. When HFMA rebuilt its member engagement model around small peer groups, the differentiator was never the technology, it was that healthcare finance leaders believed the other people in the room had nothing to sell them. You can read how that was built in the HFMA case study.

3. A retirement wave arrived before the bench was ready

Brittany has watched something shift in the last two years. Leaders used to guard the top of the org chart. Now they ask her how to develop the layer beneath them.

I’m not sure we as an industry were really preparing in a meaningful way the next generation to take on these very challenging roles in really difficult times.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

Her read on the cause is a stack of shocks landing on people who had already done the job for two decades: the pandemic, the AI transition, and an advocacy environment she described as unstable enough that the playbooks went out the window. Long-tenured leaders are handing over the reins, and the people receiving them are inheriting a harder job than the one their predecessors learned.

Heidrick & Struggles expects association CEO tenures to compress toward the corporate average of 7.4 years, and found in a spring 2023 survey of more than 100 board members that 27% of boards restart succession planning immediately after naming a new chief executive. Most association boards are nowhere close to that cadence.

Her advice to anyone with designs on the corner office came in three parts. Run a skills gap analysis with a coach or with peers, because self-assessment is the one input a selection committee will not accept. Get board face time, whatever your current title. And build the network before you need it, which is where she gets genuinely impatient:

I’ll talk to people all the time who are looking to make their next move, but they’re not interested in being out and networking. Build a network, build a community. You can learn from those people. You can help them when they need help.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

She also used the episode to make something public for the first time. CEO Update’s roundtable program, which today runs for CEOs, COOs and CCOs, is expanding to CFOs and to heads of membership. The logic is succession: the CEOs she interviewed kept asking for their senior teams to get the same access they had.

Why it matters: succession planning in most associations is a document. The version that works is a decade of exposure, and exposure is a programming problem. A VP of membership who has spent two years in a confidential group with eight peers at comparable organizations arrives at the CEO interview with pattern recognition no leadership retreat produces.

4. You cannot build value in a vacuum

I asked Brittany about the hundred conversations, in the past tense, as though they were a project with an end date. She corrected me.

I can’t tell you about that time because it’s still that time. It’s always that time.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

The method is almost aggressively unstructured. No seeded questions, no agenda, no deck. She asks three things: what are you working on, what is hard right now, and what do you wish you had more information on. Then she listens, logs the themes in an internal chat with her editorial team, and watches for the pattern that repeats across a dozen conversations.

Her frustration is with the substitute most organizations reach for. “It always shocks me the amount of people that are not out there regularly having conversations with their members,” she said. A survey gets you the things people are willing to put in writing. The real constraints surface in private, verbally, from people who will describe a board problem or a budget problem out loud and never type it into a form.

The gap this leaves shows up in the benchmarking data. In early findings from the 2026 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, Marketing General Incorporated found that fewer than one in eight associations, 12.5%, describe their own value proposition as very compelling. Nearly half call it merely somewhat compelling. An organization that cannot describe its value confidently is usually an organization that has not asked recently.

One detail is easy to skip past. Brittany makes a point of learning something personal in every conversation, on the grounds that it humanizes the exchange. She also called the approach completely unscalable and kept doing it anyway. The unscalable version is the one that produces the insight; the scalable version is what you build afterward.

Why it matters: five-year plans assume a stable member. Brittany’s view is that the planning horizon has collapsed and the listening cadence has to replace it. If your member value proposition was last revisited in a board retreat two years ago, it is describing a member who no longer exists.

5. Stop trying to build all of it yourself

The last theme was the one she was most animated about, partly because it cuts against a reflex she sees constantly: the belief that an association has to own every capability it offers.

You don’t get best-in-class work if you don’t find partners.

Brittany Carter, President and CEO, CBIS

CEO Update ran into this directly, and the story is instructive because the problem was success. The CEO roundtable grew to roughly 150 members, spanning trade associations and individual membership organizations, from $10 million to $150 million in revenue. A room that broad stops being useful in a specific way: a leader running a $12 million professional society and a leader running a $140 million trade association face genuinely different constraints, and advice does not cross the gap cleanly.

The fix was obvious and the execution was not. Niche the large group down into smaller look-alike cohorts, matched by organization type, revenue band and role. Then do it nationally rather than only in Washington, where CEO Update has historically been concentrated. Brittany’s team knew what they wanted and could not figure out how to deliver it at scale, which is how we ended up working together. Those groups are now the executive advisory councils, 10 to 15 leaders each, meeting virtually across the year. We wrote about the launch in CEO Update is launching cohorts.

She put consolidation in the same category. M&A is, by her own admission, her favorite topic, and she has now run two M&A days for the industry. ASAE’s 2026 data suggests the appetite is broad: nearly two-thirds of associations reported pursuing partnerships, and more than 60% are actively diversifying revenue, against a backdrop where nearly 39% of CEOs reported financial decline versus 10% reporting improvement.

Why it matters: there is a difference between consolidating because the model is failing and partnering because it extends the mission. The second kind compounds. The first kind buys time.

What we would do Monday morning

Four things from the conversation that translate directly:

• Put ten conversations on the calendar this month. Not a survey. Ten members, thirty minutes each, three questions, no deck. Log the themes somewhere your team can see them accumulate.

• Find the room that is too broad. If you run a leadership group, a council or a large committee where the biggest and smallest members are in the same conversation, split it by organization size or role and watch what happens to candor.

• Name the two people below you who could hold your job in five years, then get them in front of the board and into a peer group with their counterparts at comparable organizations. Exposure beats a succession document.

• Pick one capability you are building in-house that someone else does better, and go have the partnership conversation before you spend another quarter on it.

Brittany’s closing answer, when I asked what she would prioritize on day one as an association CEO, was not a strategy. It was a question about her own staff: how well do they actually understand what members need, and are we even the right organization to provide it. She said the answer is not always yes.

Most leaders are looking for the thing AI cannot do. It is sitting in a room with the door closed, asking people what is hard, and being willing to hear that the answer is not your product.

Listen to the full conversation with Brittany Carter on Built to Connect.