by Marissa Maybee of Bear Analyticsmountainsphoto.ru
Chances are, your association’s AMS data is not perfect—shhhh, we won’t tell. By placing your AMS at the center of your organization’s interactions, you can get the most from it and move toward cleaner data in the process. All roads should lead to your AMS. This may be easier said than done; a surprising number of organizations collect and house transactional and member data in places other than within their AMS.
Placing your AMS system at the center of your organizational transactions allows you to record activity across your organization, even transactions without direct monetary value such as someone subscribing to a newsletter or attending a free webinar. If members and customers touch the AMS each time they interact with your organization, you increase your member-level knowledge and gain a better understanding of interactions across the organization. This richer information can translate into more demographic and behavioral intelligence on members and prospects and increasingly robust user profiles.
While this may seem challenging to implement and might require working with several different departments or changing existing processes, the benefits are too lucrative to pass up.
Establish Data Protocols
My sister wipes down her leather couch daily. This may feel like cleaning overkill, but it ensures that the couch never gets that dirty. Think about this in the context of your AMS: Increasing the flow of data into your system can result in mistakes, duplications, and a general decrease in your data’s cleanliness in the short term. You can combat these issues by regularly assessing the quality of the information as it is collected, not during a crisis or cleaning overhaul sometime in the future. Establishing data format standards and data collection processes will result in stronger user-facing data capture and allow you to catch mistakes early on.
Explore Your Data
If you are collecting rich transactional data through your AMS, then now is the time to explore. By examining your historical records you may uncover trends, build customer personas, and provide valuable business intelligence to your organization. For example, can you parse out how often members versus nonmembers interact with your organization in a given year—is this trending in any direction year-over-year? Are more members moving from positions in academia to industry roles, or vice versa? Ask your colleagues for input and questions and then dive into the data and see what’s possible.
Armed with this centralized information and the processes for ensuring its fidelity, you will be helping your association truly make the most out of its technology investment.
About the Author: Marissa Maybee is the Director of Insights and Analytics at Bear Analytics, a start-up that helps nonprofits, associations, and event producers unlock the power of their data. Marissa is the team’s consummate storyteller and is driven by the belief that data can tell a story—and it’s her job to make the story as insightful and engaging as possible. She possesses experience in marketing and communications in both the association and nonprofit spaces.
image credit: www.flickr.com/photos/tikkel_nl