Power (aka Access to Data) to the People

At the ASAE Super Swap today, Bryce Gartner from icimo asked all the association people in the room to raise their hands if they liked their Association Management System (AMS).  Nobody did.   

We have such high expectations of our association databases and keep reading articles about how they can drive member engagement, business intelligence and revenue generation.  But it turns out to be really, really hard to do that in real life.

                      

One of the reasons for that is that it can be hard to get information out of your AMS.  Doing a member look-up, finding out who attended a conference, or getting a list of members that are coming up for renewal soon can all be very hard to do.  I've been in associations where I submitted requests for reports to IT and had to wait weeks for that to be coded.

In a great conversation with John Mills from PMMI at the break, we had a break-through idea.  Well not quite a new one, it's an idea that I saw implemented in software in 1994.  But the break-through we had is that this model is still relevant today for any large-scale transactional system.

The first part of giving people access to the data is to make it really easy to do the simple things.  So something like a member look-up should be very, very easy to do.   Advanced look-up can be just a click away, but basic look-up should be on the organization's intranet home page.

The second part of getting to that wonderful data is by satisfying the needs of the more advanced user, but one who is not in IT.  Rather than trying to develop a complex reporting interface, let them get their hands on the data to play with it.   

Give them an easy and accessible way to export data from the database into a flat file that they can muck with in Excel.  This should also be an easy export interface on the intranet, not buried away in proprietary software menus that I don't have permissions to access anyway.

The more that AMS developers can let us safely into the black box that is our member database and find the data we need, the more likely we will be to raise our hands when someone asks us if we like our AMS.