5 Benefits of an AMS with a Built-In Data Warehouse
When shopping for a new AMS, even non-techies have to dig into some technical details to know exactly what you’re looking at and whether it’s the best fit for your association. Since an AMS is at its essence a database, find out what kind of reporting and analysis you can do with the AMS alone, and what you’ll have to rely on other software to do. You don’t want to get too deep into your AMS project before learning you’ll have to budget for additional software and manage another vendor relationship.
You can avoid these laborious and costly scenarios by looking for an AMS with a built-in data warehouse. This option expands your data analysis capabilities and increases your team’s access to reports and dashboards. With a data warehouse, you won’t need a separate analytical tool—it can even do membership math for you.
The Difference Between a Data Warehouse and An AMS
A data warehouse is a data repository designed for the storage, organization, analysis, and reporting of data from multiple sources. Think of it as a turbo-charged database that stores humongous amounts of current and historical data. With a data warehouse, you can run queries, calculations, and reports, and use dashboards to share, review, and analyze data. You’re more likely to do some amazing things with the data you have.
Data warehouses are built for speed, performance, scalability, and storage of large amounts of data. In the MemberSuite AMS, the data warehouse is also designed for data retrieval and analytics via our business intelligence software.
An AMS stores transactional, day-to-day data that’s displayed by a console or portal. But since most AMSes don’t include a true data warehouse, like MemberSuite does, you usually need another tool for analytics.
How a Data Warehouse Benefits Your Association
When researching new AMS options, specifically ask about data storage, reporting, and analytics functionality. You want to know exactly what you’re getting and how much more work you might have to do to integrate another tool to handle analytics for you.
Increase the Power and Speed of Data Analytics
Your data is extracted, transformed, and loaded in large volumes into the data warehouse. Because a data warehouse stores data differently than an AMS, you can improve reporting and analytics performance, while conforming to any report or dashboard requirements, without worrying about it affecting your AMS’ performance.
As user demand grows and the complexity and speed of queries increase, the data warehouse can handle it. You no longer have to wait for IT to run reports for you, any permissioned user can quickly run analysis on enormous volumes of datasets.
Data becomes more accessible and useable since it is being pushed to the data warehouse at frequent intervals. With data at hand, staff can proactively and quickly understand behavior, identify opportunities, address challenges, and respond to events.
Deliver Higher Query Performance and Insight
A data warehouse gives you the potential to do membership math. Soon, retention reports can be calculated for you. You’ll be able to report on department or association KPIs and performance benchmarks. Imagine what you’ll learn if you can analyze transactions and engagement by aggregate or by segments, such as membership type, membership tenure, job function, staff size, revenue, gender, age, career stage, or other data sets you collect. A data warehouse gives you the ability to see correlations, differences, comparisons, and trends—and provides the insight you need to become your association’s unofficial, in-house futurist.
Enable Historical Insight
An AMS with a built-in data warehouse can create and store snapshots of data on a weekly and monthly basis so that you can see trends for different segments, for example, member recruitment, member renewal, and member or customer engagement trends.
Uncover the behavior of people who spend the most money at your association. Analyze customers’ historical journeys so you can see what turns some of them into members. Discover what your most loyal customers do and what your most engaged members do. Figure out why some initiatives went well or poorly, so you can adjust your strategy and tactics. A data warehouse helps you make predictions for the future based on past behavior, which helps immensely with forecasting, planning, and budgeting.
Ensure Scalability
A data warehouse is designed to keep up with the changing and growing data needs of your association. If, for example, in the coming months or years, your association collects additional member engagement data, virtual attendee data, email marketing data, or online learner data, the data warehouse will be able to handle its storage and analytics.
Drive Revenue and Provide a Major Competitive Advantage
With a data warehouse in your AMS, your association can compete more strategically in your market. You can quickly gather insights from member and customer behavior, find opportunities to develop new products and services, and sunset unpopular ones. You can understand what behavior drives different membership segments to get involved and renew, and refine your membership tiers and pricing to better reflect what people value.
Put data analytics and insight into everyone’s hands. Learn how our AMS Report Center can enhance your team’s planning and decision-making abilities by downloading our eBook now.