How to Ensure Your AMS Reports Include The Right Data
Every association management software (AMS) company loves to demonstrate how their AMS meets an association’s requirements. The association staff on the project team care about these functions and features, but most of their co-workers only care about one thing: reports.
Reports provide the information you and your colleagues need to better understand your members, customers, and prospects. They help you make the best decisions about strategy, programs, events, content, benefits, marketing, and more.
So how do you ensure your AMS reports provide the data your association needs for insight and decisions?
Identify the data that staff and volunteer leaders need.
To connect co-workers and volunteer leaders with the data they need, you have to become a business consultant of sorts. Meet with them to find out:
- What kind of data do they need to do their part in helping the association (or their department/committee) achieve its goals?
- What data would help them better understand members or another target audience?
- What data would help them make a decision?
Once you figure that out, a new set of questions arise:
- Do you have that data? If so, how up-to-date, complete, and accurate is it?
- If you don’t have the data, is it worth collecting? Is it data that will be useful to others? Does its proposed use align with the association’s goals and strategy?
- If it’s valuable enough, how will you collect it?
Come up with a process to collect the data you need.
It’s tempting to collect as much data as possible on the membership application, but don’t do it. Don’t create any barriers to joining. Collect only the most essential data on the application. You can collect the rest during new member onboarding.
During onboarding, collect a little data at a time, and tell the new member how you will use it. Make sure these reasons are for the member’s benefit, not yours. For example, ask them to fill out an interest inventory or have a membership ambassador ask about their career stage, position, and volunteer experience/interests.
You can also collect data via brief polls and surveys, member portal forms, and after renewal. Remember to tell members how you plan to use the data for their benefit.
Encourage members to update their profiles.
Associations that found ways to collect home addresses and secondary email addresses kept in touch during the pandemic with members who were working from home and who lost or changed their jobs. Another tactic for recovering “lost” members is to collect their LinkedIn profile URL so you can find out where they went if their work email bounces.
Getting members to update their profiles can be a challenge, but here are a few tactics to try:
- Near the top of newsletters, add a few auto-populated fields with the information you have on file (even if it’s blank) and ask the recipient to click on a link to update any incorrect or missing information.
- Add a pop up message that appears in your member portal after a purchase is made that asks members to update their profile.
- After renewal, ask members to update their interest inventory and position.
- See if you can get some of your co-workers, especially those who regularly field member/customer calls, to confirm and update information when someone calls.
- Run a profile update campaign. Have a raffle with multiple prizes for members who complete their profile. Give away something they will all value: conference registration (in-person or virtual, they pick) or online learning program credits they can apply how they wish.
Stop collecting data you don’t use.
Compare the data you collect to the data that’s regularly used by staff and volunteer leaders. You never want to collect data you don’t use. You should be able to tell members’ and customers’ exactly how you use every piece of data in their record. Ideally, that answer has something to do with better understanding their needs and interests so you can provide a stellar member experience and deliver the products and services they need. For example, do you use all the demographic data you collect?
Establish the system of record.
If you store data in multiple systems, make sure your AMS is the primary record for a person’s contact and other essential information. Never store the same information in more than one system, that’s just asking for trouble.
Take advantage of the data in all your different systems.
Siloed data is of no use. Make sure your AMS can integrate with the other systems where data resides, like your learning management system, event platform, email/marketing platform, and online community. An AMS with a bi-directional, open API will allow you to have the 360-view of members, customers, and prospects that everyone talks about.
Teach data users how to create and pull reports.
Many of your co-workers only use the AMS to access the data in it. Find out what they’re trying to accomplish—what they want to learn from or do with the data. For example, if they’re a committee staff liaison, what is the committee trying to achieve? Help them narrow down exactly what data they need.
Make it easy for them to access data in a self-service way. Don’t hide data or treat it as something for only the anointed few. You want staff and volunteer leaders to learn from data so they won’t act upon assumptions or conventional wisdom only.
Guide staff through the process of pulling reports or creating a dashboard. Make sure they have the training they need to perform these tasks. Record a few voice-over videos that walk them through it. Post the steps somewhere handy. Create rules and guidelines for naming reports and preventing the accumulation of hundreds of one-time-only reports cluttering up the AMS.
Hold people accountable for data integrity.
During AMS implementation, associations spend time cleaning their data before migrating it to the new AMS, but data management doesn’t stop there. You need to ensure your association’s data stays accurate, up-to-date, and complete. Reports are only useful if people trust the data in them.
A data governance team made up of staff representing data-using departments must establish data entry rules and take turns helping their colleagues learn how to access the data they need.
Find out what MemberSuite’s robust and user-friendly reporting solutions have to offer.