A great website experience matters to your members. Often this elevates your association above competitors, boosts engagement, and reduces churn.

However, many associations struggle to deliver a better website experience because their two most powerful tools aren’t connected—their association management system (AMS) and content management system (CMS).

By integrating your AMS and CMS, you can facilitate a better website experience for everyone. Let’s look closer at what opportunities integration enables.

Better Member Onboarding

Onboarding is the first step in facilitating a great website experience.

However, onboarding is more than streamlining nuts-and-bolts tasks for new members; it’s about getting to know them. It’s about collecting data in your AMS that will enable you to connect new members to relevant engagement opportunities through your website, a central hub of activity. 

The integration of a CMS and AMS allows you to tailor a welcoming experience on your website filled with relevant messages and resources to quickly engage members with your association’s community. The sooner a member gets involved and sees the value your association provides, the less likely they are to churn a year later.

Customized Learning Paths

Learning and professional development are often top reasons why members join an association. However, fulfilling a member’s educational needs is challenging because each person possesses distinct knowledge, experience, and interests.

Integration lets you create customized learning paths that align with a member’s unique needs. These paths are built on the member profile data collected in the AMS. Then the CMS, responsible for organizing and managing website content, can take that data and recommend relevant articles, e-learning modules, and webinars. The result is a tailored learning journey, which keeps members engaged.

Personalization

As an association, you want members to feel like they belong and that you understand what makes them special. The key to achieving this is personalization.

With integrated systems, greater personalization becomes possible. You can feed AMS-stored data into the CMS to filter and display content on your website, creating a custom experience each time a member logs in.

So, what does this experience look like? It could be a personalized homepage where a member can easily find saved content, access event registrations, and click a quick link to their special committee page. Or they could see recommended content based on preferences or past interactions on your site.

Creating a personalized website experience not only saves members time but also eliminates any friction they would otherwise encounter when trying to engage with your association.

Streamlined Communication

Reaching members with the right message at the right time is important, especially at critical points in the membership lifecycle like renewal. Connected systems make it easier to streamline and automate communication.

For example, you likely already store records in your AMS showing when individual memberships expire. To prevent members from churning, you might use that data to send notifications on your website, which remind them to renew.

You can also leverage integration to lift engagement. For example, if you’re launching a new webinar series that matches a member’s interests, you could serve a banner at the top of your website promoting the event. And depending on your goals, you can pair AMS data with the content found in your CMS to improve your website’s targeting and reach.

Websites today are the central hub of activity for most associations. By integrating your CMS and AMS, you strengthen your relationship with members, resulting in a more relevant member experience, better engagement, and higher membership renewal rates.