Growing your membership base, deepening member engagement, and boosting retention rates are likely among your association’s top priorities. But to achieve these important goals, you’ll need to build a culture of innovation and continuous improvement that’s driven by data.

In this guide, we’ll explore four tips for better understanding your membership data, enabling you to gain deep insights to pave a clear path to success.

1. Centralize Your Database

Depending on your current tech stack, you may have important data stored in multiple places (e.g., your CRM, marketing software, and event management system). It’s easy for your data to get disorganized when it’s distributed across so many systems, but remedying the situation is crucial. Otherwise, your association will be working with fragmented data that makes it impossible to gain complete insights, consider all various perspectives, and take advantage of key opportunities.

Consolidate your association’s data by implementing or upgrading to a centralized association management system and integrating all other systems and tools with your database. Choose a CRM-based AMS, which is an AMS that includes foundational CRM functionalities. According to Protech, this allows you to take advantage of “opportunities to refine your engagement, retention, and acquisition techniques, which lead to long-term revenue growth and increased efficiency.”

2. Define Your Goals and Their Corresponding Metrics

Your actions should be dictated by goals that are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART goals). For example, you may combat low engagement by setting a goal to increase event attendance by 25 percent by the end of the quarter using personalized outreach strategies.

But setting goals is only part of the challenge. You must have an accurate way to measure your progress by identifying and tracking corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some common association goals and their KPIs:

• Boosting recruitment:
  • Total new members for the month, quarter, or year
  • Conversion rate for recruitment campaigns
  • Referral rate from existing members
• Increasing retention:
  • Percentage of members who renew their membership
  • Churn rate, or the percentage of members lost from total membership
  • Average membership tenure
• Enhancing engagement:
  • Attendance rate at events or webinars
  • Participation rate in surveys, forums, committees, etc.
  • Percentage of members listed and actively updated in your membership directory
  • Social media engagement metrics such as likes and followers
• Driving more revenue:
  • Total revenue
  • Revenue by source (e.g., dues, event registrations, merchandise)
  • Average revenue per member
• Enhancing staff efficiency:
  • Average time to respond to member requests
  • Total tasks automated or streamlined via technology
  • Percentage of projects completed on time and within budget

3. Learn to Use Segmentation Effectively

Starting with a comprehensive, standardized, and accurate database is essential, but that doesn’t mean you have to reference your entire set of data for every decision or strategy. Instead, thoughtfully pare down your database into more manageable subsets of information, or segments, to get specific, actionable insights.

First, you’ll need an AMS with robust segmentation and analytics capabilities. Then, follow these steps:

• Create categories. Based on your goals, segment members by demographic data, engagement level, membership tenure, interests, etc. These insights should help you plan tailored strategies and communications that move the needle on your top goals.
• Analyze needs and profile each segment. Using details about members in a specific segment, identify their needs, interests, and expectations. For example, younger, first-year members might be looking for networking opportunities or career development resources. Create member personas, which represent the ideal member for that segment, to better tailor content to their preferences.
• Audit your offerings. Analyze your current offerings, events, and resources. Do they deliver value to each segment? Are you consistently evolving to satisfy each group’s needs and goals? If not, meet with your leadership team to develop solutions.

4. Anticipate Members’ Needs With Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is a specific type of analysis that falls under the broader data analytics umbrella. As Harvard Business School explains, predictive analytics involves using data to attempt to predict trends and events that might happen in the future. This way, your association can proactively address issues or changing member needs rather than waiting for problems to arise.

Predictive analytics tools work by analyzing data to identify patterns, creating a model that can forecast future results, and applying what it has “learned” to predict outcomes when you input new data. To work, these tools must integrate with your AMS.

Use predictive analytics to forecast trends in members’ behaviors and needs, such as projected churn rate, peaks and dips in engagement, interest in new offerings, responses to campaigns, and more. You could even use predictive analytics to boost survey responses by predicting the best day and time to share the survey with members.

These tips illuminate the practice of membership analytics, helping you cultivate a clean, comprehensive database and track the metrics that matter to your success. Use them to build confidence in analyzing membership data to enhance your members’ experiences, add value to their membership, and make your communications more relevant.