This is the second of four case studies on how associations are using business intelligence, about which I presented at a recent ASAE conference. There are a lot of details to these case studies, but since this is a blog, I’m going to keep this at a high level.

When Steve Doran arrived at NACUBO, he learned that NACUBO was investing about $19,000 per conference to sell 400 registrations. With a background in direct mail marketing, Steve felt confident he could lower that investment and still fill the 400 seats. Using data that Steve gathered from multiple sources within NACUBO, he was able to reduce his direct mail investment to around $3,000, while still filling all the seats. That was a direct reduction of costs of nearly 85%! So how did he do it?

In a nutshell, Steve developed a five-tiered system that classified his customer base (by organization) by their level of engagement. Using data points from 12 different areas within NACUBO (e.g., attendance at the NACUBO annual meeting, listservers, and benchmarking studies), Steve weighted each of these points of participation and created a total score for each organization. The results were pretty remarkable. Steve determined that of his 10,000+ universe of organizations, more than half were not participating at any appreciable level. Yet up to this point, NACUBO continued to market to them as if they were good buyers.

As a smart marketer, Steve knew that this was the first group to eliminate from future mailings. And while Steve met with some resistance (”What do you mean we’re not going to market to everyone?”), the results certainly speak for themselves. As noted above, NACUBO has cut their marketing expenses by more than 85%, a net savings of over $75,000 in the first year of this program.

I should note here that Steve did not use any fancy business intelligence software beyond an Access database that he built himself. And all of the data he used was pulled from sources within NACUBO.

What I’m most impressed with about this case study is that Steve did this without any fancy software, and he was able to convince the powers that be that marketing to everyone in the same manner was costly and ineffective. By determining who his best customers are, Steve was able to cut his costs and increase his marketing effectiveness.

This is the first of four case studies on how associations are using business intelligence, about which I presented at a recent ASAE conference. There are a lot of details to these case studies, but since this is a blog, I’m going to keep this at a high level.

The Texas Medical Association started using business intelligence several years ago. TMA invested heavily in true business intelligence software. They also hired a consultant to help them implement their BI initiative, using that consultant to help them develop a data warehouse, star schema, and decision cubes.

The results for TMA have been pretty spectacular. Shortly after implementing their BI program, TMA discovered that over 1000 doctors in the state of Texas (their primary membership) were taking advantage of a members-only program, even though they weren’t members of TMA. TMA was able to bring the majority of these doctors into TMA membership, the result being a nearly $500,000 increase to their top-line in dues revenue. That alone was probably worth the initial investment.

But TMA also saw additional benefits. With their decision cubes, they were able to see many different aspects of their membership and potential membership. As a result, TMA was able to alter their product offers and promotions. Since implementing this BI initiative, TMA has moved from an average of netting 300 new members per year to over 1,200 per year. Again, a result well worth the investment.

Of course, TMA had several things working in their favor:

Having said all that, this is a great example of an organization taking a calculated risk on business intelligence, and one that paid off quite well.

As I noted here, I was pleased to see an AMS vendor provide client access to their online help system. In a nutshell, the online help that is available from the vendor can be modified by the client to include client-specific business rules. This is a great concept and one that is long overdue.

I’m pleased to report that I sat through two demos last week where both vendors allowed for the same thing: Protech and Aptify.

In the case of Aptify, the online help can be modified by the client and is protected through upgrades. In addition, Aptify allows for field-level help as well, which is very cool. In their case, you can hover over a field within the database and call up help on that specific field. Nice feature.

I’m very pleased to see more vendors offering this option, and I hope in the near future it will become standard industry practice.

Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

I was sitting in a consulting workshop a few weeks ago being led by Alan Weiss. Alan was making the point that the most valuable consulting is the kind that focuses on transformational behavior, rather than transactional behavior. That is, there is more value in helping an organization move to a higher level of performance (transformational) than there is helping an organization to better manage its current state (transactional).

The same applies to managing your association management system. For most organizations, the focus is on the transactions taking place in the database (e.g., sales being made, is the contact data correct, etc.). But to really get value from your database, you have to focus on the transformational. By that I mean leveraging the data within your system to really transform your organization. One way to do this is through business intelligence.

At the recent ASAE Marketing and Membership Conference, I spoke about business intelligence and how associations are using BI to leverage the data they have for improved marketing and membership activities. I presented four case studies on associations successfully using BI, and I’m going to use those four case studies as examples of moving from transactional to transformational. Stay tuned…

I’ve posted a new article on my website, entitled “Business Intelligence: What it Means for Membership and Marketing.”

Of course, if you’re already on my announcements list, you would have received notice of this new article right in your email box. Not signed up yet? Sign up here.

My favorite quote from Peter Drucker comes from The Effective Executive (written over 40 years ago!!). On page 5, Drucker writes: “The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.”

Quite simply, what Drucker was saying is that any information that you have that doesn’t cause you to change how you behave is useless. So for example, if your organization knows that certain segments of the membership never attend the annual meeting, yet you continue to market to them as if they do, then your knowledge of that is meaningless. It’s useless.

All organizations must have a willingness to change their behavior based on the data they have. The best business intelligence initiative in the world will fail if the organization implementing it refuses to change its actions or behaviors based on what it learns.

So ask yourself: Is your organization willing to change its behavior based on new information?

Don’t forget, I’ll be speaking at the ASAE Marketing and Membership Conference next Thursday, May 29, from 2.15-3.30, on how associations are using business intelligence to improve marketing and membership.

More info here.

I came across this in a business magazine. It seems Microsoft (and other companies) are producing children’s books to promote their products. You can even buy this on Amazon!

Selection and implementation of a new association management system is an incredibly trying process. If done well, at the end of it all, you’ll have a new system that will address your organization’s business needs. There is a natural tendency to think “we’re finished” once the new system is up and running.

But alas, our work has just begun. Data management is a process, not an event, and as such, requires us to continually review how things are going. I typically recommend to my clients that six months and one year after going live with a new system, they take a few days to do a complete system review (i.e., audit). The purpose of the audit is two-fold: To do a sanity check to ensure that we’re accomplishing the things we set out to accomplish when we first began the project; and to determine if there are new needs that have arisen since the project began that we’re not yet addressing.

In my experience, organizations typically find both; that they have not accomplished everything they set out to do, and that new issues have come up. But that’s okay. This is a process. Like adjusting your course on a sailboat, continually reviewing where you are an making adjustments as needed will ensure that you get to the right destination.

I’m frequently asked by clients to review their business processes. That is, to look at how they process information throughout the organization.

One way to look at this is to think about how many times a particular piece of data is “touched” by your staff. The more touches, the less efficient, and the greater the opportunity for error. Take, for example, a product order: if you have one staff person entering data, another processing payment, and yet another fulfilling orders, that is three different touch points in the chain.

The best way to look at this is to actually draw out a “process map” that shows what happens to the data, from the point it enters your organization, to the point you’ve finished using the data for that particular process. How often is the data “touched”? You may be surprised at what you see, and you may have an opportunity to introduce greater efficiencies and better quality data.