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.