Category Archive: fusionSpan

Track 1: Data Hits the High Notes

Track 3: Innovation’s Greatest Hits

Track 4: Resilience—The Deep Cuts

Track 5: The Future’s Fresh Tracks

Encore: Thank You for the Music

Here are the pieces we identified as top priorities among thought leaders in the space and our take on how associations can make progress in these areas right now.

How Can Associations Better Prepare Data for AI?

Our community is beyond curious about leveraging AI to ease staff workloads, engage members, and better inform decision-making processes. And so it’s no surprise that data quality, specifically how to condition data to enable AI, emerged as a recurring topic of conversation. This was so top-of-mind for the group that it was not only present in every AI session we attended but also a major topic in almost every break-time or lunch conversation we joined.

Why is this? Because two facts are increasingly clear.

1. Associations must leverage AI to keep up with changing member needs.
2. AI is most effective when fueled by accurate, complete data.

For associations who have long been the keepers of massive amounts of member data, the struggle to turn these mountains of information into a usable resource for staff, let alone AI enablement, is a chore. Common obstacles to this process include integrations, legacy systems, and incomplete data.

Data Maturity Assessments Emerge as Clear Next Step

How do associations begin to tackle this process? There’s consensus that organizations need a comprehensive data plan. That plan should, at the very minimum, stop the creation of dirty or incomplete data in the short term while moving toward integrated, accurate data sets that support AI and data-first initiatives.

A data maturity assessment is a great place to start and will help define the current state, challenges, and opportunities in front of an organization. This weaves together data quality, integration strategy, data governance, and security into a comprehensive view of how data is used in the business. This becomes the departure point for data strategy.

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How Can Associations Find Better Alignment With Their Audiences?

Many of these data-specific concerns were mentioned in larger discussions surrounding the need for stronger audience engagement.

Here are some of the common questions we heard:

• Do our digital experiences meet our constituents where they are?
• Do we understand our members’ wants and needs? Are those wants and needs informing our decisions?
• Are our offerings – certifications, classes, accreditations, etc.- still relevant to our members?

These questions all speak to a consistent undercurrent – member expectations have changed so significantly that we are no longer sure we are delivering enough value to stay relevant. We are all so busy trying to support the current state that we might miss the opportunity to think holistically about our organizations.

Changes to Audience-Facing Strategies Should Start with an Audit

One of fusionSpan’s clients, a global association, recently found themselves asking many of these same questions. They recognized a need to improve their relevancy to their members and embarked on a digital strategy audit to help identify areas of improvement and opportunities for modernization.

fusionSpan’s Digital Strategy Team worked with them to build member personas and conduct audience interviews that provided a more complete understanding of the most prominent issues facing their members and how they are perceived in their constituent groups. This led to the discovery of both immediate changes and longer-term strategic initiatives to build engagement over time.

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How Can Associations Be More Efficient?

Doing more with less is a constant, especially in the world of associations where lean teams are a norm. This conversation is not new, but we noticed a change in the scope of the discussion as association leaders focus more on staying ahead of trends, leveraging growth opportunities within the status quo, and identifying opportunities to automate and rationalize processes.

We saw a compelling demo from Salesforce of how AI can help reduce membership churn.  When a set of pre-defined behaviors are observed, alerts and notifications help staff focus proactively on the most at-risk members first. The vision was clear: organizations that leverage data effectively will deploy their resources most efficiently.

Membership associations thrive on being a place their members can go for specific content, training and events for their area of expertise. But while an org’s content will already be focused on a particular domain, their audience of members will break down into multiple niches all with their own unique combination of interests.

When that’s the case, content personalization becomes a crucial part of your membership experience. When your members open up an email or log into your portal, you want them to feel that the content they see has been designed and served with them in mind. The more you can cultivate that feeling, the more you can use it to drive sales and signups for events, courses and opportunities.

More importantly, it makes it easier for members to see the value you have on offer. If they aren’t aware of the content you have or where to look for it, this can lead to frustration and later attrition. Content personalization makes that content hard for them to miss, whether by spotlighting it when a member logs into the system or by pushing it out to draw disengaged members in.

Learn what moves your members to click

When members come to an association for professional development, they’re usually looking for content on specific topics. They’ve established a niche in their career and they want to dig deeper into that. The problem is that if they aren’t being served personalized content, they might not know what you have to offer in their area of interest or where to find it.

If you have data on which topics a member cares about and their area of focus, you can understand what they’re more likely to engage with in the future. You can then recommend webinars, courses and journals that are specific to their interests.

There are two kinds of data you can collect about your members. One is using declarative information, for example the details that they list on their profile. The other is deducing what you can from the content they access, and building up a persona based on what people with similar interests engage with.

The more focused you can be in your targeting, the better

For example, imagine you’re an association for veterinarians. While your membership base professional interest in animal healthcare, you’ll have numerous breakdowns into specific niches within that – such as primary care or specialist, or small or large animal practitioners.

If you’re pushing the same content about breathing disorders in dogs to all of your members, the vast majority of them won’t be interested because it’s not in their field. And this is a direct hit to the membership experience. The more they see content that isn’t for them, the more those members will start to question the value of being part of the association.

But if you can access accurate data on your membership base’s interests and engagement, you can know which members are small animal practitioners with a particular focus on treating canine breathing issues and suggest that content only to them– and not to members who won’t be interested. You can go further than pushing content too – for instance, when they’re on your careers page, your association can recommend personalized opportunities that fit their experience, specialism and geographical location.

You don’t have to do everything at once

Associations can often make the mistake of thinking that their options are going all in with a cutting-edge recommendation engine or doing no personalization at all. Faced with that choice, it’s easy to assume that content personalization is too overwhelming and expensive to try out.

It’s true that there are powerful, complex and expensive personalization tools out there, like Optimizely and Google Optimize. But diving in at the deep end isn’t the only way to get involved. There are cheaper and less complex tools available, such as WordPress plugins, and these give you an easy way to set up some success metrics and see how it goes.

Content personalization might involve a technical solution, but associations don’t need to be running at the tech frontier for this. What’s more important is to figure out what your organizational goals are, define your strategy and make sure the tools you use are supporting those.

Start by addressing the goal that’s most important to your association

While on the surface content personalization is a way to get more eyes onto your resources, it can be far more than this. Ultimately, it can provide a tactical way of supporting your association’s wider strategic goals – and this is where we’d recommend you begin.

Consider membership renewals, for example. Associations are always looking for ways to boost retention and membership engagement, and content personalization can be critical to that.

Start by focusing on your members most at risk of dropping away and use your data to figure out their personas. Once you have a picture of who they are and why they may leave, you can launch a campaign to mitigate this risk by delivering content you believe they want to engage with. The more they engage with your content – even if it’s only emails or social content to begin with – the more likely they’ll be to step up their involvement over time and see the value of renewing.

Alternatively, you could use content personalization to better support your events and education services. For example, if a member is engaging with content as part of their continued education goal, your content personalization could point out an upcoming conference that will get them the final 10 CE credits they need. As well as boosting engagement with education and events, this helps that member to see even more of the value that your org has to offer.

In order to support your association’s goals through content personalization, it’s critical to be proactive. If you only personalize what users see when they log into your system, the only people who see that value will be regularly returning members. The members at risk of not renewing won’t be coming into the system normally, so you need to push personalized content to them and start pulling them back in.

To learn more, see what associations need to know about the membership experience. Or to find out more about digital strategy can help enhance your membership engagement, take a look at our case studies or get in touch.

Associations need to go above and beyond to prove their value to members

One of the biggest problems facing associations today is how to prove their value. In the past that value was easy to demonstrate. Membership provided access to exclusive resources that couldn’t be found anywhere else – resources like training courses, seminars, job opportunities and communities for networking.

Today, however, so much of that is freely available online. People can build their own networks and find opportunities on platforms like LinkedIn. They can access content, webinars and training specific to their interests from a wide variety of sources. Even when content is locked behind a subscription, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have proven able to scrape websites and help users bypass paywalls.

When membership organizations try to compete on the same terms as freely available content, it puts them in a difficult position. If prospective members are asked to choose between paying $100 for an association’s services or paying nothing for something similar online, it’s tough for them to see the value of membership.

But membership associations are more than a collection of resources and services. The experience that comes with an association is the peace of mind that what’s on offer is credible, high value, and managed by a community who knows your professional practice inside and out. This is the primary way in which your membership experience can “delight” members – an outcome that many associations are chasing after.

Digital hygiene factors are a must for members

Improving membership experience isn’t only about creating delight however. The digital experience that comes from moving through your org’s ecosystem is too often overlooked. On a more everyday level, it’s simply about shaving off areas of friction online so that member delight becomes a possibility.

It’s worth noting that the digital expectations of members are rising, in part due to the seamless customer experience they get when using digital ecosystems such as Google and iOS. When an association’s technology is less intuitive than for-profit sectors of the internet, it becomes a potential point of frustration – a hygiene factor.

Hygiene factors affect the membership experience before someone even joins as a member. At a base level, you need to make sure people aren’t dropping out at the first hurdle because your sign-up process is confusing or slow.

Once they have become a member, it becomes a question of making your ecosystem as intuitive to navigate as possible. Even if you have a platform like Salesforce linking it all together behind the scenes, your ecosystem is going to be a complex combination of tech – from your website and member portal to systems for event management, continued learning and volunteer management.

What do your members experience when they move between those systems? If they’re in a webinar and want to check on the CE credits they’re earning, is it clear how they can do that or are the links between systems disjointed? If they’re only interested in a specific topic, can they easily find where your information on that topic is – or can you deliver more individualized value by proactively putting it in front of them?

Membership experience should be a cross-silo goal

The pitfall many organizations fall into is that they prioritize membership experience but approach it too narrowly. Usually such a membership team doesn’t have the power to make sure that IT thinks about MX when integrating new pieces of tech infrastructure, or that marketing is making it a central pillar of how they promote the association.

For example, the platform that your event team chooses to use might be perfect for them in their silo. But without a wider consideration of membership experience, they probably won’t think about how well that platform integrates with the rest of the tech stack. It might work perfectly well in isolation, but becomes a major sticking point for members moving across different systems.

Membership experience is far bigger than the work of one dedicated team. It needs to be seen as a responsibility that spans across each different platform and department, and everyone needs to be pulling together in the same direction.

IT friction is an MX issue

When you start thinking about membership experience as a cross-silo duty, it doesn’t just improve matters for members. It can also make life easier for your overstretched IT teams.

Friction between the IT department and the rest of the organization is a common problem for associations. IT is the glue that holds your tech ecosystem together, but they get pulled in all directions at once as each unit wants to choose and implement different tools for their needs.

Often IT doesn’t have the staff or resources to fully support each department’s individual focus. If that’s the case, the experience for members suffers as the tools, branding and UX become compartmentalized and fractioned.

The result is that each department feels like IT is pushing back on what they want. That’s especially a problem if the organization decides they want everyone to use a tool like Salesforce because it will help drive membership experience, but individual teams are only thinking of what tool they prefer to use.

Those conflicts become easier to resolve when membership experience is embodied across the entire organization. If the call is made to implement a single platform, it’s not the IT department enforcing change onto everyone else – it’s part of a wider strategy to drive membership experience and engagement, and support the organization as a whole.

To find out more about how we can help your association drive membership experience and engagement, take a look at our case studies or get in touch.

As an organization that specializes in AMS support and implementation, we typically step in after the selection of an Association Management System has already been made by your organization. Our first step is to ask the AMS partner or association for their Request For Proposal, but a surprising number of clients never issue one.

What is a Request For Proposal?

A Request For Proposal (RFP) is a document used when an association is seeking support or consultation on a tool, product, or service for their organization to leverage. The RFP is designed to outline the requirements for a specific project, and is used to solicit bids from vendors for the association to consider during the process.

While there are a variety of ways to format the proposal, they typically take time and resources to create. Make sure this is a project your association is fully committed to doing before beginning the RFP process.

Here are some things to consider as you create an Request For Proposal for your AMS Journey:

There are a variety of resources and templates online for your association to use when creating a RFP. Make sure to highlight your organization information and required details for this implementation, as well as budget info, deadlines, and any questions you will have for potential vendors. Remember, the idea of this proposal is to specify your needs to help find the best fit for your association.

Stay tuned for Step 3 of Your AMS Journey: Selection to Adoption, where we discuss choosing the right Product Partner for your association. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to fusionSPAN with any of your AMS implementation needs!

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