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NBAAManaged Services

National Business Aviation Association’s Managed Services Partnership with fusionSpan

Project Goals

fusionSpan’s team provides ongoing support, strategic consulting, and CRM management assistance to keep NBAA’s system operating at its best.

The National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) and fusionSpan completed an extensive Fonteva implementation in fall of 2021. The project launched successfully, earning NBAA the Fonteva Innovation Award for the groundbreaking way exhibit applications were custom developed to meet their specific needs. NBAA transitioned to our Managed Services team where we continued to build out their system, ensuring timely upgrades and ad hoc support. Since then, we have developed a highly collaborative relationship that allows our MS team to provide development support and advise on NBAA’s long-term technology strategy.

The goals of our ongoing work with NBAA include:

  • Custom development within the Fonteva and Salesforce environments to ensure their system is meeting business processes and end user needs, specifically around NBAA’s complex events processes and membership management.
  • Ongoing support through system upgrades, troubleshooting issues, UAT help and small technology enhancements.
  • Data collection and member engagement updates to understand and improve the members’ journeys through complex NBAA digital processes.
Inside the project
NBAA project screen
NBAA project screen
NBAA project screen

Project Challenges

Customizations, collaboration, and quantity, oh my! As a long-term client of fusionSpan, NBAA has challenged us with new work styles and improved processes.

Since its transition from an implementation project to a managed service one, fusionSpan has developed a holistic understanding of NBAA’s long term goals, business priorities, and support needs. Like every project, there have been some unique challenges we have enjoyed working through with NBAA.

Customizations to accommodate NBAA’s complex business processes:

Like many associations, NBAA’s business needs do not always fit neatly into out-of-the-box solutions. Many of the projects the MS team works on tackle these challenges, conducting comprehensive discovery, determining optimal workflows, and developing novel solutions that expand Fonteva’s base capabilities.

Highly collaborative work style:

NBAA has a sophisticated in-house development team that our Managed Services team works closely with. We work collaboratively to allocate the work between the teams, sharing code bases, sandbox environments, and coordinating deployments. However, this highly collaborative working relationship has taken time to nurture into the well-oiled machine we are today. Early on, we needed to figure out how to best share plans, coordinate resources, and understand priorities across both teams.

Quantity and volume of work:

NBAA and fusionSpan have become true partners in improving and expanding their association management system (AMS) platform. To that end, the work’s never done, and we’re always balancing new project ideas, urgent issues, and competing priorities. It’s been a challenge scheduling out work, prioritizing projects, and managing ad hoc requests, but fostering strong lines of communication have been key to our success.

Solutions and Outcomes

With fusionSpan’s ongoing support, NBAA is able to constantly improve its technologies and user experience.

Navigating immediate technical support for NBAA is a top priority for fusionSpan’s Managed Services team. However, the Managed Services team does so much more to support NBAA’s long-term technology strategy.

  • Custom development to accommodate NBAA’s workflows: NBAA has unique business processes that require customizations to support an optimal end user experience. We conducted discovery and workflow analysis that resulted in a new way to build out event registration and event management based on the needs of the aviation space. We’ve also worked closely with NBAA to understand their membership renewal and dues collection processes, layering on new workflows for joining NBAA, and developing a rate management module for different membership types. We used our Affiliation Accelerator to enhance this development effort, which saved NBAA both time and money.
  • Ongoing Technical Support for NBAA: The fusionSpan team facilitates system upgrades and patches, bug fixes and UAT support, as well as continuing to add new features. While these are standard services for MS, this project revealed some unique challenges based on the collaborative nature of the teams and the quantity of requests.

To ensure a smooth process, we prioritize open lines of communication and a transparent approach to ticket prioritization. All requests are analyzed for urgency and level of effort, and then prioritization is done collaboratively between our project manager and NBAA. We ensure open lines of communication between our development team and theirs, mitigating risk by sharing code and coordinating deployments. Since we have developed processes to facilitate the work between teams, we are true partners in building and managing their AMS.

  • Data Collection through implementation of advanced Google Analytics: NBAA is interested in understanding the member experience within their digital ecosystem in more depth, and as a first step, wants to gather enhanced data from Google Analytics. fusionSpan will be implementing Google Analytics across their “Become a Member” journey. This requires custom development to integrate Google tags with each step of the join process and collect data so they can understand attrition and facilitate improvements to their system.
NBAA solution screen
NBAA solution screen
NBAA solution screen
NBAA solution screen

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