April 2007 NEWSLETTER: Member Connections
"Member Connections"
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April 2007 Member Connections: Member Profiles
This month's "member connections" discusses member profiles, or your register of members.
"Ah, the member profile, that boring list of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses for our members. It's never current - it takes a mountain of work to keep it even close - and it's association management at its worst: bureaucratic, no value-added, and a never-ending chore."
If you can relate to this sentiment, it's time you uncovered the pot of gold at your feet!
The member profile is the key to understanding your members, their individual needs and wants, and the value that only you can deliver to each of them. Indeed, it lets you translate a general understanding of your membership into a specific, individual understanding of each member, and deliver customized value to each and every one of them. On the other hand, having a current member profile is also important for aggregating that detailed, individual understanding into a deep and insightful understanding of what is going on in your membership as a group, far beyond what you thought you could know.
An Opening Word on Privacy
We must, and do, take our members' privacy very seriously. Though the particulars of applying privacy concepts and legislation are beyond the scope of this article, we must absolutely keep in mind that everything we do should be done transparently and with our members' permission. But, our members (generally) are coming to us voluntarily, out of interest, for career development or advancement, or for the services and value that only we can deliver to them. And, when they come to us, they bring us their trust - often more than in any other relationship. As long as we never, ever violate that trust; as long as we always act in our members' best interests; and as long as we respect and trust our members in return, we will not stray too far from the intent of privacy legislation.
Member Profiles: The Basics
Most basic member information that associations collect falls into one of three categories: who they are, how to communicate with them, and what they do.
To start, we collect our members' names, their genders, and maybe their birthdates. This is the so-called 'tombstone' data that identifies them to us.
On top of that, we collect contact information. What used to be a relatively straightforward mailing address and telephone number has blossomed in recent years. Now, it often includes cell phone numbers, fax numbers, pagers, Website addresses, e-mail addresses and more, and sometimes duplicated for home and work.
And, finally, "what they do" is a catch-all category for the information related to their interest in and affinity with our association: business associations collect information about their members' jobs, employers, work activities and the like; personal interest associations and clubs may collect this, too, but also relevant information on their members' activities and interests around the community that the association represents. This can be a couple of data fields, or pages of information, depending on your role.
In short, we've got some static, point-in-time information that may or may not be of much use to us.
Member Profiles in a Different Light
When we think a bit harder about our members, however, we recognize that we do have a lot of information, and we could understand and use that information much more effectively.
For example, when we think about who our members really are, doesn't the "what they do" information tell us more about our members than their names and genders do? Isn't that, for our purposes at least, really who they are? And, when we think about contact information, especially if we think to ask how they would like to be contacted by us, isn't that also telling us something valuable about who they are? In fact, we know a lot about who they are. We know that they have joined our association, for a reason. We know something of their interests, their home and work, their communications habits, and their other activities. We have a goldmine here!
Serving the individual
When we first think of our members, we think of them associated by their common interest. So, our members are all chiropodists or widget manufacturers, gardeners or swimmers, commuters or allergy sufferers, and so on. And, that gives us a good start on knowing what to serve them. So, we may offer professional develop or business standards, publications or coaching, or towing services or group discounts.
But, without the member profile, we don't know much about how to serve them, about when they need us, or where. The member profile gives us much of what we need to actually deliver what they want and need from us.
The lesson here is that the member profile is a strategic enabler for our association. It is the key to actually delivering on our mission.
As such, the member profile deserves the highest level of attention and support, from its earliest design considerations, through to its most routine updating. Its composition, its structure, its maintenance and its very existence should be driven by your members' needs for your association's services and offerings.
Think about this point for a moment: does your member profile data align with and support the services and offerings that will spell the difference between achieving your mission and not? Is your data structured exactly how it needs to be in order to maximize the value that you in turn can deliver to your members? Or, has the member profile been undervalued, left to administrative staff removed from your programming and service-delivery people? Does its maintenance get treated like a gruelling administrative exercise, or like a vital first step in delighting your members? Is this foundational piece ready to build on, or ready to crumble?
Serving the greater good
If you could realize all the member service satisfaction and goodwill that your member profile promises, you'd be way ahead of the game. But, you'd still only have a fraction of the value that it can yield. Beyond the vital delivery of services to your members today, that profile data - with a bit of analysis and insight - can deliver tremendous strategic value for tomorrow and beyond.
We talked earlier about this data being a collection of static, point-in-time information. But, over time, this data and its ancestors can tell a story. Powerfully, it will be a story known fully only to you. And, that is a competitive advantage.
Even the most basic demographic (tombstone) data can reveal important trends. For example, consider not the age of your members, but the age of your membership. Is your membership, as a group, aging? If so, what are the implications to serving your members tomorrow? What are the issues around membership retention and recruitment? Around use of services, needs for different services? What opportunities does it present to you?
Consider geography. Where your members live and work. Where they want your services. And where they'll want them in five years time. What does this community information tell you about their likely housing status, their income level, their lifestyle?
Consider their interests and hobbies; their livelihoods; their ailments. Within these changes and trends over time is likely the secret to your continued success.
Now, ask yourself again: is this foundational piece ready to build on, or ready to crumble?
Stand and Deliver!
So, is this pot of gold ready to be mined, or is it just crushing your foot? With apologies for the fractured metaphor, the question remains: is your member profile data up to the task of enabling strong service delivery today and insightful strategizing for tomorrow? And, if not, how can you make it so?
There are three key dimensions to having this strategic resource ready to deliver on its promise: architecture, amendment and analytics.
Architecture is, fundamentally, a design act. In a perfect world, architecting is done before implementation, with crystal ball firmly in hand to know exactly what the data set will ultimately be used for in the future. In the real world, however, we can only: know what we needed it for yesterday; predict what we'll need it for tomorrow; and, speculate about all the days thereafter. And, we're already in the thick of delivering on our mission, so we really can't stop to ponder, reflect and redesign. So, we have to adapt on the fly, add as we must, and hope that our intuitive understanding of our members will serve us well as we go forward. Architecture is, practically, a work in progress.
Fortunately, technology today is our friend and enabler of great, evolving architecture. With the right database tools in place, this work in progress can remain agile and responsive to endless changes in requirements, needs, wants and wishes. Implementing a robust data architecture, using 21st century hardware and software tools, can be done without missing too much of a beat in the day-to-day rhythm of operations. Thereafter, life gets easier, if not easy.
Amendment, or updating and maintenance, on the other hand, is fundamentally a process. It is, and should be, never-ending. It constantly challenges us, frustrates us, and tricks us. The best we can do is to align the right, ongoing resources to the task, and always strive to do just a little bit better tomorrow than we did today.
Fortunately, there is strength in numbers, and a powerful but silent ally awaits our call for support. And that ally is our members. Living in a self-serve world as we now do, our own members are the best channel for keeping their data current, relevant and useful. The Web is the channel - the member provides the eyes, ears and hands. If we use these tools, the maintenance of our data becomes a completely scalable member-self-service.
The key to this, of course, is to engage and persuade the member of the value of maintaining their information, and this is a less difficult task than one might imagine. After all, the member has (likely) come to us voluntarily for service, support and community. And, maintaining his or her own profile is, properly, the enabler for this service and support. If the member understands the value and importance of this task, they wouldn't want anyone but themselves doing such a vital task.
Analytics is simply the rigorous pursuit of insight. It is the process of systematically seeking out the knowledge buried under the data. If using the member profile to meet our members' immediate needs is the definition of "urgent", then using it to derive strategic insight is the definition of "important". Unfortunately, in the past this lack of urgency combined with the difficulty of analysing data, meant that it was often an important opportunity lost.
Once again, 21st century software tools can make this task far more manageable. Out-of-the-box software tools - business intelligence tools - are readily available, given the integrity of the underlying data, to start shedding light on your future, within hours of implementation. And, the cost of these tools is now coming into the reach of all but the smallest associations.
Highly interactive, graphical and user-friendly tools can allow even the occasional system user to glean powerful new insights into trends and activities among the membership. And, this power can be made available to numerous staff and committee members on a full or partial basis, all without risk of altering the underlying data. A demonstration of these new business intelligence tools will simply astonish many association executives.
All of this sounds so very important, and yet so daunting. The good news is that, as important as it is, it need not be daunting in the least. In fact, the software tools exist today to integrate your existing systems, data structures and processes more-or-less seamlessly into a slick member-self-service portal and analytics engine. And, the cost is nothing, compared to the member satisfaction today, and the strategic insight for tomorrow, that awaits.
William Harper Associates has direct experience in helping associations use their member data for strategic purposes. Call us to discuss how you can take advantage of cost-effective tools to get full benefit from this strategic resource.