Leveraging New Technology to Improve Member Engagement & Create Sustainable Growth

Are you still using out-of-date technology to run your organization?

Stop holding your organization back.

Adopting emerging technology and embracing a digital strategy for your member organization is proving to be the fastest route to meaningful improvement in organizational performance, member engagement, and sustainable growth.

The process is a multi-faceted journey of innovation and optimization that streamlines internal operations and provides staff with the tools they need to do their jobs better. As a result, staff members have more time to engage with membership and pursue new prospective members.

Associations that are investing in new technologies to improve their day-to-day operations are rewarded with more engaged and satisfied members leading to better member retention and growth rates.

The software technology chosen to support a digital strategy for a membership organization must be designed to encourage member engagement and contain functionality to support all the operational tasks that associations must do daily.

What to Look For in a Platform:

Below is a list of features and attributes that an Association Executive should insist upon in the software system chosen to empower their digital strategy.

Capabilities

• Modern, scalable, cloud-based system that fuses database management and web publishing
• Purpose-built for the way you work; it must be designed specifically for administering associations and managing member engagement
• Includes inherent functionality for the plethora of unique tasks that associations do daily and provide facilities for automating repetitive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive tasks
• Cybersecurity for both the software system and the Cloud-hosting services must be certified according to industry standards (ISO/IEC 27001 and NIST Cybersecurity Framework) and both should be PCI-compliant and compliance should be Validated by the PCI Security Standards Council to fully protect the association

Excellent Member and Staff Experience

• Easy to use for both members and staff
• Encourages member self-service
• Intuitively provides reports and dashboards and supports data analytics for executive management with accurate real-time data and measurement of KPIs, keeping them on top of status and trends for all association activities

Built for Growth

• Powerful and flexible accounting open API, that can talk to the financial software package being used by the association now and support change as the organization grows into the future
• Cannot require extensive customizations or be expensive to upgrade. In fact, technology updates need to be free and included in the product license.

The Bottom Line

Implementing a digital transformation plan allows you to leverage technology to streamline your operation and improve how you engage with members. Thinking, planning, and building digitally sets you up to be agile, flexible, and ready to grow!

With so many resources available on association software, it can take a lifetime to go through them all to identify what’s really important. To help you in your search we’ve put together a comprehensive guide on selecting and implementing the right tech stack for digital transformation in your organization.