Association Marketing

Whether you’re setting annual performance goals, making changes to association programming, or moving into a new membership service, no decision should be made without first examining the previous years’ data.

Oftentimes, associations will entrap themselves in the mindset of establishing long-term marketing or membership-service objectives with just a “gut feeling.”

Lucky for you, your association may have been collecting useful information through their association management system (AMS), customer relationship management (CRM) software, or data management tools without even realizing it.

As you, your fellow executives and board members gaze into the future, you may be throwing around or even “test driving” ideas of new models to diversify your revenue streams and change how you monetize your content. This could be due to revenue declines, or just the need to adapt to new market drivers. 

Whatever the reason, you're not alone. Over the last few years, a majority of associations have reported difficulties in membership engagement and growth, and have turned to innovation before degradation. 

Breaking up can be hard. Whether you’re ending a romantic relationship or a friendship that’s no longer serving you, saying goodbye to something or someone that feels familiar is uncomfortable.

The same can be said for breaking up with data. Holding onto data, even if it’s outdated or ineffective, can feel familiar and comforting. Your mind might start racing: What if I delete it today and I need it two weeks from now? What if there is value there I just haven’t found yet? What if I delete too much and then I'm left with gaps?

If you’re feeling that way about parting with your data, you’re not alone. 

"Our stacks are mismatched to our future," said Reggie Henry, Chief Information and Engagement Officer at ASAE. 

The controversial albeit thought-provoking statement kicked off our HighRoad Spring VirCon 2021 virtual event last month, where Ron McGrath, HighRoad's CEO, interviewed Reggie in an exceptionally data-forward keynote. 

In the talk, the two industry leaders riffed on the definition of digital maturity as it becomes more and more synonymous with organizational success.

Kate Hudson was onto something. And not because she did the 60s style purple sunglasses and cream-colored boa right in the year 2000 Almost Famous film. Rather, in the same film, she coined the phrase, "It's all happening."

That's what comes to mind when I think of virtual event shift. 

Whether we're prepared for it or not, virtual events are happening. They're here and they're not going away. While in-person conferences will start to crawl back out of the cave, the sheer flexibility, potential cost savings, and, yes, data traceability afforded by virtual conferences will undoubtedly turn hybrid event models into the norm. 

Truth for most associations—you’re sitting on a mountain of valuable data, but it often feels disconnected.

You know a ton about your members—what they like, what they’re good at, what their challenges are, and what they’d like to see more of. But the data you have is disparate across platforms.

So connecting all of this data in a holistic, actionable way is a challenge. You need a bridge to connect your technology platforms so that you, the marketer, can reach out to your members in thoughtful, data-driven ways.