You start your day as an association professional with a cup of coffee and a to-do list outlining your top priorities for the day, like planning the next quarter’s digital marketing strategy. But when you check your email inbox, you find yourself buried in questions about renewals, inquiries from potential event sponsors, and requests for onboarding materials from new members. Before you know it, it’s midafternoon and you haven’t started on your original to-do list!
While managing these tasks is important, there is a more efficient way to do it. Instead, you can leverage your association management software (AMS) to automate and streamline admin tasks. Your AMS can even help you avoid future mistakes or time-consuming tasks by making data-driven decisions.
To make your team more efficient, implement these four tips using your association technology.
Automate Membership Management
Why this is challenging for many associations: Manually managing memberships can be cumbersome and time-consuming. A staff member’s day can easily be filled with tasks like data entry, tracking renewals, fulfilling member requests, and maintaining accurate records.
How Your AMS Can Help
As Protech’s guide to association software describes, an AMS “is software that assists associations with every part of their daily operations.” The guide explains that an AMS can be used to save time and improve member experiences in various ways, such as creating a member portal where members can create custom profiles, update their personal information, and engage with other members.
Additionally, your AMS can assist with membership management by:
- Centralizing data: Member data that is fragmented across multiple, separate platforms is less accurate and takes longer to analyze. Your AMS will consolidate this information in one place, giving you a quick, comprehensive overview of your members.
- Offering self-service wherever possible: When you offer a member portal via your AMS, members can log in and independently manage their own renewals, register for events, find helpful content and resources, and more, reducing administrative workload.
- Automating key processes: Set up automated processes that trigger when members complete a certain action, so you don’t have to manually oversee these tasks. For example, automatically launch an email welcome series for new members once they complete enrollment.
Streamline Event Management
Why this is challenging for many associations: If you’ve ever organized an event, you know how time-consuming it is to coordinate each small moving piece. Factor in manually registering members, tracking payments, communicating with vendors and sponsors, and overseeing logistics, and event management can become a second full-time job.
How Your AMS Can Help
Many AMSs include built-in event management tools so you can plan, promote, and execute the event from the same platform you manage daily operations from. These tools will save you time by:
- Automating registration: No more time wasted manually registering members for events—instead, direct them to a self-service portal where they can register and pay themselves. Offer an FAQ page to help them troubleshoot common issues.
- Managing vendors and corporate sponsors: Perhaps you’re working with vendors who want to secure booths in your conference exhibit hall or businesses looking to sponsor the event as a CSR initiative. Use your AMS to automate the application and payment process, track these partnerships, and distribute badges and other materials.
- Streamlining event follow-up and analytics: Once the event concludes, trigger automated thank-you messages and post-event surveys to be sent to each attendee. Your AMS will automatically collect and store relevant event data in one database, making it easy for you to gauge whether you reached your goals and identify areas for improvement.
Enhance Your Communications
Why this is challenging for many associations: As Allegiance Group + Pursuant’s guide to digital marketing explains, one of the keys to a successful campaign is identifying, understanding, and effectively targeting your desired audience. However, managing your marketing campaigns and communications manually and sending personalized messages to members is nearly impossible.
How Your AMS Can Help
As mentioned previously, association technology is often equipped with communication tools you can use to automate important messages like welcome emails, thank-you messages, renewal reminders, and event follow-up. Here are some other ways to save time while enhancing your communications:
- Segmenting members: To make personalization more feasible, use your AMS to segment members by interest, demographics, tenure as a member, etc. Then, target each segment with tailored messages. For example, engage your Millennial and Gen Z audience by reaching out via text and recommending resources for young professionals.
- Dynamic content delivery: Offer personalized experiences when members log in via the portal. Monitor member interactions like event participation, content consumption, and activity in your member community to tailor the content members see upon logging in.
- Engagement scoring: Use insights from your AMS to score members’ engagement levels, identifying those who are highly engaged, moderately engaged, or at risk of disengaging or even lapsing. Some systems have AI-powered tools to help you do this. Then, you can tailor communications to each group and prioritize reengaging members who aren’t as active.
Leverage Data-Driven Decision-Making
Why this is a challenge for many associations: Using data to support your decisions typically results in better outcomes, but manually compiling reports or analyzing huge amounts of data takes time and can be prone to errors.
How Your AMS Can Help
Streamline this process by using your AMS to analyze data, extract key insights, and guide your decisions. While this may require upfront effort with configuration and data cleanup, it saves you time and resources in the long run. Access the insights you need by:
- Automatically cleaning data: To maintain clean, accurate records, you’ll need to regularly audit data stored in your association software. Integrate apps and third-party platforms with your AMS to prevent issues, and use tools that will automatically deduplicate and standardize your data.
- Setting up dashboards: Your AMS likely offers out-of-the-box dashboards that allow you to get an instant bird’s eye view of your operations or zoom in on specific areas like membership growth. Lean on these dashboards and configure them to help you easily track your goals.
- Scheduling regular reports: Schedule reports to help you evaluate whether your association met its goals or your event was successful. While these are standard reports, you can tailor them to your specific goals and quickly identify trends, wins, and areas for improvement. This way, you’ll know where you stand with goals for membership and event registrations on a weekly or daily basis, or leading up to a conference.
Developing compelling recruitment campaigns, creating continuing education courses, and rolling out new offerings are what keep your association competitive and growing. But without removing administrative tasks from your plate, you won’t have the time to effectively execute those activities. Use these strategies and your AMS to streamline everyday tasks and take back the minutes and hours you need to shape your association’s future.
