The Changing Association Environment

For most associations, future success, or even survival, will depend on their ability to leverage technology in order to enhance, extend and personalize their members’ experience. Proper use of technology will enable an association to:

• “Unbundle” membership packages to attract a larger membership base
• Develop effective marketing programs that address specific membership segments
• “De-massify” or segmenting their membership base
• Measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives
• Turn marketing data into actionable information

Challenge

A national medical association’s marketing department was struggling with all these issues…and more. Data and analytics could not play a role in their marketing strategies, as they had virtually no marketing data, not even a circulation report for their journal, no campaign analysis (they were recording incoming promo codes on a tally sheet by hand!), and their internal data systems could not properly store subscription data about their members. There was no historical reporting whatsoever and no quantitative marketing goals or practices. Their new marketing initiatives were launched simply because there was anecdotal evidence that had worked in the past!

Further, when their marketing staff needed data services, analysis, and reporting, they were unable to define their data needs in terms that IT professionals could understand. Marketing expressed their needs in marketing terms, such as customers, individuals/institutions, sales, which are virtually meaningless to IT. IT would respond using their terminology, such as fields, criteria, tables, which are meaningless to marketing. Clearly, they needed to understand how to harness the power of technology to deliver benefits to their members. They called on TMNG Global to assist.

TMNG Global Solution

TMNG Global began this effort by designing a new position, “Marketing Technical Analyst”, which would serve as an interpreter and single point of contact between Marketing and IT. The Analyst would interpret qualitative Marketing requirements, translate them into specific quantitative technical language and either generate the data directly, using IT for support and interpretation or would work closely with IT to produce the needed data. The analyst would also serve as a resource to the Marketing department in data use and interpretation, thus relieving IT of that responsibility.

The next step was to conduct a complete analysis and redesign of the association’s database systems to enable the analysis and reporting needed by Marketing. Once complete, running basic reports, such as circulation, member conversion, retention, would be easy and quick, and would enable Marketing to focus more time and attention on critical items such as developing a true prospecting database.

Based upon our knowledge of the database being used by the association and our close collaboration with the IT department, the TMNG Global team was able to develop a series of recommendations and a technical implementation plan and timetable for a revised data structure, new user interfaces and new automated processes:

• New rate code system to better classify subscription tiers
• New parent/child relationships to capture complex group subscription deals
• Complete historical data storage and reporting capabilities
• New subscription agency data fields to enable greatly improved communication
• Discount codes to track and automatically price product promotions
• Standardized Journal discount and surcharge pricing policies
• A SQL-based pricing engine to automatically bill and invoice customer renewals
• Customer service alerts to improve data entry accuracy

Our recommendations were delivered in a presentation to the senior staff and executive board and received immediate support.

Benefits to the Client

The client adopted the recommendations and funded all of the recommended changes. As a result, they now have a more robust subscriber/member database and have hired a full time senior manager for the analyst role and a new technical analyst position to assist the manager. The client has the team in place to implement the recommended changes and to develop the function into the future.