Top 3 challenges:
- multiple databases and silos of information
- extensive customisation of system
- inadequate reporting tools.
iMIS have recently released their 2025 Membership performance benchmark report where they surveyed more than 200 associations and member professionals.
In their report, they outline the following goals and challenges.
A quarter of respondents do not have a digital transformation strategy and 20% had considered it but hadn’t started.
More people didn’t have a strategy than people who did. Digital transformation is key to achieving these goals and eliminating your challenges.
Digital transformation is the successful adoption of cloud-based business systems, CRMs, websites, and learning systems for your entire organisation.
The aim is to have all your data in one place – your single source of truth (SSoT).
Your strategy should outline your organisational goals against how you plan to use technology to achieve it.
To start, you need to analyse your current systems and processes, decide on what needs to be improved and consider the cloud-based tools to help you achieve this.
Implementation can take a while, so prioritise your needs, and don’t forget that all teams will need their own training plans to improve their solutions and processes.
Whilst you can use different tools or add-ons to manage different elements or processes, all your data should feed back into one system.
Fundamentally, you want to choose a system that will save your team time on admin and tasks so they can spend more time on member engagement.
Where you have a specific need, look to solutions that integrate with your CRM. Creating bespoke solutions is costly as it will take developer time and ongoing investment in upgrades (find out more about this in our post about getting long-term value from your CRM).
Only by having all your data in one place will be able to have a complete view of your member’s activity and engagement.
You should be able to see the web pages a member has recently viewed, their transaction history, their email communications and any other essential information about their membership.
By having a holistic view of your members, you can make informed decisions backed up by data.
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