Have you used the phrase “we’re a data driven membership organisation”? It’s a phrase we hear often, but evidence suggests otherwise.
The latest MemberWise Digital Excellence Report (2026) surveyed 480 membership body managers, department heads and directors, and these statistics jumped out to us:
- 80% don’t have a formal data strategy
- 39% aren’t measuring member engagement
- The inability to measure engagement is the sector’s number one challenge
- Behavioural data is rarely used for personalisation
- Critical member systems remain disconnected
To us, that does not sound like being data driven.
Having lots of data, a CRM, monthly Excel reports or dashboards doesn’t make you data driven. There is a difference between having data, reporting on it and then actually using it to understand your members and make better decisions.
Membership organisations already hold huge amounts of information: when members joined, events they attend, emails they open, learning they complete, resources they access and when they renew.
The problem is not how much data you have on a member, it is how much you know the member.
Data Strategy
Only 20% of membership organisations have a formal Data Strategy. Having one doesn’t make you data driven, but it should start with the questions you want to answer. What do we need to know about our members? What does member value look like? What decisions are we making without evidence?
From there, you can understand what data you need, where it sits, whether you trust it and how you bring it together.
Member Engagement
Member engagement is the second highest priority for the sector, yet 39% of organisations still aren’t measuring it and the inability to measure engagement is now the number one challenge.
We talk about member value, engagement, retention and growth. But how can you understand those things if you don’t understand what your members are actually doing?
A member opens an email – what do they do next? They attend an event – what happens next? They complete some learning – what happens next?
The value comes from connecting those activities. Do members who use particular benefits retain at a higher rate? Are there common behaviours amongst long-standing members?
That is where Business Intelligence becomes powerful. It is not about more graphs. It is about turning activity into something you can actually learn from.
The First 30 Days
The first 30 days are the most critical part of a member’s lifecycle.
A new member has chosen to join. They have paid, bought into your value proposition and their motivation is likely as high as it is ever going to be.
So what happens next? Do they log into the portal? Attend an event? Access a resource? Start learning? Join a community?
Basically – have they experienced the value they joined for?
If somebody joins and does nothing for 30 days, that should tell you something. If another member attends an event, completes learning and accesses several resources, that tells you something completely different.
Yet from a traditional reporting perspective, both might simply appear as two active, paid-up members.
That is the difference between reporting data and understanding it.
Reporting tells you that you acquired 200 members last month. Better Business Intelligence asks what happened to those 200 people after they joined.
Data should not make every decision for you. You should be data informed. Talking to members matters, experience matters and context matters.
So maybe the question is not “Are we data driven?”
Maybe it is:
What decision are we making differently because of what our data is telling us?
Because if the answer is none, then regardless of how much data you collect, how advanced your CRM is or how many dashboards you have, you probably aren’t as data driven as you think.
Memberlytics is a specialist data and analytics consultancy dedicated to the membership and association sector. Contact us to discuss how we can help.
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