Are you able to monitor your membership behaviour and business performance whenever you choose or do you have to wait for someone to gather the data and compile a report for you?
Business Intelligence can help you have all the answers about your membership numbers, personas and demographics, your membership engagement, your event and social media performance, your revenue and a whole host more on demand and through engaging and interactive dashboards.
The Data Challenge
Like many membership organisations you have probably got a variety of service offerings (Subscriptions, Publications, Networking Events, Awards, Training, Professional Development Schemes, Forums, Membership Portals, Social Media Feeds). Each of your services is probably supported by a different application and a different platform, managed or owned by different teams, and you find it impossible or time consuming to bring data from all those different sources into a single, related and trustworthy data set that can be used for driving reports.
Our experience is that many organisations have a wealth of data that forms one of their most valuable business assets, but they are not exploiting it to its full potential for a myriad of reasons. We also see in many cases that it takes days or weeks for data to be collated, often in Excel, and then it needs to be manually cleansed and prepared for reporting on, and finally pivot tables and charts are produced to compile management reports.
360 Degree View In a Single Dashboard
How good would it be to have a totally automated 360 degree view of your business and members, available on demand via a central one-truth dashboard and accessible from anywhere at any time? Dashboards that are totally automated, refreshed on a schedule, and do not require manual intervention to find the data, tidy the data and manipulate it in tools such as Excel.
You could have all your key business metrics such as new members, attrition, revenue, member engagement, web & social media analytics all in one place and all related right down to the member for maximum slicing and dicing, drilling down to answer business questions, and looking for data stories.
How Do You Do It?
Firstly, you must locate all the sources of your business data that can provide useful insights into your business and membership behaviour and performance.
Then you need to bring all of those data sets into one place. You will need to tidy them up and transform them so that they are accurate and ready for use. Next you will need to find a way of relating your separate data sources. What do they have in common?
Once the source data is gathered, cleansed and related you can start to build a central business model which will serve as your single, central, one-truth repository for all your reporting needs.
Finally you can build a suite of insightful dashboards and reports that deliver the 360 view described above.
Data Strategy & Infrastructure
The key to success is in integrating all of these stages into a cohesive and automated workflow to avoid human intervention to maintain quality and accuracy, and to ensure minimal latency to achieve up to date reporting at any time. You will need to choose the right infrastructure and platform to ingest the data, store it, transform it, model it and deliver it. And you will benefit from developing a robust and future proof data strategy with a realistic roadmap and achievable milestones.
PTR Associates is a Microsoft Gold Data Platform & Data Analytics partner delivering tailored data strategy, analytics and business intelligence solutions and consultancy services to membership organisations.
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