How did IGEM harness their technology to optimise its data and grow its membership by 180%?
In May 2024, in a room buzzing with a morning of learning and much note-taking, Carl Stokes, Head of Corporate Affairs and Operations at IGEM and Alex Skinner, Chief Executive of Pixl8 Group shared their digital change story with delegates at Digital Excellence.
The Institute of Gas Engineers and Managers saw 170% growth in membership in 30 days (and continued high growth), a 25% increase in conference attendees and over 20% increase in the sales of technical standards.
But what are the secrets behind their success?
Separate systems and siloed data previously frustrated IGEM’s members, staff and volunteers. Every interaction required manual intervention – from joining and renewing membership to buying standards or booking events. There was no single point of truth about their members and unnecessary workarounds were time-consuming.
Project lead Carl told the audience they needed to do two key things – bring all their data together and create a change culture to focus on core objectives and not their existing processes. This meant gathering and challenging their teams’ needs, holding each other to account and having a strong governance process for clear and quick decision-making.
Having transformed their goals, automated processes and brought all their data onto a new platform they are now seeing ongoing success and a highly engaged membership.
Unsurprisingly delegates had so many questions about the project there wasn’t time to answer all of them. We went back to Carl and are pleased to share his answers below:
How did you develop your Request for Proposal (RFP)? How did you avoid requesting what you had always done?
We had the support of an external consultant and held several meetings focussing on the key business processes. The RFP was drafted to focus on the core objective and meant vendors could demonstrate how their solutions could meet the end need.
How difficult was it to streamline your processes and automate them?
It helped that we focused on the desired outcomes and objectives rather than our existing processes. Where we could automate them we did and we continue to look for opportunities to automate where possible.
How are you making the most of your new platform and planning for the future?
Our new change culture means we meet regularly to discuss ideas around improvements and share learnings from new ways of working. When we have ideas or needs that we can’t immediately resolve, we share them with the Pixl8 team and bounce them between us.
They help guide us to the in-platform solution or note the use case and either add it to the platform roadmap or develop the required solution.
How do you make sure your data stays relevant in your new platform?
We monitor engaged users, bounce-backs, unsubscribes and suppressions to ensure the “active” records are the main focus. With the dynamic groups feature, we know the automatic inclusion and exclusion of “contacts” is reliable. This alongside regular reviews of email campaign performance KPIs helps us keep track of the health of our data.
Was it easier to stay within your budget with your new technology?
The primary decision was based on the solution meeting our needs – the result of our change process and focusing on our objectives. We now have a platform which allows us to spend more time developing services and experiences that members want.
Learn more about how the ReadyMembership solution has helped IGEM.
To support membership organisations with projects like IGEM’s, Pixl8 has created a downloadable “Tech Therapy” guide. Or reach out to Pixl8 to discuss any of the themes above.
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