The recent 2021 MemberWise Digital Excellence report has provided us with an empirical snapshot of digital activity and strategy within the membership and association sector. With more than 700 managers and directors from leading membership organisations participating in the research, it is a must-read report for all employees within our sector.
At Millertech, we were proud to see the CiviCRM product highlighted as the leading specialist “Association Management Platform”. As a leading implementer of CiviCRM, this software provides us with a platform that represents the culmination of more than 35 years of experience within the not-for-profit sector. Although the solution is called CiviCRM, we are happy to follow the MemberWise recommendation and adopt Association Management System terminology moving forward.
Member engagement and value continue to be vital Goals
As expected, member engagement retained its position as the leading strategic goal for the sector. In a world where the metrics of every interaction are analysed and user reviews are becoming an important tool for member decision-making, every organisation needs to properly understand how and where their members are engaged. However, measuring member engagement remains a significant challenge for many unless they possess the digital tools to be able to conduct this accurately.
It was concerning to read that only 58% of organisations have a Member Value Proposition (MVP) in place. Even more so to see this figure had dropped by 1% from 2018 and of those that do have it, only 40% have clearly communicated this MVP to their members and staff. Usually, we would have hoped for an increase in these statistics but with the additional challenges brought by the pandemic, such figures are of an even greater concern. As economic uncertainty has spread, all areas of society have started to re-evaluate the value of every transaction. For the membership sector, this is critical and effectively demonstrating value to members is now essential.
Association Management Systems (AMS)
Section four of the report discussed membership organisations’ choice of Association Management Systems (AMS) and their satisfaction with them. I was able to review this from two perspectives, both as a provider of our Merlin AMS which is well established amongst medium–large membership organisations, and as a platform supplier of the open-source CiviCRM product.
The statistics show a growing appeal for large corporate Microsoft and Salesforce platforms, but with bespoke or specialist systems still comfortably leading the sector, I believe that the evolution of systems such as Merlin will soon begin to close this growth trend gap.
The first reason for this is that proprietary providers have now embraced the integration vs. build challenge. The traditional approach of build-first/integrate-later has diminished and these solutions are able to better integrate with systems such as websites, surveys, events solutions learning management systems and analytics tools to launch a lot more quickly. These solutions are also not constrained by the number of API calls in or out of their system; something which can add substantial costs for the leading platform solution providers.
Secondly, proprietary solution providers are in control of their software and therefore can respond faster to the sector’s needs. This type of flexibility is often challenging for larger platform solutions that might be constrained by the Salesforce or Microsoft roadmap. Whilst this may not be apparent at the start of a project, the ability to control development, customisation, upgrade and license costs make a significant difference to the total price of a project. Understanding the true cost of an AMS over a five-to-seven-year period and comparing this to the original “sticker price” is often a compelling reason to choose a specialist next time.
Switching to my CiviCRM hat, I was pleased to see the growing implementation numbers for small to mid-sized organisations. We have found that the appeal of an open-source solution increases exponentially when combined with Millertech’s domain expertise; all without directly competing against our bespoke Merlin system. We expect these figures to continue growing, adding to the 11,000+ CiviCRM implementation around the world.
Hosting choices align
I was encouraged to read that cloud hosting is the broadly accepted option for AMS. While many clients have historically opted for an on-premises deployment, Millertech has embraced a cloud-first approach when implementing our Merlin and CiviCRM solutions. Seeing that the wider sector is now also following this approach reinforces our own findings and those of our many clients that switched to remote working at the start of the pandemic.
Conclusion
As always, the MemberWise report managed to cover a lot of ground without sacrificing detail. It highlighted several areas where the sector might need to increase its focus but the choice and capabilities of the solutions on offer continue to be encouraging. We always read this report with great interest but were especially pleased this year to see so many areas in which it has supported our own findings and strategy.
To find out how Millertech’s Merlin association management system can support membership organisations to enhance member engagement Click here
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