American Society of Nephrology Drives Efficiencies and Growth with Data
With approximately 21,000 members in 138 countries, American Society of Nephrology (ASN) collects tons of data. Data about their members, data about what content they download, data about what events they attend, data about what learning courses they take and products they buy. In fact, they had over 180,000 unique records, that were unfortunately spread across different platforms that didn’t talk to each other. Because of this, they were never able to turn all that data into useful visualizations to help make better decisions.They wanted to better understand where their members lived, what they cared about, how and when programs should be rolled out, and whether they were successful. Decision making was anecdotal, not evidence based. Given their rapid growth, they knew they could no longer make decisions that way. They wanted and needed a single source of data truth by which to make decisions so they decided to partner with Association Analytics to implement Acumen, a data analytics platform built for associations.
A consolidated view enables data- informed decision making
ASN has used NetForum for years as their AMS and currently leverages almost every NetForum module available, capturing data from each and now feed it all directly into Acumen. Along with this NetForum data, Acumen also aggregates data from ASN’s email system and serves it all up in easy-to-access and read dashboards so that staff and leaders get a holistic view of their members all in one place.
ASN wanted a single source of data truth to help them make better decisions.
What they learned from the data
ASN’s membership is comprised of medical doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, PhDs, technicians, pharmacists, researchers, and other allied professionals with an interest in kidney care and the elimination of kidney diseases. For years, ASN has been offering free memberships to those outside their primary demographic in hopes that they would renew and pay for a membership later. The leadership team had a hunch that renewal rates on free memberships was low but couldn’t prove this true until the data in Acumen revealed it. Giving away some free memberships may have seemed simple and trivial at the time of the decision, but Acumen quantified the true cost and ASN realized they were leaving millions of dollars on the table.
In addition, there was also a lot of wasted effort in trying to get those members outside of their primary audience to renew. Of course, ASN aims to be a valuable organization for all its constituents so instead of ignoring those demographics outside their primary one, they’re using Acumen to pinpoint the type of content that resonates most with each group. For example, during COVID, they offered more webinars with a wide breadth of topics and one trend they uncovered was that COVID-based webinars were attended largely by people dealing with patients versus academics, who were more likely to register for research-based webinars. Now, they’re seeing higher membership conversion rates overall since they are able to offer relevant content to their different member demographics.
his kind of insight has led to ASN’s marketing staff having a lot of “aha moments” now that they have the data to prove the trends they thought they were seeing. The data in Acumen enables them to do more advanced segmentation for their membership campaign. Before, communications were based on geography or interest codes, but now the marketing team can see what communities their members spend time in and then match content with topics of interest to deliver highly engaging experiences.
Doing more with less
While ASN is a moderately-sized association with 67 staff people, they supplement their staff each year with 12-20 contractors in order to get work done. Hector R. Ruiz, ASN’s Vice President of Financial Operations recalls, “We were trying to do so much with so little; anything we could do to gain efficiencies is a win. We don’t have a department of 20 people to help us figure out what’s working and what’s not, so any tool that we can get that’s automated, that we can trust, and that can give us information as quickly as possible is really going to help us in the long run.”
“Acumen offers us an automated tool that can quickly provide us with dashboards to view our data. It allows users to access information in a very simple way without fear they’re going to ‘break it’.” – Hector R. Ruiz, ASN’s Vice President of Financial Operations
Ease of use helps build staff adoption
A goal for ASN is to decentralize reliance on IT and marketing to pull reports. Hal Nesbitt, Senior Vice President of Information and Outreach states, “Anyone should feel comfortable going in and using the system. Acumen provides business intelligence on demand and is so easy to use. I love NetForum, but the interface isn’t as user- friendly for a less technical user and people have been hesitant to go in and use it. Having a layer like Acumen that’s read- only, looks great, is easy to use and users can’t break, will go far in quickly building adoption. The marketing staff who are using it have been able to with very minimal assistance.”
Worth the investment
When asked how ASN measures its return on its Acumen investment, Hal says, “We’re only at the very beginning of seeing what Acumen can do and we’re only using a fraction of the modules offered. Already, we’re able to do more – and more efficiently – with less staff time and overhead. I used to spend five to 10 hours a week compiling reports and that has gone down to about one hour, so there’s that savings on just one salary alone.”
Hector agrees. “Our biggest frustration was the time exhausted to pull data in an understandable way and use it. Acumen takes all that stress off the table. Once implemented, it’s full speed ahead and it’s so easy. The fact that organizations have full-time equivalents dedicated to report writing seems a little behind the curve and doesn’t allow associations to use their data efficiently. Plus, data doesn’t lie, so it gives us a seat at the table. Whether people make the choice to use it and follow what the data shows is one thing, but we’re able to cover ourselves with the facts at the end of the day. It’s not subjective. The numbers speak for themselves.”
A simple implementation
As an information system professional, Hal was impressed by the ease of implementing Acumen. “I’m the technical lead here and implementation was pretty easy. I’ve gone through other integrations and implementation, from a technical standpoint, was about as easy as I’ve ever had. The Association Analytics support team was fantastic.
“I used to spend five to 10 hours a week compiling reports and that has gone down to about one hour, so there’s that savings on just one salary alone.”
Next on their analytics journey
ASN recently rolled out the community module in Acumen and are excited to see who is doing what and what they can use it for, especially communicating more with members where they already are. “We spam our members with broadcast emails, so we’d like to find new ways to communicate, and communities seem to be a great way to do it.” says Hal.
They also can’t wait to implement MyAcumen, a custom workspace that allows advanced users to create and experiment with new visualizations using the Acumen data model and Microsoft Power BI. Hay says “Now that we have baseline data, we’re excited to build the customizations to get us to where we really want to be.”
American Society of Nephrology
With approximately 21,000 members in 138 countries, American Society of Nephrology (ASN) elevates care by educating and informing, driving breakthroughs and innovation, and advocating for policies that create transformative changes in kidney medicine throughout the world.
AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEPHROLOGY
WWW.ASN-ONLINE.ORG
HAL NESBITT
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION AND OUTREACH
HECTOR R. RUIZ
VICE PRESIDENT OF FINANCIAL OPERATIONS
