ASAE Leverages Community Data to Give Members What They Want
As the premier source of learning, knowledge, and research for the association and nonprofit profession, The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) aims to help associations and association professionals transform society through the power of collaboration. To accomplish this, they wanted to understand what types of activities were driving engagement from their members, how to increase satisfaction, and what factors lead to retention. However, they found it difficult to evaluate the true impact of engagement because data was stored in siloed locations like their AMS, email marketing, and online community systems. On their own, each platform contained useful data, but what ASAE really needed was a consolidated view of data across systems to fully analyze the membership journey.
That’s when ASAE partnered with Association Analytics to implement Acumen, a data analytics platform built exclusively for associations. By bringing their data into a central repository, they now have a single source of truth for their data that they use to make more informed strategic decisions. With Acumen, ASAE now sees a complete, accurate, and trusted view of their data which influences how they solve problems.
“It’s incredibly helpful to
consolidate and have one place where folks can go. And it’s a single version of the truth. They have one place they can go and get the real deal.”
Measuring the Revenue Impact of Member Engagement
ASAE knew their community platform was a strong member benefit but couldn’t fully measure its impact on the business. With Acumen, ASAE can now show that community is much more than just a place for members to interact. They can prove their community leads to additional engagement activities and revenue:
With these insights, ASAE can see the impact of community and that helps to drive their overall strategy for engagement. Instead of relying on gut instinct or anecdotal evidence, Acumen allows organizations to use real data to drive strategy and to validate (or disprove) assumptions.
Using Community Data to Give Members What They Want
How do you know if you’re giving your members what they want and need? Just listen! ASAE did exactly this when they analyzed conversations happening in their community from January to June of 2020 in Acumen. Instead of combing through tons of conversations, the unstructured data from their Higher Logic community lives inside Acumen, which aggregates data from other source systems alongside their community data. This information is presented in a visual dashboard where ASAE can easily and quickly analyze and uncover insights.
When analyzing their January to June 2020 conversation data, they uncovered one of the biggest spikes they had ever seen – COVID and coronavirus. While this is not surprising now, back then, these terms were new to everyone. In addition, with the help of visual conversation maps in Acumen, they were able to see which specific COVID related topics had the most members talking about it, which helped them narrow down the challenges that were most important to members. They could also see who was most involved in these conversations which helped identify thought leaders they could contact to help create content or participate in events.
With this kind of insight, ASAE was able to act quickly and created a series of webinars, CEO roundtables and website resources around the most pressing topics related to COVID. The virtual events resulted in record attendance and content resources resulted in record downloads and views!
“I couldn’t do this if we didn’t have a data warehouse that collected data from all of our systems.” said Reggie Henry, ASAE’s Chief Information & Performance Excellence Officer
Acumen helped ASAE understand overarching membership trends and primary discussions within their community, Collaborate, including a huge spike surrounding COVID between January and June 2020.
Changing the Way Your Association Does Business for the Better
Reggie Henry, Chief Information & Performance Excellence Officer for ASAE, sees data analysis as a constant evolution that can help change the way associations do business, as long everyone has access to the insights they need to help them do their jobs more effectively.
“It’s important to make sure everyone has access and is aware of the tools you’re investing in,” said Reggie. “When your team understands how your members are engaging with you, they’ll be empowered to more effectively work with your most — and least — engaged members and take appropriate action.”
Using Acumen enables associations to unlock insights hidden in their data, including the unstructured data lying in their online communities and social platforms. This is not the traditional data that many associations are used to making decisions around, but it’s how associations can move from focusing on the past to building for the future.
American Society of Association Executives (ASAE)
The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) is the membership organization and voice of the association profession. Founded in 1920 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., ASAE has more than 42,000 association CEOs, staff professionals, industry partners, and consultant members in over 7,400 organizations The mission of the American Society of Association Executives is to promote the value of associations to society and to support the professionalism of the individuals who lead them. 