ASAE’s goal was to bring all member engagement data together for cross analysis to build a rich picture of overall engagement and participation. ASAE uses multiple systems—AMS, email marketing, and online community, among others—to collect member data, but it couldn’t compare or analyze valuable member activity across systems. There was no clear way to track retention, understand satisfaction, or analyze member engagement. ASAE partnered with Association Analytics to integrate all data into a consolidated architecture for analysis. Connecting the Higher Logic community platform, branded as “Collaborate,” is the latest addition to this long-term project.
Both organizations got to work consolidating ASAE’s data from all the different systems. There was preexisting data available using visualizations with Tableau and Power BI. Association Analytics developed an integration with Higher Logic’s Activity Sync to bring community activity data into its data platform, Acumen, in near real time, where it’s linked to member data from ASAE’s multiple systems. Additional data includes community membership and discussion content for text analysis. This will enable future plans to automatically categorize discussions and derive other valuable information.
“We built an analytics platform and ASAE helped us build a baseline,” said Julie Sciullo, President and CEO of Association Analytics. “Since Higher Logic is a standard integration, we were able to quickly and easily integrate community data into the rest of this new ecosystem, bringing to light different trends, ways to look at preexisting data, and a plan to prompt further actions. And that’s a big part of it – collecting data is cool, but what are you going to do about it?”
In other words: ASAE wants to understand the “aboutness” in its member conversations. At a basic level, Acumen helps the organization visualize search terms and subject lines. On a broader scale, it helps to see what members, volunteer groups, and people in the community talk about.
“Since starting this partnership with Association Analytics, we’ve aimed to make data analytics top of mind for associations,” said Reggie Henry, Chief Information Officer of ASAE. “We want to create some thought leadership around full data analysis. Don’t solve just one data problem – let’s get as much data as we can into this warehouse, so we can continuously solve problems. And let’s bring the community along for that ride.”
Community Data Results
ASAE knew Collaborate was a strong member benefit, but insights gleaned from Association Analytics’ Acumen tool proved the community extends beyond just a place for members to interact. Click HERE to see the full case study and three actionable engagement trends that came to light.
