Leveraging your data throughout the entire member journey can impact your association and your members. From successfully converting non-member audiences into members, to your membership engagement strategy, to events and non-dues revenue, data can inform every step along the way.
As valuable as data is, though, without a clear and actionable way to track and report across your entire association, it can be difficult to tell what’s actually working.
Read on to learn how to best track and report on your key performance indicators (KPIs). This blog post will break down the essential steps for aligning KPIs with strategic goals and designing dashboards to monitor and share performance.
Performance Management in Three Easy Steps
Strategic plans are noble documents that are interesting to read and can tell the world a lot about your association’s mission. At the same time, it can be a real challenge for association staff to translate them into something measurable.
Let’s break down three steps to aligning your strategic plan with tangible goals and designing dashboards that can help you monitor and share performance across your association and beyond.
Step 1: Planning
Planning is the foundation of effective organizational performance management. It involves:
Defining What to Measure: Identify the specific metrics that align with your strategic goals. This is often where associations struggle, especially with broad objectives like “enhancing organizational awareness.” It’s helpful to break these high-level goals down into measurable components.
Understanding the Audience: Who will use the data and for what purpose? It’s important to tailor your metrics and dashboards to meet their needs.
Visualize the Plan: Dashboards that are visually intuitive and make complex data easy to understand make them more usable. Effective dashboards use simple, meaningful visuals like line charts and bar charts to highlight trends and performance.
Step 2: Designing Dashboards
Once you have a clear plan, the next step is designing dashboards to monitor performance. There are a few best practices to keep in mind to make sure your association staff will actually find the dashboards usable and helpful.
Use Trends and Conditional Formatting: Static numbers are less informative without context. Highlight trends and use conditional formatting to draw attention to significant changes. Conditional formatting can be used in Excel or Google Sheets to change the appearance of cells in a range based on your specified conditions.
Keep it Simple: Avoid overcomplicating your dashboards with excessive colors or graphics. The goal is clarity and ease of understanding.
Accessibility: Make your dashboards user-friendly by using high-contrast colors, adding text descriptions, and choosing color combinations that everyone can see clearly. For example, people with red-green color blindness may have trouble telling apart some shades of red and green.
Another option is to leverage an analytics platform, like Acumen, to aggregate all your member and non-member data into one place that delivers out-of-the-box dashboards.
Step 3: Collaboration and Sharing
Effective dashboards must be shared and used collaboratively within your association. To make sure dashboards are adopted:
Assign Ownership: Designate individuals responsible for maintaining and updating dashboards to ensure accuracy and relevance.
Regular Updates and Meetings: Establish a cadence for reviewing KPIs and strategic goals, such as quarterly meetings, to discuss performance and make data-driven decisions.
Dynamic Strategy Sessions: Move beyond routine updates to dynamic strategy sessions. Use pre-meeting reviews of dashboards to identify trends and outliers and focus your discussions on actions you can take based on the insights you uncover as a team.
Measuring What Matters
Translating strategic goals into measurable KPIs can be challenging, but it is essential for monitoring performance and making informed decisions. Most strategic plans include goals you can think of as main pillars that make up the overall strategy.
Here are some examples of how to measure commonly stated goals or pillars:
Pillar: Strengthening the Brand
What to track? For associations with a goal of strengthening their brand identity and reputation, it can be helpful to track metrics like awareness and visibility. These can be measured using social media engagement and reach, net promoter scores (NPS), web analytics, brand perception surveys, non-member event attendance, press and speaker requests and engagements, and resource downloads.
Pillar: Membership Growth and Engagement
What to track? Membership growth can feel like a fairly straightforward number to track but there are some nuances that can be helpful to keep an eye on. These metrics include membership numbers (comparing year over year), membership revenue, online community logins and posts, and growth within targeted member segments.
Pillar: Innovation
What to track? It can be helpful to allocate a percentage of your association’s revenue for Research & Development (R&D) and track its impact by monitoring metrics like the adoption rates of new technologies, usage rates, and user feedback.
Pillar: Advocacy
What to track? Measure participation in advocacy programs, the outcomes of supported or opposed bills, and member satisfaction with advocacy efforts.
Pillar: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
What to track? Collect demographic data, track participation in DEI training, and measure representation within your organization, individual members and member companies.
Pillar: Advance the Profession
What to track? Use metrics like certifications, accreditations, student and early career membership growth, and industry trends to gauge success.
See how the American Academy of Physician Associates (AAPA) went about translating their 3 pillars into action in this on-demand webinar.
A Data-Informed Approach To Tracking Performance
Aligning KPIs and metrics with strategic goals is crucial for driving organizational success.
By following these steps—planning, designing dashboards, and fostering collaboration—you can create a robust performance management system that not only measures success but also drives it.
Data and visualization can help you transform strategic plans from lofty ideals into actionable, measurable outcomes.
For a look at how data can inform your membership experience every step along the way, make sure to check out our six part webinar series: Navigating the Member Journey with Data.
