The fact is: AMS solutions have a ton of fantastic capabilities – but the modern tech we’ve grown comfortable with isn’t always represented in these key databases. Simply put, they aren’t designed to do a lot of what associations try to make them do.
One thing association pros want to do, that AMSes struggle with, is aggregating all the data from your other key systems (e.g. LMS, Events, Marketing Automation, Community) to provide analytical insights that can drive strategic priorities like member engagement, non-dues revenue and member retention. Sure, your AMS might work with your other tech partners to build custom integrations that drive data back to the AMS, but this process is clunky, expensive and very time intensive. Anyone who has done this is keenly aware, there are more than a few challenges along the way:
- Coordinating requirements between the association, the AMS and the vendor can be a nightmare
- The time it takes to perform the actual integration is often long and hindered by competing priorities within all 3 organizations
- The initial integration cost is often expensive
- It’s common for upgrades to both or either system to break the integration
- Often, there are annual integration support costs for EACH integration
Not to mention that getting meaningful data out of an AMS has historically been a challenge when it was just the traditional AMS data. The situation becomes compounded for those hoping to gain insights when data from your other systems is also housed in the AMS. The result is often that the association is sitting on a goldmine of data with no real way to access it.
A Better Approach
Association professionals have seen how powerful and useful an analytics platform can be in leveraging their AMS data. And most association technology pros agree a data analytics platform should be a required part of their tech ecosystem. But many still continue to cobble together data from their source systems into their AMS expecting great analytics, and get little to no actionable insights. That, or they have a staff member needlessly spend valuable time to build a manual dashboard or spreadsheet, that’s immediately stale data anyway, and not easy to access for others. We won’t even get into the challenge when that person leaves the organization.
That’s why the most innovative associations have finally prioritized and invested in true analytics capabilities with a data analytics platform. By having data from all your systems feed into an enterprise data warehouse, you get a full 360-degree view of your data for improved decision-making while letting your core systems do what they’re good at doing, whether that’s housing your member profile information, managing your online education programs or registering attendees for your events. In fact, the insights that come from your analytics platform effectively improve the value of each of your underlying systems – a win all around.
To learn more about what’s possible, and what future-proofed associations are working on, peruse our homepage and watch a 5-min demo or schedule a call with one of our data-loving experts.
