NCACPA Leverages Data for Better Member Experience and Better Margins
NCACPA Leverages Data for Better Member Experience and Better Margins
The North Carolina Association of CPAs(NCACPA) is focused on providing superior service to its 13,000+ members in the accounting profession and community. They’re dedicated to monitoring changes within the profession and ensuring members receive necessary resources and updates. As part of their mission to serve their members, NCACPA has been focused on analyzing member data from their AMS to influence decisions that impact the member experience.
In the past, they used Tableau, but reached a point where they needed a different type of solution that would align with their association’s needs. “What we had wasn’t really a holistic view, and that is critical for any organization. So we moved to Acumen and that has opened up so many eyes on the adoption side and it’s just made data “real.” explained Mark Soticheck, COO at NCACPA.
“I want to transform our organization’s culture so we can become data-driven decision makers,” says Senior Manager of Data, Annette Moy. “I want to better leverage internal and external data and determine how we can bring disparate systems together. Our association management system (AMS) houses more transactional information, while other systems of ours capture more behavioral data. We know this data can offer a richer, deeper understanding – and can even help us predict outcomes – and we want this so we can support our staff and committees in making better decisions.”
The Concept of “Fast Data”
This concept of using “fast data” is emerging as a way to spot and resolve issues before they become a larger concern. Obtaining quick access to the data you need from your AMS and other systems is simply challenging. The whole idea is to enable staff with information in a timely manner, so that the appropriate action can be taken to provide relevant content, products, services, or messaging to address customers’ needs in the moment.
“We’re tracking in real-time what our membership renewal trends look like, down to the demographic level and understanding if certain types of members are not renewing at the same rates. Then we can either get out tailored marketing to them right away, offer programming, etc.” – Mark Sotichek, Chief Operating Officer, NCACPA
Better Member Experience, and Better Margins
Over the past few years, there has been an increased emphasis on having data at your fingertips and being able to use it to understand key business outcomes. NCACPA recognized that data analytics brought an opportunity to provide a better member experience and better margins for the organization. “We were looking at live events, the value proposition and member experience, and actual margins. Often, the metric used around events is the total number of attendees, but when looking at the changing environment, we must look at expense and margin data. We made one decision that largely affected our customer experience and significantly reduced our live seminar programs (25%); however, our margin increased by over 30% and added $400K to our bottom line. And right now we are of course looking at all of our digital data points and using those numbers to really understand each member and potential member ‘personally.’ We do this not only through AMS transactions, but through unstructured data sources like community posts and social media,” explained Soticheck.
Getting Actionable Insights out of Your AMS
Getting Actionable Insights out of Your AMS
Like NCACPA, most associations have a mountain of data in their AMS, but it can be difficult to open or access in any meaningful way. In addition, AMS reports don’t provide any real analytic insights to help you make decisions. Getting to actionable data insights requires a data warehouse. By having data from all your systems feed into an enterprise data warehouse, you get a full 360-degree view of your member 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 in your AMS, managing your online education programs in your LMS or registering attendees in your event platform. Simply put – let them do what they do best and let data experts do what they do best – analytics!
“What we had wasn’t really a holistic view, and that is critical for any organization. So we moved to Acumen and that has opened up so many eyes on the adoption side and it’s just made data “real.”
Mark Soticheck, Chief Operating Officer, NCACPAFor NCACPA, Acumen has helped make data more accessible to staff, making it easier for them to look into the data and use it to inform their business strategies and operations. Listen to the full story in this webinar hosted by ASAE and Matchbox. You can also learn more about how to unlock the potential of the data you already have in your AMS in our Expanding the Value of Your AMS with Analytics on-demand webinar.
North Carolina Association of CPAs
The North Carolina Association of CPAs (NCACPA) is focused on providing superior service to its 13,000+ members in the accounting profession and community. For a century now, NCACPA’s primary focus has been providing superior member service. With guidance from the NCACPA Board of Directors, committees, local areas, and established strategic plan, we continue to successfully serve the accounting profession and community.
