My friend and colleague Rob Pitzer at the Smithsonian Institution asked me a great question: "How do you deal with the temptation to keep upgrading your website, when "good enough" would suggest you stop and focus elsewhere?" This is an issue that we all deal with: How do we know what we've got is good enough …
Just received my copy of the book Membership Essentials from ASAE. The book is a collection of writings by association executives on such topics as understanding your value proposition, membership categories and dues structures, and financial metrics for the membership professional. And why do I think this book is so good? Because one of the …
SearchCIO-midmarket.com has a list of five hot IT trends for 2008, and surprise, surprise, business intelligence is on the list. Business intelligence (BI) is so hot, I’m actually speaking twice on the topic in the coming weeks and months. BI is the Web 2.0 of 2008. It’s all the buzz. My clients have been asking …
One of the steps during the database implementation process is data conversion. Part of the data conversion process is identifying which data sets you want to convert (e.g., membership types) and which you don't (e.g., payment details for events from four years ago). One of my simple rules of thumb for data conversion is the rule …
I’ll frequently hear from my clients and other database managers, “Our members keep creating duplicate records of themselves, rather than using their existing database record. What can I do to eliminate duplicate records that are created by my customers and members?” This is a common problem across all of my clients, without regard to the …
This weblog is focused on the association management system (AMS) software market. The objective of this blog is to provide a forum for discussing issues that affect the AMS market and the associations that use off-the-shelf AMS software packages. Wes worked for nearly ten years in associations as director of membership, marketing, customer service, and …
Anyone who has heard me speak about database management systems knows that I’m a big fan of users groups. One of the singular values that an off-the-shelf database provides is the potential to tap tens if not hundreds of other organizations that are using the same or similar software. I’ve written about the value of …
I recently received a copy of NTEN’s CRM Satisfaction survey (you can get your own copy here). Here are my reactions: One conclusion drawn from the survey suggests that “after sales support” and a “user friendly interface” were the two most valued factors in a CRM system. This nicely validates something I wrote almost eight …