Try not to OFFEND your members… I recently received an email from an association where I’ve been a member for nearly 30 years. In that time I’ve provided hundreds if not thousands of hours of volunteer time to them. The first line of the email read: “Wes, have you ever considered volunteering for [association name]?” You […]
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How will you use that data? One of the beauties of technology today is how easy it is to collect data. Add a field to your database, set up a survey, collect the data. Couldn’t be easier, right? But there are several trade-offs involved (as there always are!). One of those is that odds are good that
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Pennywise and pound foolish One definition of the phrase “pennywise and pound foolish” is to “describe something that is done to save a small amount of money now but that will cost a large amount of money in the future.” I think of this a lot when working with my clients, especially when they are
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How you respond matters Very recently I wrote that I measure customer service by how a given company reacts to a problem. I’m impressed when a company takes ownership of a problem and seeks a mutually agreeable solution, rather than trying to make excuses or shift blame. The same attitude can (and should!) be applied
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Your one non-renewable resource For any project, the three primary resources are time, money, and people. And with any project (and in life itself) the only resource that is non-renewable is time. You can always find more money and you can always add more people, but you can never recover time spent on a project. (Yes, you can
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No system is perfect When working with my clients on the selection of a new system (whether it’s an AMS, a CMS, or any other software product) I stress over and over again that they will not find a “perfect” system. (As I like to joke, if a perfect system existed, I would own it
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Ask your members to update their info One of the greatest data management challenges any association faces is keeping individual contact information up to date. As I like to tell my clients, “Your members don’t care about you until they need something from you.” This means they’re not going to proactively tell you when their contact info
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Customer vs. staff In a properly designed AMS, when the customer goes online to your website to do business with you (e.g., join, renew, register for an event, buy a product), the website is interacting directly with the AMS. In other words, any data changes being made by the customer are going directly to the database
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Measuring customer service When I work with clients on AMS selection, one question that often comes up is: “How good is the software company’s customer service?” “Customer service” means different things to different people. For example, here are the customer service complaints I most commonly hear: “They won’t let me talk to a human. All
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Iterate or innovate? When moving to a new association management system, there is often an implicit question of whether the move is for iteration or innovation. The beauty is, it can be both. Iteration is doing the same things, but better. Innovation is doing new things that create new value. For most of my clients, the focus
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