Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

Budget for feature discovery and adoption When developing a budget for implementation of a new AMS, one recommendation I always make to my clients is to budget for things staff will discover they want to do once they’ve learned how to use the new system. In a nutshell, once staff has started using the new […]

Customize staff pages for better user adoption The single most important element to data management success, bar none, is user adoption of your technology. The very best technology, unused, is, well, useless! There are many aspects to user adoption, but one of the most important is the actual screens or pages that staff users see

Don’t ask questions for which you already know the answer I was recently completing an online form to submit a proposal for speaking at a conference. I had to log in to the system for it to recognize me (which it did). One of the first questions it asked me was “Have you ever spoken

All decisions involve risk Whether it’s choosing a new AMS or introducing a new product or service, every decision you make involves risk. There are two factors to risk: likelihood (probability of something bad happening) and seriousness. To illustrate: the likelihood of a plane crash is exceedingly small, but clearly, its seriousness is very high. On

Try flowcharting your processes Working with a client recently on their membership join process reminded me of the tremendous value of putting your processes into a flowchart. In their case, a single membership join (organization) requires asking three questions before the correct “join path” is determined. Drawing a flowchart of this decision process will help provide them

“I just want a system I don’t have to fight with.” I asked my client: “What are you looking for in a new AMS?” She responded: “I just want a system I don’t have to fight with.” And it struck me that this is how A LOT of my clients feel about their data management systems; that

Inertia Contributes to Bad Data Without knowing anything about your organization or its data, I’d be willing to bet you have data in your system that you are no longer actively managing/using (e.g., data that was collected long ago for some initiative at the time) or, worse yet, actively collecting data that you aren’t actually

What Are You Doing with New Contacts/ I was very interested to read in a recent report from McKinley Advisors that, with the shift to virtual events, many associations are reporting “up to 70% new participants in their ecosystem.” What that means is these associations are introducing new names to their databases. (Click here to

Be Aware of Selection Bias I wrote recently about the mistaken perception of older members not being tech savvy. (You can read that here.) One of my astute readers, Will Slade at Protech, pointed out the following (I’m paraphrasing): “It’s possible that the reason many associations perceive older members to be not tech savvy is

Some Things Just Take Time I learned recently that an elephant’s gestation period is 18 months. It takes 18 months for an elephant to have a baby elephant. It’s also a fact that three elephants can’t make a baby elephant in six months. There is no shortcut; it takes one elephant 18 months. The same is