If you haven’t already, you should download and read Marketing General’s 2012 Membership Marketing Benchmark Report, which you can request for free by clicking here.
Tony Rossell at MGI was kind enough to share with me the raw results of the portion of the study that dealt with association management systems. Two items stuck out to me as somewhat surprising:
- Just over 10% of the respondents said they have no association management system at all. That is, they have no database, custom or off-the-shelf, to manage their association. Presumably they are using Excel and Word documents to manage their data. I think this is malpractice, as I’ve written before.
- Another 10% of the respondents are using custom systems. This is not that surprising, though as I’ve written before, associations should not be in the business of creating their own software. Very, very few associations are so unique that they can’t use some off-the-shelf package.
And so my crusade to help associations will continue. Onward!