How confident are you that reports from your association management software are accurate?  It’s never a great experience to report membership numbers and then have someone with a different report challenge your counts. It undermines confidence in you, your department and the organization. And it happens more times than we’d like.

Reporting discrepancies make associations nervous about using dashboards. The items on a dashboard – membership counts, revenue numbers and trends, among other things – must be based on reliable data because dashboards are only as useful as they are accurate. You can’t manage the association if you can’t trust the data you have.

In the next two blogs, we’re taking a close look at dashboards – how to structure them, what to include in them and what to consider when you draw conclusions from them. In this blog, we’re discussing some of the primary issues you should consider with your data, reports, and dashboards.

To see whether your association has a challenge with its data, ask the following questions:

• Are you certain that a report you’ve just pulled will agree with other reports?
• Will the membership team get the same counts as the events team or does the count depend on who requests the report?
• Can you easily determine if your membership is growing or not – and why?
• Do the recognized revenue totals make sense as compared to your knowledge of renewals?
• Are you certain your database is uncorrupted?

Unfortunately, we see it all the time – association leaders who don’t trust their data. It’s very frustrating, especially if they can’t hire a full-time data analyst to fix what’s wrong. If that’s you, we’d like to give you a few tips to help you create a trustworthy membership dashboard that works for everyone on your staff and your board. 

Establish a ‘single source of truth’

First, let’s talk about the source of your data. Unless you have a single “source of truth” for your data, your reports can vary widely because they are pulled from different sources. It’s difficult to keep one database updated, and it’s almost impossible to keep several of them current.

I’m sure you know the staff member who doesn’t trust the AMS and keeps their own data in an exclusive database or private spreadsheet. Or the colleague who downloads data into spreadsheets and then manipulates the counts manually to be sure everyone is included. You might even be that person. Using conflicting data sources is only the beginning of discrepancies, and ultimately makes your life harder. Consider giving up your private data.

When do members stop being members?

Once you have a single data source, you must decide what makes a member a member. It’s easy with new members. They pay their dues and are members for 12 months. Once they enter a renewal period, however, defining membership gets more difficult. It requires the association to establish business rules for its membership data.

Are you like Amazon, so that the day the membership lapses, it’s over? According to Marketing General’s 2023 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, 18% of reporting associations do not extend a grace period to lapsed members. In these associations, it’s easy to determine membership; you either are a member or you aren’t.

The largest portion (48%) of associations in the study, however, have grace periods of two to three months, and 20% have grace periods of one month. Interestingly, 15% of respondents have grace periods that range from four months to more than a year.

If your grace period is close to 12 months, don’t be surprised if you have a two-year cycle for membership. A savvy member would only have to renew every two years to enjoy benefits for all 24 months. If you see that type of roller-coaster trend in your reports, it may be due to allowing long grace periods. 

How to standardize reporting

But what does the grace period have to do with your ability to standardize reports? Even when all reports come from the same data source, how you interpret grace periods can skew the counts. Here are some of the questions we think you should consider:

• Should you count members in a grace period as active members? If you do, it will inflate your membership numbers, but that might work in your favor. It will also make it difficult to determine renewal rates, the success of your renewal campaign and the behavior of different member cohorts during renewal cycles.

• Does your AMS allow you to identify members who are in grace periods? If so, you can report on the number of members who are in grace periods. If the number of outstanding renewals does not come down quickly during renewal periods, you will know to spend time and budget to figure out why your members are not renewing quickly and how to respond.

• Can a member in a grace period register for a meeting at member rates or receive journals or participate in member communities? Your policies surrounding benefits may allow slow-renewing members to keep using the benefits they like the most during grace periods.

• How do you identify former members who haven’t renewed? Are they considered lapsed members or non-active? Knowing that a member hasn’t renewed is crucial to targeting your retention strategies. Find out when members renew, as well as who isn’t renewing and why.

• When former members renew, do you provide new member IDs and profiles? Your decisions in this area will have lasting impacts if you want historical data on longevity, committee service or “years-of-service” awards.

• Can you combine or link two related profiles if a member has more than one? Check safeguards so that you don’t merge two unrelated records or keep two different names or spellings for the same person.

• Should you count members who do not pay dues, like honorary or emeritus members? If your AMS allows you to designate these members by type and status, your life will be easier. For example, you might need to designate them as active honorary members or deceased honorary members.

• Should you count lifetime members who no longer pay dues? Be sure to think through offering lifetime member status. You’ll need to make sure it’s in the financial best interests of the association and then determine how to report on these members.

As you begin to think about standardizing your data and using it throughout your association, reporting is just a part of the challenge. Next time, we’ll discuss how to create a dashboard that can give you the data you need at a glance. 

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@intellida.tech.