NUCLEUS ANALYTICS BLOG

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Gravitate Solutions is pleased to announce a partnership with Americaneagle.com, an industry leader in professional website design and development. This partnership will make it simpler for mutual clients to bring valuable member activity and engagement data into Gravitate’s Nucleus data analytics solution.

Americaneagle.com has helped hundreds of associations maximize their presence on the web and effectively integrate membership and communication efforts. More recently, the firm has invested heavily in Salesforce and offers an array of services with the platform including consulting, implementations, and custom app development.

Making the case for Data Analytics being budget-neutral in Year One

At most associations, it is difficult to argue that better information is not a good thing – that better understanding your current members, potential members, and the broader constituency would not benefit the organization.

It’s also difficult to argue that Data Analytics, in today’s era of so much member data spread across so many systems, does not provide better information. 

One of the ways in which Associations differ from many commercial businesses is in the requirement of associations to draft and approve an annual budget. The budget cycle drives the annual organizational cadence and often elicits protracted debates to establish the rates for membership dues, annual meeting registration fees, the price of a 10X10 exhibit booth and much more. The problem is that the data points to support the debate are often limited – mostly historical activity, some trend data, and some minor input from the association board. 

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Gravitate Solutions is pleased to announce a partnership with Naylor Association Solutions. This partnership will empower mutual clients to more easily bring valuable member data from Naylor products into Gravitate’s Nucleus Data Analytics solution. Platforms will connect through an open API integration available via the Naylor Marketplace, the online app store for Naylor’s career center and association management software technologies.

As data continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, data governance is becoming an ever-more important organizational activity for associations and for more reasons than ever should probably be an ongoing initiative at yours. Data Governance has been defined as “a collection of practices and processes which help to ensure the formal management of data assets within an organization. Data governance often includes data stewardship, data quality, and others to help an enterprise gain better control over its data assets, including methods, technologies, and behaviors around the proper management of data.”

We spotted a visualization published by MarketingCharts.com recently that is striking. They surveyed more than 200 marketers at major North American brands and asked, “if you had extra marketing budget, where would you invest it first?” They found that the leading response (more than double the next response) was to spend extra marketing budget on data analytics technology.

Gravitate attended four association-focused conferences in the last quarter of 2019 – AMSFest, Community Brands Xperience, Higher Logic HUG, and ASAE Tech.  

At each conference, we asked participants “What is your greatest data challenge?” and thought the results were interesting.  The responses clustered as follows:

Marketing General, a leader in marketing research for associations, recently released their 2019 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, a compendium of information regarding marketing and associations trends. Marketing General specializes in providing associations and non-profits expert guidance on growing and retaining membership. Every year, they release the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, an in-depth study of the strategies and tactics that membership organizations use to recruit new members, engage and renew those members, and reinstate lapsed members. 

Community Brands recently published a large-scale study that detailed 8 strategies association executives can use to modernize their organizations for 2020. In recent years, “Modernize” has become a buzzword for associations looking to make the most out of available technology in the same way that “superfood” has become a buzzword used to sell kale and blueberries. While navigating the world of quinoa and chia seeds can be frustrating, difficult, and often tasteless, it is almost undeniably good for you - as is properly-executed “Modernization.”

Inefficient as it sounds today, it was not uncommon in the 1990’s to hear that an association was going to build their own Association Management System (AMS) rather than purchase an existing one.  When we heard that, we’d generally put a reminder in our sales tracking system to contact them again in 18 months. By then, most would have spent a lot of money, failed to achieve the goals established by the organization, and lost some or all the technical staff who were working on the project.  For those who persevered and were mildly successful, they were still challenged with retaining their key technical talent and keeping the system up to date. By the mid-2000s, you seldom heard of an association taking this approach.