Is your association delivering a personalized member experience? Your members want highly personalized experiences like those offered by leading companies Amazon or Netflix. Members want to be recognized by name in communications and receive recommendations and offers based on their specific interests and preferences.
Community Brands research found 65% of members are interested in personalization, with 79% saying it’s very important that their organization provides targeted, valuable content. However, only 24% of associations are investing in the personalization of information. These findings point to an opportunity for associations to catch up with member expectations.
Read our blog for three strategies to deliver a personalized member experience to exceed member expectations.
3 ways to create a personalized member experience
Member demand for personalization has reached new heights. Here are three ways to deliver a more personalized experience for your members.
1. Collect and use data
Leverage your association management system (AMS) and other tools to gather useful data on a regular basis and send targeted messages at the right time to deliver a better, more personalized member experience.
For example, use your AMS to collect and analyze data about your members’ career stages, interests, and behaviors to provide personalized information and benefits to your members. Based on your members’ interests and preferences, you can do things like recommend new industry reports or services to help your members in their specific career stage.
TIP: NetForum AMS not only allows you to collect and manage member and donor data in one system, it also includes engagement scoring and moves management functionality to automate and personalize communications to targeted groups of people based on their scoring patterns.
2. Respect data privacy and be transparent
Community Brands research shows that 71 percent of members of professional associations say they worry about data privacy and security. However, this concern doesn’t prevent most of them from sharing information if they feel it’s secure and/or for their benefit.
Moving your member data and management into the right AMS system puts your member data in one, secure place. Be sure your AMS offers the following functionality to protect your member data and reduce risk:
- Transparency into security and performance status
- Best practices for data security, such as multi-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access and tokenization for credit card payments
- Data recovery to safeguard your data from data storage errors, catastrophic failures, and everything in between
- Compliance certifications to validate security
Also, make sure your members know you have data privacy and security standards and precautions in place. Explain how the information you collect will be used for a better and more personalized experience, and your members in turn are more likely to trust you. That trust will then translate into a better member experience and, ultimately, greater member loyalty.
TIP: Choose NetForum for an AMS with best-in-class security and multiregional disaster recovery. As a Microsoft Partner, NetForum will give you the confidence of increased reliability, enhanced system speed, and transparency into security and performance industry standards.
3. Provide a connected experience
Take personalization to the next level by connecting your AMS with your online career center and learning management system (LMS). Here are just a few examples of the member experience you can provide by integrating these systems:
- Learners seamlessly navigate from your website to your e-learning catalog to your member page. Any updates to user data automatically sync across your systems.
- Create a shopping experience through e-commerce integration that allows members to purchase your association’s learning products from your association’s e-commerce store or LMS storefront. A full view of your members’ purchase history lives in your AMS.
- Send automated emails that acknowledge what steps learners have completed, and then recommend next steps toward certification or credentialing.
- Members and non-members can opt in to receive intelligent job recommendations based on their AMS member profile data, such as job title and location, so they can passively search for new career opportunities.
TIP: NetForum AMS is part of the integrated software suite for associations by Community Brands that includes solutions for membership management, learning management, and career center. They work even better together to help you support a complete, personalized, and connected member experience.
Learn more
Learn more about the importance of personalization for associations and discover tips to personalize your member experience. Read our free infographic: 6 strategies to personalize the member experience.
