Every association wants to build strong relationships with members. Centralized member data can give associations a real-time view of member engagement and reveal valuable information about their motivations and interests.

Though centralizing data can be daunting as there are myriad details and nuances to cover, in the age of big data, having a centralized system for managing member data across various touchpoints is crucial to driving engagement and building member trust and loyalty. Let’s explore how.

Identify and Set Goals

First, make goals for how you want to use your data in the short term. These should be small attainable goals that let you focus on the organizational objective of using data to enhance the member experience.

Identify the touchpoints your members have when they interact with you. Then, review all the places that data lives within your organization. With that information, develop a strategy to bring those data points together. This might require phasing out old systems as you integrate new ones, or deeper integrations between existing systems.

Prioritize Your Data

With your data identified, it’s time to conduct a data audit. Consider what information and outcomes you want from the data. What does your organization’s leadership need to know? What will help inform critical business decisions?

Be honest about what data is and isn’t necessary. Performing audits allows associations to focus efforts on the information that matters most.

Establish a Modern Marketing Data Stack

Associations are shifting from traditional, on-premises data stacks with limited scalability and rigid architectures to more modern, cloud-based data tools considered the modern data stack.

The most common tool associations use to centralize member behaviors, interests, transactions, and demographics from the ground up is a data warehouse, which in the modern data stack is a cloud-based solution that gathers and stores data from multiple sources. It can integrate with other tools so data can flow through your organization.

Today, there are several tools available that make centralized first-party data that get to the heart of member engagement like Fivetran, a data ingestion tool that helps blend data from multiple sources or Snowflake, a data warehouse that that helps with data storage and integration (among other things).

Embrace an Incremental Process

Remember that you don’t need to tackle everything at once. Approaching this work in phases will help lower stress levels and give you time to adjust your process accordingly.

An incremental approach is also a good idea if you have a limited budget and resources. For example, if you have five data sources to contend with, start by tying together only your marketing automation platform to your content management system (CMS). This foundation provides a launchpad to act on the data and uncover where to focus data-centralization efforts next based on what you’re trying to accomplish and what data you need activated.

Use Your Reports

Once some of the data is working together, you can create initial reports. Reports can demonstrate success and justify further investments. Whether they’re marketing reports, member activity reports, or reports for executive teams, they should be an input when prioritizing data sources and inform what data you need and where.

These reports should be produced on a continual basis. As you integrate more data, you must prioritize tasks like identity resolution (i.e. linking member behavior activity data from multiple channels their unique profile) and field mapping (i.e. mapping fields from one database to another) to ensure data accuracy.

As your data strategy and reporting mature, consider ways to create these reports more effectively. To start, most associations will leverage clean data and pull reports manually. As more data sources are integrated, leveraging a tool such as Power BI can help streamline reporting processes and create dashboards that allow teams to access and analyze data in a user-friendly way.

Use a Strategic Focus to Drive Revenue

When you centralize data and improve data management, you can unlock new insights that will help you engage members and recruit new members.

Centralized data leveraging a customer data platform (CDP) unlocks the door to stronger campaign attribution, smarter content, and more personalized experiences. This software combines data from several tools to create one centralized customer database with data on all touchpoints and interactions with the product or service.

Using a CDP can connect member email marketing to event registration and attendance, making sure you understand which events people are interested in so you can fine tune future recommendations based on past attendance and engagement. Focusing on data as a strategic lever will help you obtain valuable insights into the content and strategies that push your association forward.

Associations that set achievable milestones, are critical about data priorities, and focus on the essentials of truly knowing members can construct a strategy that delivers results that mean greater efficiency and revenue growth, as well as deep, honest relationships with members.