You want to make informed, calculated decisions for your association—not wild guesses that leave you wondering whether your actions were actually worth taking. Fortunately, you have a powerful tool at your disposal: your association’s database. By organizing and maintaining your database, you can accumulate a wealth of insights that can guide your membership marketing, engagement, and other priorities.

To ensure your association’s long-term success, you need to stay on top of what matters to your members. Only 24% of members surveyed by the Association Engagement Index rated the associations they belong to as “excellent” at providing services that meet their needs, and only 20% completely agree that it’s easy to find content, programs, and services that match their personal interests.

In this guide, we’ll cover four quick actions you can take to keep your database in good condition so it can continue to power your strategies year after year.

1. Store all of your member data in one place.

Members interact with your association in numerous ways, from attending your events to purchasing ebooks through your online store. Rather than merely storing basic information about your members, such as their name, age, and contact details, your database should consolidate all aspects of member engagement in a single location.

According to iMIS, you should be able to keep track of activities such as:

• Dues payments
• Event registrations
• Course completions
• Product sales
• Email opens

With a 360-degree view of your members, you can better understand the benefits and opportunities that resonate with them. For instance, you might notice that your continuing education courses are popular among many of your millennial and Gen Z members. To recruit even more young professionals to your association, you could expand your offerings to cover emerging industry topics and trends that may interest them.

2. Implement regular database backups.

Your association’s database yields insights into your most popular member benefits, event types, and educational content, which you can use to improve your engagement strategies. To protect this essential resource, it’s important to take ongoing measures to back up and secure your data, including:

• Automating backups daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how frequently new data enters your database and how important the information is to your association.
• Storing backups in multiple locations, such as a fireproof safe, an offsite external hard drive, or a cloud backup service.
• Creating a backup policy, which specifies where backups are located, who is authorized to access backups, and procedures for recovering data from backups.

Work with your association’s IT leaders to define your backup requirements and conduct the necessary training for all relevant staff members to effectively safeguard your data.

3. Standardize data entry.

Typically, your association has team members across varying roles and departments interacting with your database. To promote consistency and minimize errors, develop uniform data entry standards for all users to follow. For example, Double the Donation’s data hygiene guide recommends standardizing:

• Phone numbers. You might agree to input phone numbers as (123) 456-789 instead of 123-456-789.
• Addresses. You could decide to use common abbreviations such as “Rd.” and “St.”
• ZIP codes. You should determine whether users enter a five-digit ZIP code or a nine-digit ZIP code.

Compile these standards into a master document for users to reference from day to day. Where possible, consider simplifying data entry by implementing drop-down menus that reduce the need for users to manually type in information.

4. Check for outdated or duplicate information.

Just as your association changes over time, so do your members. As you continue to enter new data into your association software, periodically check your database for outdated or duplicate information. Schedule a data audit at least once a year to verify the accuracy of your data.

For instance, if one of your members also serves as a frequent volunteer for your association, you might discover that you have two records of them in your database where there should only be one. Additionally, cross-reference contact information that is subject to frequent change, such as phone numbers and email addresses, with recent communications to ensure everything is up to date.

Take this opportunity to identify whether there are any gaps in your database as well. Whether you’re missing address information for many of your members or looking to learn more about their communication preferences, you can send them a survey to fill in these gaps.

By implementing these basic measures to maintain your database, you can hone your member engagement strategies and build a loyal community around your association. Use metrics such as your membership growth rate and retention rate as a north star to assess how well you’re performing overall and continue to make improvements as opportunities arise.