Offering continuing education opportunities makes your organization more engaging to your members and encourages participation in all that your association has to offer. Today, we’re taking a look at how your association—and its members—can make the most out of an integrated LMS and AMS.

We’ll show you how your association can:

1. Choose an LMS that allows you to be the center of learning for members.
2. Help your members display their achievements in their member profiles.
3. Provide social learning opportunities for your members.
4. Recommend more courses for your members through your AMS.
5. Keep your members updated on additional learning opportunities.

Providing the best possible learning opportunities for your association’s members begins with selecting the right LMS. Choose a highly configurable software system that can satisfy your members’ unique learning needs.

1. Choose an LMS that allows you to be the center of learning for members.

Your association should aim to provide your members with courses and materials that are tailored to meet their specific professional needs. Select an LMS that allows you to be the center of learning by tracking all of their continuing education, even if they take it outside of your association.

It’s likely that your members are already using your AMS to connect with other members, register for your events, and find new ways of engaging with your association. Your next goal is to be seen as the provider for their lifelong education. When your AMS and LMS are integrated, your members will have a lifelong view of their continuing education (CE). They’ll also be able to track their CE with features such as:

• Self-reported learning. Make sure that your LMS allows your members to self-report any education and CE earned outside of your systems. By offering them this feature, they will look to you as their main source for their CE information and tracking.
• Migration of existing continuing education earned. If you’re transitioning from one LMS to another, you’ll want to make sure you can migrate your member’s existing transcript records (credit earned at a minimum) into the new system.
• Lifelong transcript. A transcript that tracks all of your member’s education is invaluable for professionals to report their CE to their respective board and/or employer. Typically a three-year history is required for tracking CE.

The right association LMS can transform your members’ experience with continuing education and encourage them to participate in more of the activities and opportunities that your association has to offer, both online and in person. If you’re thinking about selecting or upgrading your LMS, you can check out Web Courseworks’ guide to association LMS features.

Once you’ve found an LMS with all the right features for your association, you can integrate the system with your AMS so that members can showcase their achievements in their courses on their member profiles.

2. Help your members display their achievements in their member profiles.

Your members’ profiles within your AMS are important locations for making valuable professional connections, as they often contain information indicating each member’s levels of certification and areas of expertise. When your AMS and LMS are integrated, your members will be able to show the courses they have completed on their member profiles.

Make sure that your association management software provides a positive user experience by allowing members to indicate their achievements on their profiles with badges or other representations. This way, other members can gain insight into their colleagues’ certifications and specialties. They may even be encouraged to participate in continuing education courses themselves!

Member profiles that contain information derived from your LMS are just as helpful to your association’s team as they are to your members. Automatically updated member profiles help you clean up your data in your AMS and better understand your members’ current goals and interests, as well as:

• Their certifications. In certain fields such as healthcare, course completions are accompanied by certifications necessary for professional advancement. For association members in these fields, having their certifications displayed on their member profiles is highly important to their professional standing.
• Their course completions. Knowing which courses your members have completed in the past helps your association create the courses they’ll want the most in the future, as well as recommend to different members the right courses based on their demonstrated interests.
• Their goals. Your members will likely complete courses in the areas of their fields where they would like to develop new or stronger skills. This indication of their goals can help your association plan the right events for your members and facilitate the most helpful professional connections among them.

In addition to using your association’s LMS and AMS to provide your members with opportunities for individual professional development, you can also use your software systems to bring them together in person and online for social learning opportunities.

3. Provide social learning opportunities for your members.

Social learning provides your members with opportunities to learn from one another by gaining new perspectives on the materials contained within their courses. This way, members can benefit from their colleagues’ varying areas of expertise. Use your integrated LMS and AMS to make the most of social learning opportunities for your association’s members.

Social learning can take place online or in person. Whichever approach your association chooses to take, you’ll be keeping your members engaged in the learning process and appealing to their different learning styles. With the help of your software systems, you’ll be able to offer them social learning opportunities in the forms of:

• Discussion boards. Relatively simple yet highly effective, discussion boards within the courses offered through your LMS allow members to offer their individual questions and viewpoints about the course material. This keeps them more engaged with the content.
• Live chats. Opportunities for live chats with other members in a course provide your online learners with one of the most valuable components of classroom learning. Discussing the material helps learners explore it from different angles and increases retention.
• Live learning events. Look for an LMS that allows you to host live learning events for members within the same geographic region. You’ll want to make sure that you can transform any materials used in the live event into online resources for members accessing the course remotely.

Integrating your AMS and LMS is especially important when it comes to conferences and other live events. When your systems are integrated, members will have more convenient options for registration. You’ll also be able to use the eCommerce features of your AMS to offer attendees customized event merchandise designed on a platform like Bonfire, which can help fundraise for your association.

Event tickets and merchandise aren’t the only items you can offer your members through your AMS. With integrated software systems, you’ll also be able to offer them more courses based on those they’ve already completed.

4. Recommend more courses for your members through your AMS.

Your AMS—and especially your members’ profiles—provides your association with comprehensive information on your learners’ professional achievements and goals. Your association can use this information in your AMS to offer individualized recommendations for courses via your LMS.

With the help of your association’s member database, you can further your members’ professional development by offering them the right continuing education courses. These recommendations can be based on:

• Their past course completion. It’s likely that your members will want to develop or improve a skill set through a series of related courses. Recommendations based on individual members’ past course completions within your LMS are some of the most appreciated and effective.
• Their peers’ course completions. As professional expectations in various fields shift to meet new needs, certain courses are likely to become popular among your association’s members. These can be highly effective recommendations as well.
• Their professional sectors. If your association has members in a wider range of professional sectors and subsectors, you’ll likely use your software systems to recommend very different courses to different members.

Personalized course recommendations can help your association re-engage lapsed members and encourage your most active members to participate in more of your association’s offerings. For all of your members, it’s important that you use all of your software—your AMS and LMS as well as your association’s website—to keep your members updated on all of the opportunities available to them.

5. Keep your members updated on additional learning opportunities.

Your members value the insights and opportunities that come with being a part of your association and want to learn as much as possible from their experience. Whenever you add new course offerings to your LMS or develop more ways for your members to learn and grow, make sure that you share these opportunities through your AMS and association website.

Helping your members learn more and reach their professional goals is an important component of your association’s brand and story, so you’ll want to place learning opportunities front and center on all of the platforms that you use to communicate with your members. These include:

• Communications sent via your AMS. Offering courses that your members are sure to be interested in? Select an AMS that allows you to send out automated communication about the new offerings to all of your members. You can also segment your member database and send the communication to the appropriate groups of members.
• Committees and regional groups within your AMS. Some opportunities, especially live learning events that take place within specific regions, may be of special interest to regional chapters of your association or other member-run subgroups. Make sure that these groups are aware of the learning opportunities available to them.
• Your association’s website. Members should be able to visit your association’s website to learn more about the opportunities you provide for their professional development, including in the form of on-demand course offerings. This can encourage current members to register for courses and potential members to join your association.

When your software systems work together to help your association create and distribute valuable learning materials, your members are sure to benefit from the opportunities that you provide. Integrated systems make it easy to expand and share your offerings, facilitating your members’ professional development.

If your association is already using an AMS to manage your members, an LMS to create and offer continuing education courses, or both of these software systems, integrating them can better facilitate your members’ learning. Choose comprehensive systems that make it easy to provide your members with the materials they need to learn and succeed in their specific fields.

Amber Bovenmyer is the Director of Sales & Marketing at Web Courseworks. She’s committed to helping association executives realize the potential of their education programs and turn them into high performing revenue generators. Amber was named one of Madison, Wisconsin’s 40 under 40 and the number 1 LMS salesperson by Talented Learning.

The post Integrating Your LMS and AMS: 5 Best Practices to Follow appeared first on Personify.

Let’s say your membership team needs a quarterly readout of engagement to share with the board of directors. You have decided to measure engagement by individual member count, frequency of customer activities per individual member, and membership certification status. Running this process manually each quarter is not only time-intensive but can position IT as a bottleneck in the reporting process.

The Novus APIs’ Web Admin interface lets users manage the scope of their APIs, including what endpoints are available and who has access.

With the right technology tools, you can automate this process to satisfy your leadership’s requirements and provide a unified view of how your organization is driving engagement with members.

An organization’s technology should support business processes and organizational goals, not restrict or impede them. When your software doesn’t allow you to easily manipulate data and automate manual processes, it ends up feeling like you’re the one doing all the work.

There’s a Better Way

You may already be familiar with the power of an Integration Platform As a Service (iPaaS) and how you can connect best-of-breed technologies for unified data integration and secure, bi-directional exchange of data. (If not, get caught up with our iPaaS Guide.)

Integration projects and robust APIs work well together to facilitate integration, reduce time to value, and accelerate your organization’s drive towards innovation. When your data is integrated and accessible, there’s more time to devote to new initiatives and programs that provide real value for members and constituents.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce the first release of our Novus APIs, a proprietary new integration method that allows for easy reporting, process automation, and the ability to easily create custom applications or services that leverage your Personify data.

At Personify, our goal is to help make your data more accurate, accessible, and actionable. Our Novus APIs will allow you to do just that.

How Do Personify’s Novus APIs Differ from Other Integration Methods?

To give our clients maximum flexibility, we provide several options available when deciding to integrate data streams and automate workflows, and many work in tandem together to provide better insights:

• Personify Hub allows you to connect existing applications directly into a Personify or an alternate ecosystem and provide secure, bi-directional exchange of your data.
• Direct integrations allow linking mobile applications and partners’ end-to-end systems to your Personify environment.
• Import and export processes provide for one-time or infrequent data transfers and can be used for ETL processes that are unlikely to be repeated.
• Novus APIs can be used for reporting, frequent large-scale operations (and automation of frequent processes), and custom applications or services manipulating or accessing Personify data.

How Can Novus APIs Help Me?

APIs serve as the backbone to many association’s data systems and technology tools. They help you make more informed decisions about the future of your organization. We’ve developed Novus APIs, to further improve reporting with:

• Better Encapsulation: making it easier to interpret what methods and objects are intended for what purposes, and easier to control who’s exposed to which endpoints
• More Parameters: customizing your API requests (which we’ve added to satisfy user voice requests), and allowing for more server-side functionality than our old data services
• Improved Logical Structure: allowing for improved performance for at-scale operations and ease of navigation.
• Swagger Interface: Our APIs are built using Swagger, a widely adopted API documentation platform across the software industry. This platform is easy to comprehend, meaning that non-developers can view an endpoint’s documentation page, select values, and make a test API call without writing any code. The platform is human and machine readable, and it easily adjusts for both human eyes and programs reading in the structure of the API.

Ready to learn more? If you’re interested, reach out to your account manager or connect with us to find out if Novus APIs are a good fit for your organization.

The post Supercharge Your Data Insights with Novus APIs appeared first on Personify.

It’s the start of a new year, a blank slate filled with opportunity and fresh perspectives.

Right?

While 2019 affords nonprofits the chance to adjust their technology strategy to improve on what may not have worked as planned, the latest trends in digital transformation for the year ahead reflect some particularly hard-won lessons from the past few years, on both the business and technology sides. Taking the time to understand how these insights came about can help nonprofits avoid making the same painful, expensive and time-consuming realizations.

In the year ahead, we predict that nonprofits will scale-back Big Bang rhetoric in favor of a results-driven, iterative approach to innovation and renewed efforts around operational efficiency.

Prediction 1: From bottom-line delivery to top-line strategy.

Although the way in which nonprofit technologists navigate the path ahead may change, there’s no doubt digital transformation will continue, decentralizing IT and turning CIOs into business executives. Indeed, 84 percent of CIOs at top-performing digital organizations report their role has substantially widened beyond IT, with innovation and transformation being their prime responsibilities, according to Gartner’s CIO Agenda report.

The new paradigm is shifting success measures from bottom-line delivery to simultaneously driving operational efficiencies and supporting top-line data initiatives for improved acquisition, engagement and retention. Per research from IDC, by 2020, 80 percent of IT executive leadership will be compensated based on business KPIs and metrics that measure IT effectiveness in driving business performance and growth, not IT operational measures.

Heightened expectations necessitate a need for a complete view of organizational performance from a single pane of glass. Systems and their respective data sets must be integrated, and central data repositories should facilitate easy access to reporting with drag and drop data visualization, self-guided business discovery tools and easily accessible dashboards to deliver at-a-glance measures of progress against a nonprofits strategic goals – whether or not they live in the IT department.

Prediction 2: Discovering untapped revenue opportunities.

Professional societies offering company member benefits. Trade associations offering individual memberships. All associations looking to fundraising, advocacy, volunteers – typically more charitable/philanthropic business models/strategies. Fundraising organizations offering “membership levels” with member benefits. Nonprofits applying traditional models, like moves management, in new ways to deepen engagement in other programs.

Growth is often at the top of the strategic priorities lists that CIOs are working to help their organizations achieve and 2019 will be no different. Many nonprofits, especially with a membership focus, continue to explore opportunities to boost non-traditional revenue streams. For example, according to ASAE, in 1953 associations received 95.7 percent of their revenue from membership dues. In 2018, that number fell to 41.4 percent for trade associations and just 34.2 percent for professional associations.

Organizations are looking to extend their message and increase the value of their member benefits, but the infrastructure and applications must be in place to support organizational agility while maintaining a good constituent experience. As pressure to drive non-traditional revenue continues to build, we believe that 2019 will see an even greater emphasis on integration of systems, creating centralized data for improved member experiences and quick identification of new opportunities.

Prediction 3: Artificial acuity for long-term vision with immediate value.

While a continued area of focus, artificial intelligence (AI) has yet to fully realize early expectations for revolutionizing nonprofit technologies. Even recent Gartner has acknowledged that, through 2020, 80 percent of AI projects will remain alchemy, run by wizards whose talents will not scale in the organization.

Compelled to curtail IT spending, improve enterprise IT agility, and accelerate innovation, IDC also reports 70 percent of CIOs will aggressively apply AI to operations, tools, and processes by 2021. Personify expects this trend to extend to the nonprofit sector, with 2019 seeing a highly-focused application of this technology in meaningful ways, delivering immediate value by solving business issues in real-time. For example, predictive analytics may help nonprofits proactively identify retention risks in their database while the introduction of chatbot may streamline operations, improving staff efficiency and the acquisition of new members.

Prediction 4:  Engagement made seamless.

As consulting firm Bain & Company recently observed, “Managing interactions, or episodes, as part of an integrated journey is one of the top three most effective customer (member) techniques.”

Research conducted for the retail sector by Aberdeen Group reports, organizations with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.

OK, but what does this have to do with nonprofits?

Today, exposure to technology is ubiquitous. The consumerization of IT continues, with greater demand from constituents for more integrated experiences that mirror what they see in other areas of their lives. Why can’t the nonprofits with whom they engage be more like Amazon? Or Netflix? Or LinkedIn?

Personify believes 2019 will see omnichannel trends long-influencing the retail sector emerge in the nonprofit space, creating immersive experiences that blur the lines between in-person and digital interactions, regardless of geography. Whether interacting with a national organization, a chapter, a global association, local office streamlined technologies deliver unified experiences will help drive expansion, engagement and retention.

Prediction 5: Honest conversations today, innovation tomorrow.

It is, very frankly, the elephant in the room.

Technical debt is incurred when the more expedient option is taken during the technology development process over the smarter, better choice for the longer term, but which often takes more time and resources to realize. It is also an off-balance sheet liability that’s growing and has not been accounted for as it should be to stakeholders.

With limited resources, the technical debt of associations and nonprofits has been steadily accumulating in organizations for almost as long as they’ve had their existing platforms in place. Fragmented customer databases, systems that haven’t been upgraded in recent memory, time-consuming operational manual processes that should long ago been automated, etc. when viable alternates such as exist pose risk to digital transformation and future success. Per research from Cisco, companies are spending 90 percent of their budgets keeping older IT systems up and running, leaving little for new digital development. What’s more, outdated systems create a fragile foundation upon which to build modern business systems and processes.

In 2019, we believe that organizations will finally take steps to understand, and remediate, technical debt as organizations prepare for long-term growth. While a “rip and replace” of existing solutions may be impractical, recognizing the potential harm existing systems cause, committing to the exploration of the potential cost benefit provided through new technologies and creating a plan to grow beyond the limitations of technical debt are essential for success in 2019 and beyond.

The post 5 Nonprofit Technology Trends to Watch in 2019 appeared first on Personify.

“Associations are slow to change or adopt new technology. “

“Unless you’re in technology, you don’t get technology.”

We’ve all heard it all before. People both inside and outside our space are quick to jump on nonprofits for a perceived lack of innovation. Nonprofit and association budgets are smaller, organizations run leaner, and you often can’t make the kinds of large-scale investments in software, infrastructure and data management as other, more consumer-focused companies.

But things are changing, and (as you know) they’re changing fast. Cloud-based apps, smartphones and the Internet of Things have made technology more accessible than ever and more often than not we’re hearing from organizations who are no longer struggling with a lack of technology – they have too much. Your Meetings team is on one platform for event registration. Marketing is on another for email campaigns. Sales is tracking prospects somewhere else. And Membership has to keep track of everyone in a database – but Finance uses a specific accounting software for balancing the books. And for some reason, another team is tracking everything on a series of spreadsheets.

Your organization has invaluable customer data and actionable insights – spread across disparate systems. Your IT team is overwhelmed with internal requests to generate reports, upload data, merge records, clean up bad data. Why can’t all of these applications just talk to each other?

Your organization needs a single source of truth for your data, but you also need the flexibility to allow your teams to use their specialized best-of-breed tools. Now, building connections between different systems can be hard to accomplish with a traditional architecture. The legacy approach of creating direct connections between unrelated touchpoints is simply too complex. Microservices, IoT devices, business SaaS applications and databases (legacy or not) might operate on different business logic and may not have been built to work together.

Sound familiar? Organizations often want to take advantage of what’s new but struggle to make do with old technology too expensive to replace. If this is the situation your team is finding themselves in, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can not only help manage these connections but give you the scale you need to grow. So what is an iPaaS? It offers a set of cloud-based tools enabling teams to manage and integrate various applications and services from across their organization. iPaaS platforms simplify integrations, often coming pre-configured with many commonly used business applications and a low setup cost.  Other benefits of iPaaS include:

• Ease: Having all connections in one place streamlines the process of managing integrations and querying them when you’re looking for something specific.
• Lowers Cost: iPaaS reduces costs by allowing organizations to quickly test new applications and switch them out if they’re not providing value.
• Flexibility: Empowers end users by letting them use the technologies they want to use to do their jobs
• Transparency: Connecting systems and applications of value across the organization ensures a total view of a constituent’s engagement with your organization.

But wait! I’ve already integrated my systems! I have APIs!

While APIs are a great place to start, an iPaaS solution can provide real value. Not all APIs are the same. APIs will be different depending on who creates them, when they’re created and the scenario for which they were written. And, often times organizations who have built API integrations must shoulder the burden of maintaining their integrations – which just like infrastructure and hardware, can be costly and time-consuming.

Using an iPaaS makes the data consistent and readable, regardless of the system, application or API on the receiving end. Pushing these APIs through a single platform completely removes inconsistency for internal employees and partners. And, eliminating inconsistency yields one additional (big) benefit: speed.

In a report, “How Pervasive Integration Enables your API Initiatives (and Vice Versa),” technology analyst Gartner finds that “Anecdotal evidence from Gartner clients’ experience suggests that by using an integration platform, time to value for integration logic can be reduced by up to 75% versus custom coding.”

IT teams can leverage iPaaS to control the entire API and integration lifecycle – from creation to publishing, management and measurement – on the same, secure platform. You’ll be hearing more from us about the power of iPaaS and the benefits it can bring to your organization but in the meantime, learn more about our iPaaS solution, Personify Hub – Request a Demo today!

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