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.

February 19, 2019– Austin, Texas – Personify, Inc. (“Personify”), the market-leading provider of technology solutions for associations and nonprofit organizations, today announced that the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) is its first client to build its operations strategy with the full Personify Platform including Personify360, Personify Community, Personify Hub, a2z Events and Wild Apricot.

NASSP, the nation’s foremost organization of school leaders and home to the National Honor Society (NHS), has been a Personify client since January 2010. The organization engages more than 45,000 principals, assistant principals and other school leaders annually in membership and programs. Personify sits at the core of NASSP’s operations and staff depend on it daily to process thousands of transactions including membership, subscriptions as well as sales orders. In addition, NASSP leaders use Personify to make data-driven decisions to drive the organization forward.

“NASSP is truly committed to building an active and vibrant membership base to empower, educate and connect schools and student leaders,” said Sarah Schmall, Vice President of Client Success at Personify. “They continue to make technology investments that allow them to be at the forefront of the association market and provide tremendous value to members and constituents.”

To improve visibility across the organization, NASSP recently added Personify Hub to its technology stack. An integration platform as a service (iPaaS), the Hub will allow NASSP to streamline data flow and workstreams across multiple sources including Salesforce, Phone2Action, Personify Community and Core Achieve LMS.

While NASSP’s recent addition of the Hub is designed to improve internal operations, the organization has long trusted Personify to create a meaningful experience for its constituents. NASSP leverages a2z Events by Personify to manage its national conference exhibitions. The organization engages NHS advisers in its online community powered by Personify Community. A few NASSP local chapters use Wild Apricot which will strengthen the relationships between the national organization and its state affiliate organizations. All of NASSP’s stakeholder data, eBusiness and analytics are held within Personify360, which serves as the organization’s central CRM.

“Personify’s tools support NASSP’s activities in many different ways, which places them at the heart of our operations”, said Meta Tshilombo, Director of Information Services at NASSP. “We track membership and sales transactions, run our vibrant NHS Adviser Online Community, manage our National Principals Conference exhibitions and more through the Personify Platform.”

About Personify

Personify is the market-leading Constituent Management and Engagement (CME) platform that empowers organizations to better engage their constituents, maximize revenue and optimize operations. For over 20 years, Personify has served as the technology foundation for organizations of all sizes from the largest associations, charities, YMCAs and JCCs to emerging nonprofits. For more information, visit https://personifycorp.com/.

About NASSP

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) is the leading organization of and voice for principals and other school leaders across the United States. NASSP seeks to transform education through school leadership, recognizing that the fulfillment of each student’s potential relies on great leaders in every school committed to the success of each student. Reflecting its long-standing commitment to student leadership development, NASSP administers the National Honor Society, National Junior Honor Society, National Elementary Honor Society and National Student Council. For more information, visit https://www.nassp.org/.

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“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!

The post Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS): What It Is and Why You Need One appeared first on Personify.