When I look at these numbers, I do not feel inspired to make a ton of resolutions. Yet, I continue to make them each year…and many times, I’m making the exact same resolution as the previous year.

Why do most of us fail at our resolutions?  

Unrealistic expectations play a big role. If I resolve to exercise five days a week in 2020 when I currently make it to the gym only a few times per month, I’m not setting myself up for success. And, when I fail this unrealistic expectation, it will likely make it harder for me to go to the gym altogether. 

If you’re creating new year’s resolutions for your personal or your professional life, make sure to set realistic expectations…ones that do not require an overhaul of your schedule and current processes or lifestyle. As with my approach to exercise, association and nonprofit staff can approach cleaning up their organization’s data with simple steps that break an overwhelming task into more manageable pieces.  

According to Dr. Marcelo Campos, a lectured at Harvard Medical School, it’s helpful to answer these five questions when creating and sticking to your New Year’s Resolution. Let’s apply these questions to the goal of eliminating dirty data in an organization…and keeping it that way: 

1. Why do you want to make the change? 

Dirty Data is everywhere. Forbes finds that 84% of CEOs are concerned about the quality of their data and Gartner measures the financial impact of poor data on businesses at an average of $9.7 million per year. It’s crucial that your team can trust and rely on your organization’s data. This is important from not only a compliance and regulatory standpoint, but also so that you can make data-driven decisions about the types of programs, events and activities that you should invest in to provide the most value to your members. 

Bad data can hurt an organization’s reputation, make you miss out on opportunities to engage members, and result in lower revenue when communication is not accurately aligned to the audience.  

2. Is your goal concrete and measurable? 

As we’ve already discussed, this is incredibly important. Ensure that you’ve put a goal in place that is both realistic and measurable. 

Consider how much time that you and your staff currently spend on ensuring that your data is accurate and is consistent across your systems and tools? Ideally, your AMS serves as the single source of truth for your organization and is synced with all other technology platforms regularly. If your making data hygiene a priority next year, be sure to account for the time that will be involved in keeping your data clean.  

Additionally, while clean data is a continuous goal rather than an item you can cross of your list, create a list of milestones and dates that help you confirm you’re making progress.  

3. What is your plan for dirty data? 

Now that you’ve committed to good data hygiene for 2020, it’s time to implement a plan of attack. There are generally three types of dirty data: 

• Inaccurate data: information that is out of date or was entered incorrectly 
• Inconsistent data: when data fields are missing or are formatted differently across records 

• Identical data: where a single contact has multiple records 

Your data hygiene plan should include steps to not only protect against all three types of dirty data but have scheduling times to routinely scrub your data and consolidate any duplicate records. Want to learn more? Check out our Data Hygiene Guide. 

4. Who can support you as you work toward change? 

Creating a data hygiene plan can be an overwhelming activity, especially when you have multiple years of dirty data to review and clean up. Create buy-in across departments and teams to help you fix bad data more efficiently and ensure it stays that way. 

There are a wealth of tools and resources that can extend your team’s limited resources. Look into an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaas) solution that allows your organization’s data to flow across systems as well as manage duplicates, create data filters and more. 

5. How will you celebrate your victories? 

Each time that you move closer to your goal of eliminating dirty data, take time to reflect on the experience and celebrate your success. This can be as simple as a shout out in your monthly team meeting where people share their recent wins and accomplishments. You can also bring in lunch for your team or plan an offsite activity when they finish surveying your membership and consolidating/updating all records in your AMS. 

Regardless of your journey, it’s important to remember that getting rid of dirty data is not a destination, but rather a journey of behavior change and regular maintenance. Be patient with yourself and your team, and don’t be surprised if there are setbacks.  

Are you ready to get started on your dirt data resolution? Well…you’re in luck.  

Watch This On-Demand Webinar 

The post Resolve to Clean Up Your Dirty Data in 2020 appeared first on Personify.

Source: The Independent

• USA for Africa recorded the charity single, “We are the World”
• Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and de facto leader of the Soviet Union.
• Coca-Cola changes its formula and launches New Coke.
• The Nintendo Entertainment System is released on US shores.
• A joint American-French expedition locates the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

But during my stroll down memory lane, there were two notable events that jumped out to me more than the others. First, was the release of summer blockbuster “Back to the Future,” which saw Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly being transported to 1955 via a DeLorean that’s been transformed into a time machine.

The other was the founding of the WELL, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, a home for digital dialogue between writers and readers of the Whole Earth Review and widely regarded as the birthplace of the online community.

To say there’s been change in the ensuing years would be an understatement. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 90 million Americans have participated in an online group and estimates of virtual community membership in the United States have exceeded 25 million – more than six times the population of Los Angeles. Then there was the rise of social media. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn seemed to promise a new advent of digital communication, broadening the opportunities for users to participate in a more global community.

Yet for many nonprofits, that early promise remains unfilled.

The number of American adults on Facebook hasn’t increased since 2016. eMarketer reports that Facebook engagement is sinking, already down 10% versus last year with no end in sight and even more dramatic declines among key demographics with only half of American teens using the social media site.

LinkedIn now has 562 million members but only 260 million users are active on LinkedIn monthly. What’s the average amount of time spent per month by those active users? 17 minutes.

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that while social networks and community platforms seem interchangeable, they aren’t. The Community Roundtable defines social media as a loose network with the predominant structure being a hub and spoke model of interaction between an audience and the content creator. It is composed of users who have nothing in common (only using the platform because their friends are on it), creating a communal monologue with transactional engagement – a quick comment or, more often than not, a click of a like button.

However, as more and more organizations are learning, it’s not the quantity of engagement that makes the difference – it’s the quality.

In the 1986 film “Back to the Future,” Dr. Emmett Brown remarked to Marty McFly that you never know when or where a bolt of lightning will strike.

Marty, with the perspective of his recent trip into the past responded, “We do now.”

Many organizations are turning their attention back to online communities and forums, integrating the best of social media and leaving behind the risk to create a digital space designed to drive long-term, meaningful interaction. What can we learn?

To learn more about this, watch Personify’s on-demand Webinar, Back to the Future: Next Generation Forums, where we’ll explore:

• Trends driving digital engagement, including changes to keep an eye out for in your organization
• The importance of improving access and the growing role of forums in engaging members on the go
• Driving interaction, from opportunities for passive action to recognition and beyond
• How community members can drive a more personalized experience – and new tools available to support organizations looking to bring it all together.

The post Community, Your Destiny and the Importance of Going Back to the Future appeared first on Personify.

What started as a buzzword has become the

But, while it may be quite an undertaking, there are several worthwhile reasons that organizations should carefully consider making a move: 

1. Flexibility, Mobility and Increased Access  

A cloud-based architecture allows an organization to have increased collaboration and knowledge sharing, making for more efficient and effective means of communication. In your organization, you may use Microsoft Teams, Google Docs or another cloud platform to share and collaborate on documents with your team. I remember—not too long ago—having to share a document with a team for their input and then consolidating edits from each individual document into the master version. This process now seems completely archaic. However, if you’re using an on-premise version of your association management system or CRM, you may be lacking the flexibility to collaborate with your colleagues, easily share files and look up or update members’ information on the fly.

Additionally, a move to the cloud version of an AMS enables an organization to have bi-directional data sharing with their best-of-breed tools such as their marketing automation platform, learning management system and more. An on-premise AMS means that your IT team needs to build a one-off integration each time that you add a new piece of technology to your tech stack and, in many cases, this means dual data entry. If you’re interested in bringing flexibility into your system and ensuring seamless data sharing, check out our Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) guide. 

2. Real-Time Updates 

One of the things that truly brings me joy is to speak with our clients who are considering a move to the cloud and to see the mind-shift that occurs when they realize that there’s no longer a need to go through an expensive and time-consuming upgrade process every few years. Upgrades and implementations can be challenging and disruptive to your daily operations, and it’s critical to be able to maintain system processes for your membership while you’re upgrading the whole system and training staff on the changes. 

A cloud–based AMS means that you receive updates automatically and they typically don’t involve any additional cost, meaning that you don’t have to approach your board of directors for budget approval every other year.   

3. Security  

Data breaches are certainly top of mind for many organizations these days. From the Facebook data breach that exposed more than 540 million user records to the Equifax breach that raised the risk of identity theft for millions of U.S. consumers, member-based organizations need to thoughtfully consider how to reduce the risk of their members’ data being exposed. Data breaches erode trust in organizations, hurt revenue and create legal liability for organizations of all sizes. 

According to Breach Level Index, more than 6 million records are compromised via data breaches every day.  

If your organization is in an industry with increased compliance oversight, such as healthcare, government and financial services, you need to be even more concerned about the possibilities of a data breach and create strategies and employ tools to safeguard your data. While they are not fail-proof, cloud-based solutions and tools are typically more compliant and a move to the cloud can help remove the burden from small IT teams whose focus and priority may not be data security.   

4. Cost (both human capital and cash)  

According to Gartner’s IT Budget report, healthcare companies often spend nearly 75% of their IT budgets to maintain internal systems. Yes, really. These organizations spend a majority of their budget, not on investing in tools that increase efficiency and innovation, but on maintaining current systems and processes. 

Whether you work in healthcare or another sector, organizations can often get caught up in the upfront price of software and fail to understand the total cost of ownership that includes support, additional hardware, training and more. A cloud-based option allows you to pay for the resources that you use and, at the same time, take advantage of scale and reliability—two things that most companies can’t afford internally.  

By leveraging a subscription model, which nearly all cloud solutions use, an organization’s cost is spread out over time, which makes the line item in the budget an easier pill to swallow. 

Beyond the sticker price, it’s important to consider human capital. Member-based organizations and associations have limitations on their internal resources and typically, their small IT teams are spread too thin across the day-to-day maintenance of an on-premise solution, including:  

• Uptime availability  
• System performance and speed 
• Data loss and security
• Maintaining satisfactory turnaround times on misc. issues and requests 

Want to understand more about the benefits of what a cloud-based or SaaS product can do for your organization? Contact us to learn more about Personify360, a SaaS solution that provide a seamless experience for an organization’s staff.  

The post 4 Reasons to Move your Association Management System to the Cloud appeared first on Personify.

The Society of Hospital Medicine is a membership organization dedicated to promoting exceptional care for hospitalized patients. SHM serves hospitalists, or members of care teams, that care for hospitalized patients and the organization currently has over 18,000 members. Hospitalists include physicians, hospital executives, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners and practice administrators. SHM has been using Personify’s technology to manage member information, grow engagement across chapters and improve member communication since 2017.

Creating A New Member Experience

One of the most notable areas of improvement after launching Personify360 is the online member experience. Previously, prospective members would have to call SHM to purchase a multi-year membership, often deterring people from membership altogether. With Personify360, hospitalists can do it all online- purchase a membership, update their account information and more. Allowing members this new level of self-service has paved the way for revenue growth and improved member satisfaction. Kim shared that, “Personify360 has been a real game changer in how we service our members and has given us a lot of opportunities we didn’t have before.”

Improving Data Integrity

According to Kim, Personify’s robust reporting tools and dashboards have allowed SHM to ramp up their data integrity efforts and improve visibility across their departments.

They use Personify’s reporting tools to easily pull and schedule a variety of reports. This ranges from having the latest registration numbers sent to the meeting planner every morning to real-time data integrity reports identifying potential data errors or duplicates.

Engaging Members Across 60 Chapters

Like many membership organizations, SHM struggled to engage their members and keep them engaged throughout the lifetime of their membership. With 18,000 members across 60 chapters, it can be a challenge to preserve that feeling of connection and belonging. After implementing Personify360 and Personify Community, they were able to come up with several solutions that they wouldn’t have been able to achieve before.

SHM now bundles special interest groups with certain membership types to improve long-term engagement. For example, if someone becomes a student member, they are automatically added to the relevant student member special interest groups, which also syncs with special interest groups within the online community. Upon joining, the new student member has direct and immediate access to the content, news and information most relevant to them.

Additionally, SHM encourages chapter leaders to use the various online communities to talk with their members (not just at them), share relevant information, encourage speaking proposals for the annual conference and more. “We are striving to make community the number one method of communication with our members,” explains Kim.

Perhaps one of the biggest member benefits to be found within SHM’s online community is the Open Members Forum, which is a private space available only to members to discuss a wide range of topics relevant to their day-to-day jobs or to the overall industry. Discussions topics range from Medicare cording to scheduling procedures and billing practices.

Optimizing Operations at Conferences and Events

In addition to managing their day-to-day business, SHM also uses Personify360 at conferences and industry events. The flexibility of the Personify SaaS interface makes it an ideal platform to facilitate onsite sales and quickly access member information.

This is particularly beneficial as SHM hosts a large annual conference with thousands of attendees each year and often need to access their database from a tablet device onsite to better serve their attendees. In fact, SHM’s annual conference “Hospital Medicine” is the largest national gathering of hospitalists in the United States and offers a broad program of educational and networking opportunities specifically for hospital medicine professionals and SHM members.

We were thrilled to learn about all that ways that the Society of Hospital Medicine is using technology to further their mission. We’ll let Kim tell you more herself about SHM and how they’re changing the game and driving digital transformation for their organization.

Hear Kim’s Story

The post Client Spotlight: the Society of Hospital Medicine 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.

The Personify team at the ASAE Tech Conference.

If you think ASAE Tech is just for I.T. staff, think again.

While historically the industry’s marquee event for showcasing association technology of all kinds, as the impact and reach of the various tools powering today’s modern nonprofit continues to expand, so too have the opportunities for learning about how to optimize these systems across all areas of an organization.

One of the sessions kicking off today’s agenda 4 Key Steps to Digital Marketing Transformation at Your Association, led by the American College of Radiology’s Dave Martin, is one of the sessions breaking the mold.

While digital transformation has long been a cornerstone of conference programming for a technology team, Martin’s session explored best practices marketing teams can adopt to ensure they keep pace.

1.    Get the Right People on the Bus

The right approach begins with the right team. To ensure the right mindset, Martin encouraged attendees to explore the DARC model, originally introduced by HubSpot to help their CMO screen talent for their industry-leading inbound marketing team:

• D – Digital Marketers who live their lives online and are familiar and comfortable with blogging, the growing variety of social media and the Internet.
• A – Analytical: Marketers who are data-driven, always measuring what they do and making decisions based on the available information.
• R – Reach: Marketers who have a knack for growing their network with savvy for topics and the ability to create a natural, gravitational attraction to their work.
• C – Content: Marketers who are natural content creators, with a strong interest in – and willingness to – write.

Once you have the right people in place, Martin suggests organizing the team around the funnel:

• Attract (Top of Funnel): Personas, content strategy, SEO, PPC, blogging, webinars, social media
• Connect (Middle and Bottom of Funnel): Analytics, CRO, landing pages, marketing automation, lead scoring and nurturing
• Engage (Bottom of Funnel): Website, messaging and persuasion, sales enablement, case studies, collateral, partnerships
• Inspire (Member Marketing): Member retention, education, member-focused content, eNewsletters, online community

2.    Be Agile

Borrowing another term from the I.T. lexicon, Martin suggests that marketers need to mirror their technology peers in being more agile in their planning and execution. Instead of a “waterfall” approach, Martin suggests teams should:

• Respond to change as opposed to following a rigid plan
• Introduce rapid iterations organized around themes instead of leaning on big campaigns
• Test constantly and learn from data
• Commit to many small experiments instead of placing many large bets
• Focus on the individual and their interactions instead of broad target markets
• Collaborate across the marketing team and organizations rather than be constrained by silos

3.    Outcomes over Outputs

In one of my favorite takeaways from the session, Martin urged attendees to, “market with a magnet, not a megaphone.” While association marketing teams are often highly experienced and deeply familiar with their audiences, there’s an opportunity to change the conversation and ask strategic conversations around goals and objectives. Don’t be afraid to poke holes and leverage data to drive your decision making and support your point of view.

4.    Build Your MarTech Stack

Here at Personify we’re no strangers to the power of the MarTech stack and the transformational effect it can have on an organization (check out our recent webinar and blog post on the topic).

While nonprofits include a number of nuances specific to the work we do, there’s a great deal to learn from the commercial sector when it comes to marketing technologies. As of 2018, there are over 7,000 technology tools designed to bring marketers closer to their buyers! For-profit businesses invest heavily on systems to support data gathering, automation and conversion.

The benefits of a strong MarTech stack are just as clear for nonprofits. A MarTech stack can help an association:

• Increase membership renewals and retention
• Drive non-dues revenue, especially when it comes to events
• Attract new members
• Engage and inspire membership
• Position your organization to cross-sell and up-sell products and services

Where should you start? Martin suggests beginning with your database, whether a CRM, AMS or Constituent Management Engagement (CME) solution like Personify. Connecting your systems to your database is an essential next step in supporting activities across the funnel, from early attraction of that new lead through inspiring their continued journey as a member of your organization.

5.    Analyze and React

But I thought there were 4 steps! Martin surprised attendees with a fifth suggestion that may be the most important of all. The old adage says you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Understanding your organization’s marketing performance by the numbers is a critical step in ensuring digital transformations provide ongoing value to an association. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, new contacts, visitor-to-new contact ratios, new contact-to-member ratios, blog traffic, organic search and keyword rankings are only some of the metrics marketers should look to.

People. Process. Results. Technology and a commitment to measure it all. While not necessarily new to marketers in the association space, Martin’s unique way of packing up his 4 (really 5!) steps in digital marketing transformation paves the way for alignment of teams across an association and success in the year to come.

The post Live from ASAE: 4 Steps to Digital Marketing Transformation appeared first on Personify.