In the year ahead, the fate of safely gathering in person remains uncertain. But with the vaccine rollout, there’s now an added dose of cautious optimism. Of course, people want IRL events to start back up ASAP, and it can be demoralizing as they continue to get canceled and pushed back. But Molly Hamill, the manager of exhibit sales at the Global Association for the Attractions Industry (IAAPA), believes it’s all about moving forward together.

“People are more forgiving and I hope that continues into 2021, [with everyone] understanding that we are all going through this,” Hamill said. “I have such high hopes for the rest of the year and I want to maintain that happiness and not dwell on 2020.”

According to our research in December of 2020, nearly 90 percent of association members surveyed said that looking ahead, they will focus more on virtual engagement than they had in past years. But “not every event is equal,” Hamill pointed out, noting that some things that might easily work for one association might not work for another, and vice versa.

“You really have to look at each event individually and not think that everything is going to fit into a box.”

Getting into the technical weeds of managing safe and effective events (whether they’re virtual, in-person, or a hybrid) in the not-yet-post-COVID world is an individualized task. So associations should figure out what their essential checklists look like and adapt their plans accordingly, Hamill said. But she noted that there are some event-planning strategies that remain universal—empathy and understanding should fit into everyone’s box, for example. We’ve shared more of Hamill’s thoughts here:

Share the Deets

What is the “sweet spot” when it comes to dropping into your members’ inboxes? Your intuition might not always match up with the type of attention your members are looking for, Hamill points out. Best to consult the stats: According to our research, while associations were inclined to overestimate how much members wanted digital content from them, about one in three did want to receive something weekly or more.

Our study found that the ideal amount of communication was about weekly to monthly—81 percent of members wanted something either weekly, twice per month, or monthly.

And once you’ve struck that perfect harmony when it comes to how much information you drop in leading up to the event, you need to figure out where to drop in, suggests Hamill. Again, let’s turn to the stats: Personify looked into the social channels where associations are reaching members, and found that Facebook is the most effective, with Instagram a close second. Twitter might be overused—half of associations reported using it, with only a third of their members interested in following them on Twitter. The underutilized gem? Private online member communities.

Hamill also pointed out that it’s essential to have dedicated COVID-19 resources available not just for members, but for big companies, legal teams, independently-owned facilities, local government agencies, and constituencies—all the parties that need insights into things like bills being passed and relief options. “In this instance, it is, the more information the better,” she said. This way, everyone has all the info they need to ensure they’re actively and safely opening their facilities and that the public feels safe coming to them.

At the end of the day, it’s all about fostering a comfortable event environment. IAAPA drives home that it is working with all its partners—local agencies, convention centers, decorators, partners—to ensure attendees and suppliers feel safe.

“Again, it’s putting as much information online or accessible to the attendees upfront so that they feel safe enough to make that decision to come.”

Speaking of the association-member relationship…

Best Too?  Your Members

Hamill said the best tool her association has is its members.

“The most valuable lesson that I learned in 2020 is to stop and listen to the members regarding their needs. They can come up with ideas [to address them] that you probably didn’t think of yet.”

Members are attending annual association events and other virtual events, so they can tell you what’s working and what’s not. “What you think is going to work for your audience might not satisfy their needs, and you can’t satisfy everyone,” Hamill said. But she added that you can have open and honest conversations with members—as well as exhibitors and clients—to cultivate those relationships and plant seeds for people to feel comfortable providing feedback in the future.

And in a Close Second, the Tools That Bring Those Members Together

Now that you’ve listened to your members and found that information sweet spot, the third piece of the puzzle is finding and adopting the right services and platforms to execute your well-informed vision.

She and her team worked closely with our Personify team, especially when they had to cancel, move, postpone, or downsize events. Personify helped their association with many of the moving pieces on when to make those changes and quickly sending them off to exhibitors.

To summarize, when it comes to smooth sailing during a turbulent time of shutdowns and safe reopenings, it’s about three key things—keeping your ears open to members, making sure communication is open and flowing, and maintaining a digital toolbox that can deploy all of your event planning (and scrambling) needs.

This IAAPA profile was first published on the Associations Now blog on February 16, 2021 as part of an ongoing series profiling the COVID response strategy of Associations. Republished with permission, all rights reserved.

The post Planning for an Uncertain Future Requires Open Ears, Communication and Empathy appeared first on Personify.

Let’s put last week’s approach into practice. Here are four tangible ways to think about and evolve your Sense of Community:

Create a Safe Space and Provide Emotional Safety

One of the main elements of a Sense of Community is membership or spirit. And one of the main attributes of membership is emotional safety.

Imagine heading over to your friend’s house for a casual get together to watch the big game. You may be wearing your laundry-day clothes and bringing a 6-pack of beer to share with friends. But, when you walk through the door, instead you find a black-tie event. That type of experience doesn’t feel comfortable and safe. If I found myself in such a situation, I would turn around and go home.

This reminds me of a similar story with a community that shall remain nameless. The community manager had crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is, and she couldn’t figure out why members weren’t posting and engaging in the community. It wasn’t until she took a look at the community through her members’ eyes that she realized what was happening. All her posts were these well-crafted, incredibly researched, detailed and long posts that ended up intimidating her members…to the point where they didn’t want to contribute. Many of them felt there was nothing left to contribute. The community manager didn’t realize that the tone of her posts negatively impacted this sense of safe space for her members.

What your members might not be telling you is that they may not feel safe enough to open up and be vulnerable in the community. They may not feel comfortable enough to ask their colleagues questions for fear of being humiliated or looking dumb.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) asks members to share their story in the community. But instead of a new member walking through the door and seeing these beautifully written, well crafted, high-quality posts from their members and then being intimidated from writing their own, EDF proactively created a safe space for their members by breaking the writing process up into digestible chunks. In fact, members don’t see the next step in the story building process until they’ve completed the previous step. And members only see the progress of other member stories as they progress themselves. It’s an ingenious way of turning a potentially intimidating experience into an opportunity for members to emotionally connect and build a safe space together as they go through this process of creating their advocacy stories.

Another community that is proactively creating a safe space for their members is the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). The engineers in the community post regularly, but a high number of posts does not necessarily mean that the members have that emotional safety in order to feel vulnerable and self-disclose. It’s one thing to ask your colleagues about wiring and regulations, it’s another thing entirely to ask a colleague if they also feel out of their depth. So IET created an option for members to submit anonymous questions. They also created a persona called ‘Calvin the Engineer’ as a community mascot to share these anonymous questions in the forum for other members to respond.

Create and Define Boundaries.

Another important attribute of membership is boundaries.

There’s a speakeasy in downtown Austin called the Floppy Disk Repair. The door is locked and only those with the code can get it. The code changes weekly and you must know someone who knows someone to get it. It’s difficult. But once you walk through the front door, there’s the most amazing feeling of validation and exclusivity. This is the feeling you want to inspire in members of your community.

On the opposite spectrum of that is Who’s Who American High School Students. Getting into Who’s Who was touted as an exclusive honor… until you flipped through the pages and saw everyone in your class listed. Then you realized that the threshold to get into the book is negligible because the goal of the company was to sell books to proud parents.

What your members aren’t telling you is that having a low barrier to enter the community does not inspire feelings of exclusivity and validation. The higher the barrier, the higher the feeling of belonging. If the barrier is low, then you’ve already removed one ingredient to forming a sense of community right off the bat.

Now, sometimes those barriers are out of our hands. If an organization makes member acquisition a higher priority than developing a sense of community, then that probably means the community has a monetary boundary. In other words—if you pay a membership fee, you’re in!

A community with a monetary boundary might therefore supplement a secondary barrier by creating a nested community – one that weaves in intersectionality and is based on demographics.

For example, consider the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP). Everyone that walks through that front door is a safety professional. They are immediately part of a homogenous group, and homogeneity is vitally important for group cohesion. But once you’re through the door, members need to be able to differentiate themselves from the group in order to develop their identity within the community and truly feel like they belong. For that purpose, ASSP created a nested community for women in that profession called WISE (Women in Safety Excellence).

Create a Sense of Belonging and Identification

Next, let’s consider the attributes of belonging and identification that is inherent to membership.

Say you walk through the front door into a house and see people milling about. Except, everyone is wearing the same blank grey mask on their face. And they’re all staring at you. That does not make me feel safe. I’m just going to turn around and walk out. Well, that’s what it feels like for a new member who walks into a community and everyone has that default grey avatar, you know which one I’m talking about. For myself, this does not inspire feelings of belonging and of identification.

What your members might not be telling you is that in a very literal, visual way, they don’t feel that they have anything in common with other members. They don’t recognize themselves in the constituency. They don’t see anyone that looks like them.

The National Wildlife Federation’ EcoLeaders program decided that they want to make their community feel lived in, warm and inviting, so they encourage members to upload profile pictures. And to overcome any issues with emotional safety, they created an avatar menu that members could choose from that aligned with their specific passion if they weren’t quite ready to upload a picture of themselves.

Similarly, the American Diabetes Association encourages belonging and identification in its members by creating a self-selection of badges for illness type, and then displays those badges with the member’s profile throughout the community. So, if you walk into ADA with type 1, you can quickly see others like you interacting in a safe space.

Show That You’re Invested

My final example of this practice is Investment, which is another element of sense of community.

Imagine walking into a house for a party. You look to your left and see a table displayed with rotting food. Perhaps, there are some 25-cent bags of chips that you could have easily gotten at a gas station down the street.

What your members aren’t telling you is that walking into a community and seeing stock photos, static content and announcements of a community relaunch that haven’t been updated in a year creates a sense that the community is not invested in the member. The community does not value the member. So why should I invest in the community? It’s a common practice with communities to place the onus on the community manager to continually update content in order to keep the space lively and fresh. That is not sustainable.

What is a sustainable option? Let’s take a look at the Climate Reality Project, which has successfully created an environment where community members contribute the majority of the content. They did this by turning the act of contribution into a challenge for the entire community to reach a certain number of contributions in the year 2019. In fact, they’ve inspired members to act by making their contributions visible in a challenge or leaderboard format.

Know What Works For Your Community

There is no standard, ‘out of the box’ platform or configuration that consistently creates a sense of community in your members. Each community is different. Being able to take a step back and see your unique community from a member’s perspective is a mix of art and science: of understanding of the psychology behind a sense of community while using tactical imagination and a background knowledge of what your platform can do.

While there is plenty of research and study behind the intricate psychology, there isn’t much in the way instruction on how to build a community that hits on all four elements to improve your community’s Sense of Community index. By using targeted conceptualization, you can see your community through the members’ perspective and stimulate ideas on the practice, configuration and process to encourage connection to these elements.

If you’re ready to take the next steps of improving your sense of community, I recommend thinking about this from an approach of “Who + Why = How.”

If we know the who (member goals) and we know the why (sense of community), then we can use this practice to determine and become architects of the How.

The post What Your Members Aren’t Telling You: 4 Ways to Improve Your Sense of Community appeared first on Personify.

Well, about ten years ago, I was at my significant other’s apartment on the fourth floor in North Austin, and just to paint you a picture this is the same apartment complex where they filmed office space.

I walked down the four flights of stairs to the parking lot to get something out of my car, and when I came back up the stairs and walked into the apartment, I immediately felt like something was terribly off. It probably had something to do with a strange woman laying on a blanket in the middle of the living room floor wearing nothing but a puzzled look on her face. To my horror, I realized that I walked into the wrong apartment. I was one floor off.

Well, that was ten years ago, and since then I’ve walked into nearly 100 strangers’ houses.

But don’t worry! That’s because I’m an assistant to the Weird Homes Tour.

Weird Homes Tour is a for profit social benefit company that works with homeowners across the United States in order to open up their weird, otherworldly, strange, interesting houses up to the public to tour for one day. So yeah, I’ve walked into a lot of strangers’ houses and met a lot of interesting hosts. I’ve soaked up the vibe of a lot of these spaces. People and spaces that have:

• inspired me,
• intrigued me,
• creeped me out (but in the best way),
• overwhelmed me,
• and made me feel cozy and welcome.

And, as a community consultant, I’ve also walked into quite a few online communities. What I’ve learned is that whether physical or virtual, that feeling you get when you walk through the front door sets the tone for the remainder of your experience there. This pivotal moment is important and should not be left up to chance. It should be strategic and well-crafted. It should have purpose and be predictable.

Now, the worst feeling in the world is to walk into a community that you fully expect to belong to and feel safe in, but instead feel out of place – like you’ve just walked into the wrong apartment at the absolutely wrong time.

So…what feelings does your community inspire in your members?

Well, the feeling we WANT to inspire in our members is the feeling of walking into a good friend’s house for the very first time but feeling like you’ve been there a million times before. That feeling of instant belonging, that sense of emotional safety. The sense that you can be yourself and be vulnerable. That feeling of being seen and heard and that you matter. That inspired, excited feeling of wanting to learn and grow and share with other people.

These are all ingredients that make up what I call a “community soup.”

The sense of community theory, which was founded by McMillan and Chavis, is vital to our work. It’s the engine of all communities. Organizations want members to have a sense of community because research shows that it may lead to increased activity, investment, engagement and member retention. So yeah, it’s an easy sell. Yes, we want a sense of community.

Except, it’s not easy to measure. How do you measure a feeling? How do we tie specific metrics to a feeling?

We as community managers and builders are consumed with wanting to correlate specific metrics to a sense of community.

Metrics are extremely important in telling us the potential for engagement, but not necessarily the real picture. You may have a high number of page visits and post views, and from that you can infer that the content is useful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is contributing to a member’s sense of community.

How do we know if our members have a sense of community?

Luckily, the sense of community index (SCI) tool, which is a survey based on McMillan and Chavis’s decades of research, can be used to measure our member’s sense of community level. However, even with this wonderful tool, there are challenges.

1. Sample size. We send out surveys like the SCI, but often we don’t get enough responses for the required sample size. For example, a community of 36,000 members will need to have approximately 600 to 2,000 survey responses in order to have a margin of error and confidence level in the results to hang our hat on. What should not happen is getting a couple responses back and then make sweeping changes to a community platform.
2. Low Sense of Community. An inherit issue with this approach is that members with a low sense of community many not fill out the survey in the first place! Members need to be in the community long enough in order to measure their sense of community but by then you might have already lost them.
3. Now what? Assuming that you are able to obtain enough submissions and the results tell you that you have a sense of community problem. Now what? The survey results aren’t going to tell you where in your process or platform to make changes.

So, in a way, metrics and survey results can be like DNA at a crime scene. You may have the DNA, but that doesn’t quite mean you understand the motives and can understand the bigger picture.

How do you find out what your members aren’t telling you?

In addition to your metrics and using a validated survey tool like the SCI survey, my proposal is to take the SCI tool and flip the script. What I mean by that is to take the survey items and turn them into a checklist for yourself as you walk through the community and view it through your members’ eyes. However, in order to effectively do this, you must first understand your members to the core. You must know that your members’ goals may not be the same as your organization’s goals. Identify the reasons why your members walked through that door in the first place. Know their hopes and aspirations. Understand what motivates them to want to learn and grow. And it doesn’t hurt to also understand the problems they’re facing in their industry.

Along with this, as a community admin, you are wearing all the hats. You’re the all-seeing all-knowing god of the community. You’re standing on top of this mountain and have this 5,000-foot view of your community, but that also means you may not see the minutia of your members’ day to day life. Instead of not being able to see the forest for the trees, you may not be able to see the trees for the forest. In order to see your community through your members’ eyes, you must shed your bias. And maybe even your ego if you’ve had a hand in building the community from the ground up. And just acknowledging your bias is a positive step.

So, without bias and with a deep understanding of your members to the core, reverse engineer the SCI tool and use it as a guide as you walk through this house you’ve built with your members’ perspective, and it may reveal issues and opportunities that you might not have seen previously.

In the next post, we’ll practice this approach.

The post Sense of Community: Find Out What Your Members Aren’t Telling You appeared first on Personify.

August 13, 2019 – Personify, Inc. (“Personify”), the market-leading provider of technology solutions for associations, nonprofits and corporations, today released findings from its new research, Member Experience 2.0, on association professions and the future of multichannel and omnichannel engagement that was conducted in July 2019 with more than 300 members in the United States.

Key findings from the research include that:

• While members of all ages and groups value membership, 43% of survey respondents say associations seem out of touch and nearly a third do not understand the benefits.
• Respondents expressed a preference for digital engagement channels with younger members more likely to choose digital channels over print (73% for Gen Z, 64% of Millennials).
• Across all groups, members report that email is the best way to reach them with a large majority (82%) of those surveyed ranking email first or second.
• Nearly half of all members surveyed report that public social media sites are the worst way to engage and least effective.
• The phone was ranked as #1 and #2 as the channel of choice by 46% of those surveyed. Overall, 45% of members told us they “liked” or “loved” receiving a phone call from their association, with 51% showing the same level of appreciation for text messages.
• A majority of all members surveyed (52%) indicated events were “very valuable” in making them feel engaged with their association. This number was significantly higher with African-American members reporting events were valuable in terms of engagement (75%, +23 percentage points higher than average), and LGBTQ members sharing the same sentiment (62%).

An upcoming webinar, hosted by Personify will dive deeper into the findings of this research and share how association leaders can apply these findings to their organizations.

In addition to the new research, Personify announced the recent release of its Wild Apricot member management software at the 2019 ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition conference. The latest version introduces new features and an updated look and feel for the user interface.

Recognized by Capterra as the leader in member management software for the past six years, the latest additions to the Wild Apricot solution will help streamline the member experience and include two new payment features for Wild Apricot Payments allowing users to activate recurring donations and simplify the checkout process. Additionally, Wild Apricot users will experience a new modernized look that is unified under the Personify product portfolio.

“Helping organizations better connect and engage with members is at the core of what we do,” says Eric Thurston, President and CEO of Personify. “We’re proud to bring new features to the Wild Apricot solution to help associations and nonprofits provide a seamless user experience, and we continue to innovate, creating tools designed to meet the needs of today’s organizations.”

Association professionals experienced Personify’s new capabilities and learned about the Member Experience 2.0 research during the 2019 ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition that took place August 10-13 in Columbus, Ohio.

To learn more about Personify’s solutions for associations, charities and corporations, visit, www.personifycorp.com.

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 a diverse group of organizations including associations, nonprofits, event professionals, YMCAs and JCCs. For more information, visit https://personifycorp.com/

The post Personify Releases New Member Research appeared first on Personify.

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.