Aptify

I have had the pleasure of working in the association industry for a very long time and remember when business analytics consisted of relatively few metrics like:

• Is our membership growing or declining?
• How many Active v. Associate v. Student v. Inactive v. Retired members do we have?
• Are we tracking to budget?

You get the picture. The ability to pull information was limited to a few variables which generally took hours if not days to compile in spite of a centralized data repository. By the time the information was ready for presentation it was stale…but it was the best ...

I was IM’ing with a colleague the other day and we were lamenting about the overwhelming amount of work we have. Not actually the amount of work, because we both love what we do, but rather an inability to focus on the task at hand when there are so many concurrent needs all seeming to require immediate attention.

This made me begin to wonder why everyone seems to be effective at multitasking but me.

After giving this some thought…

While driving home, wondering about a recent less than positive experience, thinking about dinner, wondering if I should stop and ...

I remember in the mid nineties when websites started to get popular. Associations hadn’t yet really understood how to use a web site, but everyone wanted one.  I think we’re a bit further along the curve today with Social Media, but the similarities are interesting. 

I have heard time and again from very strategically focused Association leaders: ‘We need to have a Social Media presence.’ Really? Why? What thought has been given to creating a social media presence? Before you haphazardly promote a public persona which could inadvertently suggest your association as dysfunctional, why not take the time to really ...

Compared to many of you I am probably considered a Luddite, but that is simply not the case. Granted, I can’t code and terms like DRM, OLAP & IEEE 802.20 standards send me scrambling to Google or Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a great appreciation for technology and what it can do for associations.

I read practically everything I could get my hands on during the last month of 2011 hoping to glean some interesting concepts that would impact the association profession in 2012. I could bombard you with a list of fifty cool things to ...

Government Relations staff members are usually not focused on association operations and often times they don’t even use the same database. There are indeed requirements for a GR professional that demand the use of specialized software and there are many great options out there to help. From our viewpoint though, it is important to pull back information into the AMS system and push data from the AMS into the GR package to maximize the impact in both areas.

First off, let’s talk about engagement – one of the prime reasons companies and individuals join certain associations is the impact that ...

Just about every association I know is using email communication extensively. Are you sending and hoping or are you pushing out carefully thought out and highly segmented messages and then testing open, click through and conversion rates, and then driving that data back into your AMS so that you can improve with each cycle? Most associations I run across are doing a bit of tracking but not nearly as much as they could if they pulled the marketing and email systems together with the data in their AMS.

These days, most of the good outbound e-marketing tools such as Real ...

Social Media is something I write about regularly on this blog. This post is all about how to use social media as a “data source” to enrich your association’s “member intelligence”.

Social media has two major formats today – public and private. Public social media includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and many others. These forums are broadly used, have a wide array of user types, and your members are out there using these services today. Private social media tools help you build a community that is branded around your association and give you more “control”, but at the same time ...

The life of a consultant in the association community is interesting. Typically, our charter is to help an association improve the way it does business in one form or another. In the case of Association Management Systems (AMS) providers like Aptify, we work on improving processes by adopting practices that have been proven. The challenge you run into every time is staff resistance to change.

What we’ve found over time both internally and externally is that the art of “No” is critical to achieving the results the association’s CEO and Board of Directors signed up for. Middle management and staff ...

In the association community, when you start a conversation about integrating systems, the first stop in the discussion needs to be the AMS system. Association Management Systems (AMS) are comprehensive applications purpose-built for the association industry. My company builds one of the leading products in this space and there are many others in the market as well. The goal for these systems has been to provide a centralized system for managing the core businesses of the association. The challenge for most associations is that they have diverse lines of business including membership dues, meetings, publications, education and many others. So, ...

Over the Thanksgiving break, I was thinking about how associations need to improve collaboration between the various systems they use. This is an area that is not in good shape in most associations today and things are about to get worse if executives don’t prioritize it. In general, associations are great at collaboration, but, when it comes to collaboration between their systems, many association executives don’t even know where to start.

Not too long ago, it was considered acceptable by many to leave most systems isolated and just deal a few manual processes when data sharing was needed. In the ...