Poll members

Nothing Helps You Gauge Your Membership Better Than an AMS

Building a community through orchestration of an association is a great thing. Bringing people of similar interests and like backgrounds together provides a great benefit to them and can only support the improvement of the particular industry sector your association is meant to service. The next step is figuring out a method to positively influence your target market, because after all, we don’t start an association just to occupy space. We start an association with the intention to have a positive impact on a particular professional community.

Fortunately, if you have a healthy membership, your association is already in a prime position to take meaningful steps toward positively influencing your target audience. The community you’ve built is a treasure trove of information to draw from. The insight is just sitting there – waiting to be mined. So, how?

The first step is ensuring your association implements a comprehensive AMS solution. The best way to pull and analyze information from your membership is an AMS. All of their interactions, communications, feedback and activity is centralized in one place – so it is much easier to gather up and evaluate. What’s more, you can directly survey or poll your membership (or portions of your membership) to delve into their consensus on what the direction of the association and their industry as a whole should be.

An effective member management software will allow your association’s administrators to develop and initiate customized canvassing of their membership. This is an extremely powerful tool for involving your association’s knowledgebase (its members) and empowering administrators and association executives to make informed and strategic decisions.

The following represent some types of canvassing your association can accomplish through an AMS. By using these sampling techniques, your association will be able to paint the most comprehensive picture supported by information extracted directly from the source.

Surveying Impressions on Completed Initiatives
Conducting surveys to garner feedback on events that have occurred is integral to continued success of association initiatives. Association administrators and executives need to know what is being considered valuable by members and what elements could be improved. AMS surveys can be easily created, customized and sent out. Once surveys have been completed by members, all incoming data is collated and easily tallied and evaluated.
Polling Appetite for Future Course Content
As has been mentioned in other blogs we’ve published, it is very simple to provide e-learning courses via your AMS (a great way to add value to membership). Polling members who have previously taken other course offerings provided via your AMS can help your association understand what may be the best educational resource to add to the library next. Garnering feedback on this topic is a win-win-win because the association will provide a resource that gets good mileage, members will feel listened to and their perception of their subscription to the association will be positive (because of the value they derive).
Private Voting on Board Positions
Should positions within the association executive need to be changed or introduced, administrators can activate a private voting system via the AMS, to have the membership decide who should fill those roles. These private votes can be conducted anonymously, so all that matters are the results and not the contributor data. This process really makes members feel involved in the association they choose to be a part of and feel that they are contributing to its future.
Open Forum Balloting on General Market Sector Topics
It’s fun to offer up your thoughts on a particular topic and then see what others think. Open forum balloting is really just another piece of content – as far as members are concerned. It’s a quick hit of interest that they can get involved in. However, they can provide invaluable information for associations. Understanding where most people land with regard to this topic or that topic empowers an association to accurately position their initiatives and offerings in the direction of where the market is heading (or, at the very least, a reasonable estimation). This method of canvassing will really allow your association to stay in touch with the grassroots of the market.

An added advantage of having a canvassing tool built into your AMS is that your association will be able to evaluate engagement from the membership, based on the level of participation in the survey or poll.

You need to be able to connect with your membership on a meaningful level and members need to know that their feedback is wanted and means something. AMS canvassing tools will allow your association to know your members’ views on a multitude of topics – thereby acquainting you all the better with your community.

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