With an AMS, Your Membership is at Your Fingertips
Access member information with ease
One of the greatest features of a comprehensive AMS, is its ability to put administrators in the driver’s seat of their membership. As your association grows, the number of members can become too much for administrators to manage in a meaningful way. Or, at the very least, they may not be able to manage members efficiently.
Fortunately, with the right association management system, administrators can reference to and draw from membership with a couple of taps of the keyboard and clicks of the mouse. When your membership gets into the hundreds, it can become tedious to identify the specific member or information you are searching for in an expedited fashion. The key in effectively mining your membership when necessary is having a solution that allows the administrator to see the whole picture (to float above the many components of your association and see the sum of its parts), where otherwise they can’t see the forest for the trees.
With a member management software, administrators are equipped with a resource that allows them to be more precise with their examination. Through its member directory interface, your AMS provides a holistic databank of your association membership. Accessibility to the information of every single member attached to your association is all right there for your administrators to pull from. However, if it just stopped there – if all you had was a large compendium of everything to draw from – you probably wouldn’t be able to draw much of anything worthwhile.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to end there. If your AMS was developed by people who understand end-user (both administrator and member) interactions with association software, the process of finding members, information, credentials, occupations, or whatever else you are looking for within your membership is as simple as setting the parameters and generating a search.
Below are some of the types of searches administrator should be able to enact within your association management system’s member directory. Having the ability to conduct these pinpoint searches allows you to know your membership with an exacting level of familiarity, and empowers you to optimize both the interaction with existing and prospective members – bolstering the growth of a healthy professional community.
- Membership Level / Class
- Doing a collective search based on membership level or class can be key when formulating communication patterns. Depending on the organizational standing of members (whether they are at the executive, associate or junior level), they may need to be communicated to in a certain way for the messaging to be effective and achieve the desired outcome. Doing a membership level search of your member directory will allow you to identify how many people make up that group and who the group consists of. This knowledge will positively influence the tailoring of content directed toward those members.
- Registration Date
- Searching by date will inform administrators what certain members have seen (or not seen). For example, a piece of content or an event may have been provided by the association prior to certain members’ registration date. So, they may have missed out on that value. Knowing this can help in figuring out what content to strategically repurpose so that those newer members can garner benefits they may have missed out on otherwise.
- Occupation
- It can be extremely beneficial to understand the occupational make-up of your membership. For example, based on the types of occupations that compose your association, should there be a more dominantly present occupation, this may indicate the worthiness of initiating specific break-out sessions at association events slanted toward that job type.
- Professional Background (Expertise)
- Being in touch with the know-how of your membership is a huge asset and can be drawn on to provide more value to the association as a whole. If you are able to search professional expertise within your AMS, administrators may be able to identify accomplished members who are interested in penning a member-authored piece of content or conducting a presentation at an association event. Drawing on members’ expertise and recycling that knowledge back into the membership is a great use of resources and is a net-zero way of boosting association value.
- Education (Training & Certifications)
- Understanding the professional development and educational programs your members have under their belt is important in providing value in the training your association provides (if you provide those type of services). First off, by staying in touch with the certifications members are adding to their repertoire, your association will better be able to identify the types of training your membership is interested in – which can positively influence what genera of courses you may want to add to your member management system’s educational library in the future. Also, by paying close attention to what certain members do not have in the way of education, you can identify opportunities to suggest existing courseware on your AMS to those members you believe it may benefit.
- Age
- Getting a feel for the age of your membership is important in determining your association’s strategic direction. It may be that you decide you want to begin initiatives that attract younger members or people who are earlier in their careers. To understand the type of members you want to attract, you first need to know who your existing members are.
- Custom
- Through your AMS, administrators should be able to set custom parameters for their member searches that include any of the above, as well as others. By creating custom search sets, the administrator can cut through the volume of your membership to focus in on a very specific group of members – making it simple to find exactly what you are looking for.
To have a healthy association, your administrators need to know its membership like the back of their hand. They need to be uniquely familiar with who they are, what they do, what they find interesting and what they are looking to get out of their membership. To accomplish this monumental task, you need to be supported by a powerful management solution. When investing in an AMS, make certain that it optimizes access to your membership for your administrators.
