Engage your Members - Technology advice

Offering membership technology advice APT's Business development director George Land had the following informative article published in the December 2008 edition of Civil Society magazine.

Membership technology - Engaging your key audience is the way forward.....

How you communicate with your members or donors is a vital part of your success as an organisation.  It is now possible to revolutionise the way in which this communication takes place by utilising one of your main assets - information.

Most organisations hold significant amounts of data about their members or donors but rarely make best use of this information in their communications.  Profile information is locked away in back office databases with little or no integration with other systems, particularly the website, meaning that everyone visiting the site sees the same thing.

Yet your organisation knows where the person lives, it probably knows how old they are, what events they have attended, what merchandise they have bought - but all this information is going to waste when the person visits the website.

What should be happening is their view of information should be being tailored to their profile, if they work in a particular sector then priority should be given to news from that sector.  If we know that they live in the North West, for example, then they should be given information about events that are happening in the North West.

If the person is an officer of your organisation they should be able to see information that is useful to them.  If they are responsible for an area of the membership then they should be able to get to the details of those members.  If they are on a committee then they should be able to see details of that committee, who else is on it, communicate with those people by email, SMS or in a restricted forum and be able to access meeting minutes.

Staff members shouldn't be left out either, from wherever they are they should be able to find and access people's records, plan events, manage payments - whatever their role demands.

This revolution doesn't just affect the web site, all communications should be targeted, and information should be accessible across your databases.  If you are running an event on a particular topic can you target all the people who have attended an event in the past on that topic, or bought a related publication?  If planning whether to carry out an activity in a particular place can you easily determine how many people with the right profile are in that area?  When you need statistics for a monthly meeting are they delivered to your inbox automatically for you?  Can you click on a page on a website and see instantly how you are performing: payments received, records added etc.?

Not only should your technology by delivering this to you, it should be doing it in a way that is really easy for you to use.  If you want to send an email you should be able to go into Outlook, access the database as an address book, find a person's email address and send them an email.  That email should then be logged in the person's correspondence history automatically.  If you want to send a letter, you should be able to do that in Word.  If you have some statistics in a spreadsheet you should be able to click to refresh the data without having to run reports.  And if you need to create a new report or create a variation of an old one you should be able to do that quickly and easily as well with no need for technical knowledge.

Today all of this is possible, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune.
Stratum Engage from APT Solutions gives organisations the facility to provide all of the above plus much more. 

Designed specifically to integrate traditionally separate, back-end data with website usability to create a comprehensive personalised web experience for both organisations and their members Stratum Engage gives organisations the tools to go to the next level. Stratum's accessible online presence will allow the increasing number of technologically savvy members to not only, join and pay online but also access to a secure home page which will allow them to view and amend their own personal data, pay subscriptions, buy merchandise and personalise their page by adding widgets and RSS news feeds.  In today's marketplace these key added values afford participating organisations with strong retention and can be positively marketed to directly help in the recruitment of potential new members.  

To view the Stratum Engage talking brochure visit www.aptsolutions.net/engage or to arrange a no obligation web demonstration call Lisa Turk on 01952 214000.

Date: 02.02.2009

For further information please contact:

Helen Pomlett
Sales and Marketing Manager
Tel: 01952 214000
Fax: 01952 214001
Email: helen.pomlett@aptsolutions.co.uk