Episode 6: RevUP Data to Drive Business

Lurie: Data has evolved significantly. We started with basic Excel reporting. We’ve moved from that to visualization. We moved from visualization to insights and storytelling, and now it’s contextual decision making with the data as part of that conversation.

Colangelo: Collection alone, mission not accomplished. Yep. Right, just having a bunch of data thrown at you. So the value is in the extraction of the insights, the actionability from the data.

Shomali: Welcome to Association RevUP, the podcast that will get everyone in your association talking about revenue health. I’m your host, Carolyn Shomali, and I’m the Director of Content for the Professionals for Association Revenue. On today’s episode, we’re diving into a topic that is overwhelming for some and exhilarating for others.

Manges: Nobody wants to sit around and talk about data. I don’t know why. I think I can geek out on data.

Shomali: We’ll be talking about how data can drive business decisions and outcomes. We’ll focus on how data has evolved, what to do with it, and how to show that it is valued within your association culture. And we’ll look at ways that association pioneers are using it to transform their association business.

Lurie: What is your organization trying to accomplish? Are you trying to desperately cut costs? Are you trying to get to a balanced budget? Are you trying to drive revenue in adjacent spaces outside of your membership? Are you trying to bring industry to the table? What is your focus and your strategic plan? This is giving you information you didn’t have before so that hopefully you can make better business decisions for your organization and drive things forward.

Shomali: Association RevUP is a podcast series for both association leaders and revenue producers. But sometimes as associations, we categorize different elements of association business into either or focus areas. As in, that’s an area leadership controls or that’s a skill where practitioners should take ownership. In this series, our intent is to show that an effective association business approach requires both C-suite executives and association practitioners working in tandem. As we explore how data can drive an association’s business decisions, this is particularly true.

Deshetty: It would be great if it started at the top, but also the C-suite leadership may not know that they need to do this, right? So I’m a big believer in also managing up and educating up. That was Vinnu Deshetty, founder and CEO of EventTech Hub. She helps associations elevate events through comprehensive and innovative technology solutions.

Shomali: During today’s episode, you’ll hear insights from a team of data superstars, including Joe Colangelo, CEO and co-founder of Bear Analytics, Maneesha Manges, Chief Experience Officer at High Road Solutions, Thad Lurie, SVP of Digital and Technology at the American Geophysical Union, and Erin Pressley, SVP Education, Training and Events for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Thanks for tuning in today as together we explore how to RevUP Data and Drive Business.

Shomali: If your association isn’t yet prioritizing data and utilizing it to make informed business decisions, Joe Colangelo says to think of your members, partners, and overall association stakeholders and ask yourself this question.

Colangelo: Are they looking to have more or less personalized experiences in the future? Are they looking to have more or less tailored value benefits in the future? And if the answer that you believe, like I do, that both of those things are going to be, you know, you want to be more tailored and more value added experiences, then all of a sudden you’re going to realize that you have to come to rely on the data more.

Shomali: Research from McKinsey underscores his point that association members, partners, and potential customers want more personalization. According to the research, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. Additionally, the fastest growing companies generate 40% more revenue from personalization than their slower growing counterparts. When we start to think of our association audience as consumers of our products and offerings, data becomes our most valuable association asset.

Colangelo: You may own your building, you may own the real estate, and you certainly own the data. And as you sit on this ever-growing repository, data that’s not just getting deeper, but also getting wider, again, I go back to outside of the real estate, maybe, that you kind of own, what other asset is appreciating at the same pace as the data for your association?

Shomali: As association data grows and the technology for capturing and interpreting the data evolves, the challenge is in both how our associations view the data and what we do with it. Let’s take a look at two areas that may be stalling your association and then explore a few solutions.

Challenge number one, data overload. The easier it has become to collect data, the more intentional associations must be about extracting the proper insights. Maneesha Manges has spent her career in digital marketing and works with associations experiencing this challenge.

Manges: It’s kind of up to us to recognize the value of what we’re seeing and what we’re collecting. I think associations are a very unique position to be able to capture a lot of data without a lot of resistance, right? What we see a lot of is there’s, it’s almost like it’s too much coming through if you treat everything the same. If you treat every single data point as you kind of have these digital interactions or these face-to-face interactions and quantify them, it’s overwhelming.

Shomali: So how can associations extract the proper insights? Deshetty says it begins by understanding your organizational priorities and having a strategy in place for improvement.

Deshetty: What are your organization’s goals? And then how does that pertain to whatever project you’re working on? But not only that, it also is going to be important to determine what data I collect and how I see data. So no longer am I going to present to my executives, you know, I filled 5,000 seats, I now I’m going to say, you know what, I met the organizational goals because I attracted 30% of our membership who are within this particular category we’re interested in. And they not only renew their membership, they’re more engaged in the relationship with the organization. And that’s what we’re talking about data. We have lots of it, right? It’s just a matter of how do we want to define how we look at that.

Shomali: Throughout this season we’ve looked at how association culture can drive behavior and improve business outcomes. It’s something to keep in mind here while we discuss data. Having team members who are willing to challenge you on the data you’re collecting and its relevancy to your organizational goals can help you think more strategically. Erin Pressley of NRECA shares how her association team helps her do this.

Pressley: In working with the data folks on our team, a lot of it is, and they had to teach me to do this, because I would say, yeah, I want the data. I want to know how many CFOs went to these five events for the last five years. But they would say, well, why? And forcing me to say, well, I’m trying to figure out, I don’t know if there’s an opportunity for them, if I can find out if the CFOs go to these two events, if they go to two events, then that means they’ll definitely go to this third one. If I could see that trend in there, then maybe that’s how we can create this marketing funnel and push people to that third event. But I had to explain that, the why I wanted the data. And then they can come back to me and say, well, actually, I think you should look at this instead. And then it becomes more collaborative, which is also a benefit.

Shomali: So challenge one of data overload can be overcome in part by keeping your organizational priorities and strategy top of mind. And by being intentional about the data you’re examining and what it’s telling you. The second challenge we’ll discuss is a common one, data silos. The data lives in one department and isn’t shared with others, meaning each department lacks a full understanding of their audience, their gaps, and their overall business objectives.

Colangelo: When I hear data silos, that’s code for the actionability on the data isn’t actually being achieved, because you feel like you can’t get to the next step. Because things are separated.

When you’re activating on your data, that’s what allows you to kind of feel like you’re starting to break down those silos, because you’re using information that’s coming from multiple places to dazzle and delight, and then hopefully move your business objectives forward.

Shomali: Imagine a machine with multiple levers being pulled in order for it to operate effectively. Manges says that this is what an efficient data process looks like, in which data may be collected or owned by different departments, but they work together by determining which department owns the action that follows.

Manges: Data coming from your AMS, working with your marketing platform, working together, working in with process. And again, I think this is where we’re talking about data silos and data ownership. Who owns this data now? Who owns the data? Who owns the action? Who owns all those processes together? That’s what you’re really trying to solve for.

Shomali: Overcoming data silos means solving for inaction. And a good place to begin in order to spark that action is by helping your organization understand that data tells a story.

Colangelo: Most of the time, the first step that folks feel super empowered is when that story is being told in term. They feel like they can communicate up, down, and sideways across the organization with command. You know, things like sales goals, week over week performance on the registration front, gap to budget, just top line KPIs, but it’s available readily to them repeatedly. They’ve kind of crossed that silos gap, and now I can tell a really clear narrative.

Shomali: Sharing the story in a way so that all departments are able to understand its value requires ongoing communication. Colangelo references a time in his early association career when weekly meetings began with each department sharing the top KPIs they were tracking and how it was informing their work.

Colangelo: And then what that allowed us to do is you very quickly started seeing someone from a department, someone from that sponsorship department, all of a sudden someone from operations or the program team now knew why them booking speakers in earlier that allowed the sponsorship team to go and hit their goal and move down the pipeline a little bit faster. And you started to see those synapses start to be created. So it’s not a, let’s go buy a new AMS and start from scratch. I know a lot of people probably feel that kind of burning desire. I would do maybe the inverse of that and go, hey, what do we know? What’s in front of us right now? And build a little momentum culturally. Because you’ll be surprised at how quickly that can spread the positive vibes around data.

Shomali: With the help of our experts, we’ve looked at two challenges and presented two solutions. Challenge one, data overwhelm can be lessened by focusing in on your organizational priorities and challenging team members to think critically about the data they’re examining. Challenge two, data silos can be overcome by improving actionability on the data. You can do this in part by improving the internal narrative of the data and by sharing top KPIs among departments. There’s one more overarching solution to both the challenges of data overwhelm and data silos. Thad Lurie of the American Geophysical Union reminds us that while data is about numbers and statistics, its real value emerges when we prioritize the people who are working with it.

Lurie: In the beginning of using data, it was presented as the be-all end-all in some cases. And like, well, this is telling us we have to do the thing, so we have to do the thing. And it wasn’t a conversation. I believe it should be a conversation. Where you’re sitting with the executive team, the data comes back, the executive team hopefully was involved in designing what was happening. So they know they’re looking for the results to come back. And you also know that it’s going to play a part in your prioritization and product development conversations. Sometimes there will be owners of products and services who are open to change and to having that conversation. Other times, there may be specific sensitivities that you need to be aware of. And so I think this is where we really bring our people skills to the fore. And this is where we blend those people skills with the data and the visualization.

Shomali: If your association is using data to make decisions about a particular product, Lurie says it’s imperative to involve anyone who has ownership of the program in the entire process. Doing this will help show that their work is valued, even if the data supports the decision to sunset their product.

Lurie: If you just drop this on people and they have no idea what it is or why you were doing it, they will feel attacked. I’ve found in data in general, the longer in the process you involve people, hopefully before this happened, there was a set of conversations that took place previously.

Shomali: So far today, we’ve explored why data matters. It helps our associations develop a more personalized approach to our stakeholders, and it eliminates assumptions about what might be going on and instead replaces those with tangible evidence. We’ve also looked at the challenges to collecting and deciphering the data, while also sharing solutions. And when we come back, we’ll dive into specific ways that our experts are using data to make decisions and drive their associations forward.

Lurie: It’s one of these concepts that’s remarkably simple, and yet it’s not used all that often. And once I present it to organizations, a lot of times they look at that and then they say, why haven’t we done this?

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Shomali: We’ll focus the second half of today’s episode on specific ways associations can gather and use data to drive decisions within different departments.

To begin, we’ll look at a simple yet effective approach that Lurie recommends for associations to help them better understand member value, a two-question survey that asks respondents to rank a member benefit on importance and satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10.

Lurie: Once you have the results, it’s really easy to break them into groups. You know, you’ve got the high satisfaction and high importance things, which are very important and you’re doing them well, and so you want to do more of that. Then you have the high importance, low satisfaction. So those are important things you’re not doing well, and you really want to focus some energy there and fix whatever is broken. You have low satisfaction, low importance, and those are things that you’re not doing well that nobody cares about anyway. But sometimes having data like this that you can take to a board or to a program committee allows you to start a conversation around a benefit or a program or a service that clearly is not performing and nobody cares. And you can really maybe redeploy those resources to something in that upper right quadrant that’s high satisfaction, high importance, that you want to do more of.

Shomali: As Lurie points out, communicating data to the team makes the difficult decisions easier, even when it means ending a long-term offering, according to Pressley.

Pressley: You know, when you do look at that engagement, it’s an opportunity to always be looking and revisiting your portfolio of products and services and events that you offer. And it’s okay to do something once and never again. Or it’s okay to do something for 10 years, and then you look at the engagement and the environment has changed, the needs of your members have changed, and say, this doesn’t work anymore. We’re not going to do this anymore. There’s something new.

Shomali: Pressley adds that it’s important to stay consistent in data collection and analysis. Consider a uniform approach to surveys between departments so that you can make clear and accurate comparisons with reliable data. Let’s look now at specific ways our experts are using data in their work with different association departments.First up, marketing. In HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing and Trends report, close to 60% of marketers report that the way they spend their marketing budget is being scrutinized more now than in the past. With a well-designed marketing campaign, association teams can use data to understand which marketing channels are the most effective. That helps them decide where to allocate their marketing budget. Manges uses the example of the National Association for Healthcare Quality to drive home this point.

NAHQ offers competencies and certification in healthcare quality. Its marketing campaign existed across multiple channels, and Manges says they use data to better understand which marketing channel, email or social, converted the highest rate of customers. Examining the right kind of data took them from speculation to clear guidance on which channel to invest in.

Manges: They ran the campaign a couple of times to collect the right results and then land on, okay, it turns out email, even though social popped more, there was more like engagement, people were front and center, every time we ran the email marketing campaign, the series about the drip, whatever we did, it always resulted in X number of dollars.

And so let’s reallocate and put more behind what it takes to get people into that email thread or that email journey versus social.

Shomali: The campaign itself didn’t change, but NAHQ was able to use the data to understand where best to target their efforts. A specific example of how data can drive your decisions.

Now moving from marketing to events, let’s look at two ways data can help your association provide a more personalized experience for both exhibitors and attendees. Sharing specific data points with your exhibitors about the makeup of your event attendees is something that many associations already do. But Deshetty says the next step in the evolution of data is in fine tuning an attendees intent.

Deshetty: Now in the corporate world, you see a lot of this where companies are now identifying what an intent is. When somebody visits a website, they can determine, oh, are they looking for just information? Are they actually having an intent to buy? And so as soon as associations can start capturing that type of data points and able to share that, they become even more valuable to sponsors and to exhibitors. So no longer do you just charge $2,500 for a booth space. You can now double it because your value that you’re giving back is so much more. If they’re going to a session, it’s mostly for educational purposes. If they visit you at a booth, then that’s most likely for commercial reasons. So being able to almost score those differently, those two different positions differently, you now know that what their intention is of being at that event, how you want to message to them. If I was an exhibitor, I’d go to the education person and say, hey, I can teach you more about this problem that you’re trying to solve. If it’s a commercial intent as an exhibitor, I would say, hey, I see that you visit our booth. Let’s set up a demo. It can go right into that hardcore sell. So that helps the exhibitor really fine tune what their strategy is going to be.

Shomali: The last idea we’ll explore today comes from Colangelo and is specific to event attendees. It goes back to his earliest point in this episode: Is your association trying to create a more personalized experience for your audience?

In this example, AI can help you build an individual profile of each event attendee to better understand the personalized experience and content that they’re looking for.

Colangelo: We can now track who is in rooms. We can track the type of content with, again, a prescribed well-trained series of bots, pull out the various content types, and now start to append those into an individual record. Now, in this example, I know that Joe is really hyper-focused about events, analytics, and AI, but maybe I went to a session on how to train the next generation of data analysts, but that’s a little bit lower on my priority scale. And so, as we start to see people around more events, and that could also be webinars and other areas of contents being delivered, now you’re starting to round out that individual’s profile. And so, we’ve taken something that had a relatively, let’s call it short shelf life, but is hyper-valuable. We’re extending the value of it. And then we’re also allowing you, or the organizer in this case, the association to actually use that data in different ways, because it also can be used, obviously, for marketing outside of events too.

Like, wouldn’t it be great if I had a white paper series that I could specifically target not to my entire list, but I could send just to the 3,000 people that are most aligned with that kind of topical area.

Shomali: We’ll explore this topic of AI in more depth next time as we look at the role that digital strategy plays in your association’s overall revenue health. I’ll be joined by Dwayne Capuano, Michelle Brien, Colleen McKenna, and more as we RevUP digital strategy.

Until then, take some time to consider how your association is performing when it comes to data. Is it driving business decisions? Is it valued within your association’s culture?

And remember, it’s not necessary to wait for association leadership to make data a priority.Everyone in your association owns a part of improving data usage.

The Association RevUP podcast is presented by the Professionals for Association Revenue. We launched this eight part series in May of 2024, and we’re relying on the data to help us understand if it’s the type of professional development content that association professionals value. Consider leaving a review, and don’t forget to subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode. And join us in person at our annual conference, the RevUP Summit, where we focus on the business practices prioritized by association business pioneers.

We’re gathering November 20th and 21st in Annapolis, Maryland. Visit our website and use the code PARPOD for a discount.

I’m Carolyn Shomali – Thanks so much for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.