How your Association Management System and MarTech work together for better member experiences
Summary: Is your AMS creating friction and frustration for members? Having a healthy platform is paramount but replacing it can be cost-prohibitive for many associations. Not to worry, with the right MarTech integrations you can harness best-of-breed tools to supplement capabilities and close gaps.
Your association provides expertise and best practices to guide your industry. Its members count on you for access to educational resources, professional development, networking opportunities, and to advance their community. They also expect self-service websites and smooth user experiences (UX), just like the ones they enjoy in areas from retail to financial services.
Driving this is the association management system (AMS). This platform tracks dues, takes subscriptions, facilitates events, and handles transactions. It can control content, put resources at member’s fingertips, and host certification programs. The potential is tremendous, but unfortunately, not every AMS is a fit and replacing it can get costly. But while many associations have to make do, they don’t have to settle for sites that cause friction and frustration. That’s especially true when the AMS is integrated properly with their marketing technology (MarTech) toolkit.
Assessing your Association Management System
Understanding what your AMS can and can’t do will help determine which path to take. The goal is to modernize your system to improve operational efficiencies and create a more cohesive online experience. So, naturally, you want to first assess your AMS’ capabilities and identify where it may be falling short.
When we start a new relationship with an association, there’s usually an AMS in place. We assess it from a digital features perspective, offering recommendations to meet user expectations, focusing on issues from navigation ease to search functionality. We can make platform recommendations, but again, we’re typically talking about leveraging and building upon an existing AMS.
That said, it’s just as important to identify disconnects between different systems that may be inhibiting performance and limiting capabilities - ones that could be rectified or leveraged. Chief among these is the MarTech stack, a collection of technology-based tools digital marketers use for activities across multiple channels.
Feature performance for association websites
After assessing your AMS, update your platform strategy accordingly and develop a change roadmap. As part of this, familiarize yourself with current solutions so you can take advantage of newer features for your association website. Be sure to test the current user experience objectively, set aside a budget to control costs, and ensure changes are finished. Also, plan a rollout strategy to limit interruption to members' services.
The following are some tips on specific areas to help things along:
Features: Decide which features you’re missing and newer ones that are now must-haves. You must also determine if your platform is too outdated to accommodate such updates.
Integrations: A healthy AMS must play well with other tech, especially digital asset and content management systems (DAM and CMS). Further, be sure yours can leverage best-of-breed tools to supplement existing capabilities and close AMS gaps. In the MarTech stack, this means tools for managing content, automation, email marketing, customer relations management, analytics, social media, and more.
Experiences: Strive to provide consistent, branded, user-friendly experiences. Don’t have members search for resources, wait on downloads, question tracking or feeling left behind. This is especially critical for healthcare associations because they have an added commitment to public education and advocacy.
Personalization: Personal communications and services increase member engagement and satisfaction. Note these activities can consume significant time and money, so be sure your AMS can facilitate it.
Future-proofing: You need to be able to incorporate emerging, more powerful capabilities. Topping the list is artificial intelligence (AI). For example, AI-driven personalization engines can interpret user behavior and tailor content accordingly, pleasing members while saving associations time and money.
The significance of an AMS can not be stressed enough. Your best approach may be a total rip-and-replace. This involves deploying the AMS, untangling integrations, and connecting various platforms. It’s complex but worth the lift. We helped CREW Network redesign and re-platform their main site and 55 integrated chapter sites. They were able to enhance site speed, expand accessibility, streamline event registration, add features, and more.
Talk to an association integrations expert
Does your association suffer from broken user experience and poor integrations? Having our experts assess your AMS is a low-stakes, high-return project that’ll help you navigate change, win support, and maximize ROI on investments. Let's chat.