I always approached recruitment as a sales effort, and kind of a numbers game approach. What I wish I had done differently is put a lot more effort into data gathering as part of that effort. People in the Association world are very focused on member data, but perhaps not as much on prospect data. At the last Association that I worked at we were really good at gathering data about a prospect’s meeting attendance and what they might have downloaded from the website, but not as much on their current professional needs or program interests (they weren’t members after all!).
Prospective members may not join right away, but that doesn’t make their information any less relevant to their mission. In fact, it might even be more so. We can think of the interests and focus areas of our future members as leading indicators of where an Association might need to steer itself towards in the years ahead.
Now, if I could hop in the way back machine, I would have built out a bunch of custom fields (in the AMS), email campaigns, metrics and dashboards geared solely at prospective members. Having data on what they wanted to learn and industry issues that concerned them would have allowed us to be more relevant to our current members and given us great ideas to use in recruitment campaigns. But perhaps even more importantly, it would given us the information to present the Association as ahead of the curve on future issues and positioned us a resource for the entire industry, not just our members.
And of course, we would keep all that data tied to the individual’s record so that when they eventually joined, we had the full history of all their engagement with us.
Not too shabby for some custom fields and planning, right?
“I like the fact that by using Impexium versus our previous system, we will be able to reduce staff’s workload. As a result, NAADAC’s staff will be happy, feel more capable and competent…in serving our members.”
“…Impexium has allowed us to significantly improve our processes and procedures. We’ve automated quite a lot with Impexium and removed a number of manual processes that we had before. And staff are very happy about that.”
“I found Impexium to be more modern, more sophisticated, more user friendly, more intuitive.”
“We wanted a partner that would grow with us and one that could innovate with us. Impexium checked all those boxes. They took us from outdated to automated.”
“…very excited because of the possibilities that I see for NADA moving forward, the ability to give our executives the information, any intelligence that they need in order to help our members better…the ability to simplify the whole application ecosystem, removing unbelievable complexity and bringing simplicity to the application.”
“You have to have a support team that communicates clearly, is a good listener, is patient and can really handle the problem solving…I have been really pleased with Impexium’s support. They are on-top-of things responsive…I know they will stick with me until we figure it out.”
