From Data to Decisions: Helping Associations Better Understand Members

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Edition, guest host Sharon Pare of HighRoad Solutions sits down with Georgina Donahue, Director of Community Innovation and Strategy at Higher Logic, and Rachel Mace, CAE, Director of IT and Database at the National Pest Management Association, to discuss how associations can better understand members and use that insight to drive smarter strategy. They explain how most organizations have plenty of data but little usable intelligence because systems don’t integrate and staff lack a unified, individual-level view across programs, leading to decisions based on gut instinct and missed warning signs like “silent churners.” The guests distinguish reports from behavioral signals and patterns that predict engagement and renewal, share examples of targeted outreach and pandemic-era webinars boosting recruitment and retention, and discuss using engagement scoring, dashboards, and guidance to act at scale. They recommend auditing where data lives, focusing on high-signal sources, and making incremental improvements rather than chasing perfect data. Check out the video podcast here: https://youtu.be/QCQXIDc_cYI   Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.   Transcript Sharon Pare: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Associations NOW Presents: Industry Partner Series, an original podcast from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Sharon Pare, Partnerships Director at Highroad, and your host of this series throughout the year. This episode is sponsored by Higher Logic.  Today, we're excited to welcome Georgina Donahue, Director of Community Innovation and Strategy at Higher Logic, along with Rachel Mace, CAE, Director of IT and Database at the National Pest Management Association. Our conversation today is about how associations can better understand their members and turn that insight into smarter strategy. Georgina, Rachel, welcome to the show.  So I think this is something a lot of associations are quietly dealing with, so why don't we jump in? So let's start with something most associations don't want to say out loud. Most of them are making decisions about their members based on very [00:01:00] little actual insight. Why is that, and how common is it?  Georgina Donahue: I think that most associations have more data than they've ever had, right? They have data coming in from all over the place. They have their AMS records, their event history. They have a community platform. They have email opens, right? So they have this huge bulk of data, but the problem is that almost none of it actually talks to each other, so they end up flying blind even though they have this embarrassment of riches, but they can't access it. They don't know which members are thriving and which ones are drifting, which ones are gonna silently churn in a couple months from now. And the problem actually is not just small organizations who don't have the resources to wrangle the data. It's large, sophisticated tech stacks see this problem as well because the data exists, but it's just really siloed  Rachel Mace, CAE: Yeah, I would have to echo that. There's a lot of silos. [00:02:00] Almost every time I start a job at an association or even at a vendor that services associations, the first thing we have to deal with is untangle the glut of information that they have, what they want to actually access and use. And then we also have to talk through, okay, once we decide what we're gonna use, how are we gonna get it there? Integrations remain such a huge problem with most associations. We find that our data lives in completely separate places, and that data doesn't pipe into new places very easily. So that's been a big issue, and it's not the association staff's fault. We are not integration engineers. We are not high-level data scientists. We came here to work in the nonprofit industry and serve our members. We don't have a background in that expertise. So that data mess exists everywhere, large associations or small associations, and we find that more and more association professionals, whether they like to admit it or not, are starting to realize that they can't make decisions based on the gut anymore, which is how we were making decisions.[00:03:00]  I can even recall way back in the 20-teens encountering a situation where an association professional said, "I have an idea. We're gonna use the power of social credit, so to speak, to get people to reach out to each other and encourage them to join the association." But the problem was this professional was working in a trade association environment, so the other member associations or prospect member associations were competitors, and it's very hard to convince a competitor to join the same