All, or at least most, membership associations tend to measure their success by how many members they have, but member numbers alone don’t really cut it. The success of membership is far better measured by the penetration, or percentage, of the total particular market. And by keeping an accurate membership database. A database that is out of date is like trying to tell the time with a broken watch.

I learned these facts early on in my career when working as the CEO of a national membership association. The organisation in question thought it was doing pretty well when I started working there, however when the annual invoices went out for the next year of subscriptions, there was a degree of shock, horror, when only a really small percentage of members actually paid their subs to maintain their membership. A cash crisis quickly followed. Hardly surprising.

Phantoms in the Database

A cursory investigation showed that there was a huge number of ‘phantoms’ in the membership database. They consisted of duplicates (and even some triplicates) with ever so-slight variations of spelling of their names; people who had attended events and had joined just to get the generous member discount available, but who had no interest in retaining on-going membership. There were people who had resigned, sometimes years earlier, but had never been removed from the database. And sadly, there were deceased members whose families were still receiving invoices and correspondence from the association, despite having died years previously in some cases. Which was a most upsetting situation to put them through.

My first task was to tidy up the data. Unfortunately, the membership database at that time was hosted on Access Software (enough said), but it quickly found its way onto MoST software via a temporary stint in Excel. Phew. We painstakingly worked our way through around several thousand names and ended up with just over half the members we thought we had. Naturally, losing half our members in one fell swoop did terrible things to our budgeting, but at least we were now dealing with reality, not living in La La Land.

We reset budgets and planned activities to reflect the reduced resources we now had, but there was something missing. Actually, it was glaringly obvious. We had no idea how many interested parties we represented; we could only guess at how big the pool was. This question came up time and time again as we sought sponsorship, released industry-related statements or were interviewed by the media.

Do you know how big your audience or market is? How do you find out? If you don’t have a target, how are you ever going to hit it?

Lots of industry leaders had their own theories about how many people were working in our sector, but that was all they were, theories, with nothing concrete to back them up.

So, we engaged a professional researcher, who in turn contacted the Department of Statistics and requested data on the industry sector, collected at the last national census, which had only been a year or so prior. We were careful to request info on the people we directly targeted to provide membership services to; there were no fringe groups or people with just a vague interest in the sector. No outliers. And we used descriptors (job titles in our case) that matched the ones used by Stats, which kept the results incredibly accurate.

Once we had this data, we knew how big our audience, or target market, was. Then it was a simple matter of doing the maths and calculating the percentage of the market we represented. It was around 12% from memory. At every scheduled meeting after this, we reported to the Board on membership growth and membership penetration, and within a remarkably short time frame we’d grown the membership by thousands and were sitting at over 50% penetration. This helped our organisation enormously when it came to representation, to obtaining sponsorship, to be taken seriously by industry and government experts, and it also created a sense of urgency and exclusivity for those in the profession to belong.

Consistency is vital

We ensured that after each census we purchased the same data (to maintain consistency), whilst also looking at any trends that were emerging, and we ran our own survey alongside it to learn about the psychographics of our members.

Once we had this data, we worked on refining it into specific areas, which in turn helped us to fine tune the courses and training we offered; the themes of our conferences; the awards and recognition programmes we created; continuing professional development; student and academic offerings; mentoring and research grants. It also showed us the geographical locations of our target market, which helped us enormously to establish new branches around the country.

We learned that our profession was becoming better educated (or at least better qualified), that women were rapidly replacing men in a range of roles, including senior ones, that more young people were entering the profession, and which career backgrounds our members came from.

These were exciting times and we embraced the power of the database with both hands.

Technology has vastly improved in the intervening years when the only dashboards we had back then were in our cars, and much of the leg work we undertook then can now be done without much human intervention, thanks to AI and algorithms.

Relying on hollow data isn’t useful to your organisation

While Google Analytics is like a crystal ball for your website by providing cold hard data about the pages your visitors spend time on, how many visitors your website receives, and whether they come from Google, email or social media, it is unlikely to tell you how big your potential market is, where they live or work, how well educated they are, what they’re interested in, how much they earn or spend, or other psychographic info that could be used by your organisation. It will tell you a lot about your website though, but is that enough?

A combination of gathering the correct data from your members, storing it in a robust database, maintaining it, analysing it and knowing how big you can grow by knowing the size of your market, makes a lot of sense. Best of all, you already have most, if not all of it in-house, or should have.

Expert’s MoST software can do a huge amount of the work for you, and it continues to evolve. Just ask us.