Association Insight International & European Association Insights Winter 2015 | Page 35
Association Insights
Association Success Story
NETWORK
Project
Categories
Dates
Association
New CRM System Implementation – Impact on Member Services and
Membership Experience
Membership, Events
1 August 2013 to 30 November 2014
Society For Experimental Biology
Members
2400 members worldwide, 40% in Europe and 60% in the rest of the world, who are
biologists at all stages on their career, from PhD students to practicing researchers
and academic, to emeritus professors
Project team
Sabina Baba, Membership Manager (lead), three other members of staff, the
conference manager and the office administrator.
Objectives
The SEB decided that to address the issues we were facing, a new Membership CRM
system needed to be implemented. The purpose of this was to:
» reduce administration time required for membership through automation
» improve membership processes (joining and renewal)
» improve the data we hold on our members as well as how we use this
» improve the overall customer experience by making our services more user
friendly and efficient
» reduce barriers for members and non-members alike when joining, renewing,
registering for events.
Background
The Society’s membership processes were very administrative heavy requiring a lot
of staff time, and in such a small organisation with only 5 staff members this was
problematic. Having to spend a lot of time on manual administration, this left very
little time for developing and growing our membership base and existing services.
From a customer point of view membership processes such as joining and renewing
were not user friendly and required a lot of effort and time on the customer’s part.
This placed barriers for joining and renewing and posed a threat in terms of retention
of existing members and acquisition of new members.
The SEB carried out an audit of the membership processes as well as the processes
for registering for our conferences and the following problem areas were identified.
The joining process was not user friendly
» To apply for membership you had to fill in a paper application form
» It also required a lot of administration as each application had to be manually
entered onto the database
The database was not allowing non-member profiles to be created
» The SEB previously could not capture non-members as the database would only
allow membership registrations. Non-members attending their meetings would
therefore have to create a new registration from scratch each time. We were also
not able to market membership or other services to these members or monitor
how many of them actually became members or purchased any other services
from SEB.
Membership Renewal process was administrative heavy and created many
barriers for members to renew
» Members were not able to change category online (i.e. from a student to an early
Career scientist membership) and needed to contact the membership office
when no longer eligible for your membership category. We were therefore relying
on people’s honesty to let us know when their status changed.
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