Association Insight International & European | Page 42

Association Insights | Association Success Story

ETIS has 10 working groups and over 30 events per
year therefore it is essential that each member receives
personalized and contextual information when logging
on. Each member receives his own monthly newsletter
based on his/her interests and activity. They each have a
personalized profile page which provides a contextual feed
that is unique to that person (much in the way a Facebook
profile page works). The possibility to link to Social Media
platforms further encourages personalization of content
and feeds.
Optimisation for mobile devices:
Although the website did have an Iphone App when it
was first launched we decided to get rid of it very quickly
and opt for a responsive design approach. After surveying
our members we realized that even though many of them
have personal smart phones they are also tied to corporate
phones, many of which still use Blackberry for security
reasons. We also found out they view our website via a
number of devices and screen sizes. As a result the website
has responsive design which allows our members to have
an optimal viewing experience regardless of access device.
This allows our members to perform all functions while
on-the-go such as: profile, messages, agendas, logistics,
reminders, rsvps, contact details, maps, upload photos, etc…
The website also has a mobile mini site for display on older
phones.

Partners
In order to deal with the ever increasing demands on our
Members Corner we decided to adopt an association
management software as a service platform. After extensive
research, we selected yourmembership.com as the new
platform for our online community. YourMembership.com
(YM) provides “Software as a Service” (SaaS-model) online
member communities and membership management
software for member-based organisations. With this hosted
solution, there was no hardware to purchase or additional
software to install and includes future development
capabilities.
The integrated nature of the solution vastly improved
our online presence as well as the services we offer to
our members online through the Members Corner. It
also improved and streamlined other areas of the ETIS
experience (e.g. messaging, events, logistics, networking),

while decreasing the administrative load for the Central
Office staff. Given the holistic nature of the solution, the
integrated measurement capabilities further allowed us
to keep better track of our activities online and provide
accurate indicators and feedback. Moreover, with the
evolutionary approach of YM’s SaaS products, we have the
ability to keep on adding new features in the future and
thus decrease the risk of the solution becoming out-dated.
This will vastly improve our flexibility in responding to the
rampant pace of change in the online environment and
allow us to make timely adjustments to the ETIS online
presence and branding. In conclusion this platform allows
us to converge costly software and future development into
one complete online solution running on one, up-to-date
member database.

Challenges
» The main challenge we faced was the data privacy and
location issues. As this platform is hosted in the USA we
faced some resistance from a few members and had to
build a very strong case to convince them to go forward.
» Although the Cloud Membership Management Platform
promises many benefits such as controlled costs, freed
up resources, future proof development and countless
features we found it was almost easier to start from
scratch and use the opportunity to ‘clean house’ than to
try and import our old platform into the new platform.

Success Factors
» We had the luck( or bad luck depending on how you look
at it) to have a membership base made of IT security
and web-design professionals who have very high
expectations. We created a group of about 30 test users
and their feedback was invaluable towards a successful
launch.
» Whenever possible we use our Members’ Corner as
a central platform from which most communications
originate, converge and return to, making it a central hub
for member interaction. We have tried to reduce the use
of email as much as possible and after a while Members
get used to communicating through the platform
resulting in vastly increased logins, online interactions and
collaboration.

Member Dashboard

The integrated event registration
platform has gone a long way
towards providing a better
service to our members. The CRM
system provides useful statistics,
automatic reminders and other
features to make such inactive
members don’t fall through
the cracks.

42 | © Associations Network 2015

www.associationsnetwork.org