How To Select Management Technology For Your Association

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How To Select Management Technology For Your Association

Sr. Marketing & Operations Manager
5 minutes read
April 27, 2017

When you run a large association, with chapters and members all over the country, your list of tasks is never-ending. There is a big amount of things to do: signing up new members, collecting dues, tracking finances and planning events.

Event Management Technology for Associations

It's tempting to have a powerful specialized tool to cover each of your different tasks. Marketo for marketing, Salesforce for lead generation, EventBrite for event management, and on and on. The problem is none of these tools are geared towards associations. They don't know how you operate and their solutions are made for companies.

Instead of having different specialized software, you can try a single event management technology for associations that keeps all your tools together. Here's why.

Already hooked on getting event management technology? Book a demo to see more for yourself with Glue Up's event management software solution.

All-in-One Software Makes Your Data More Efficient

Your data lives in a feedback loop - information about finances and membership affects areas of your work beyond money and sign-ups.

If you're planning a huge gala event and inviting all your members, you need to know about their behavior. It would be very useful in planning the event, to market effectively, and sell more tickets. With event management technology for associations your membership CRM works together with your event management tool.

While planning the event, you can use your membership CRM to learn details like:

  • The number of people who came to your last similar event
  • What percentage of your members buy early-bird tickets
  • Response rates to social media vs. email campaigns

Later, your event management tool has to combine all these positions. If you use two separate tools for your membership CRM and event planning, you will have to manually input and merge data between them. It can be not only waste of time but also exhausting and boring process.

When you have an all-in-one tool which puts your membership CRM alongside your event management, it will let you focus on maximizing attendance at your events and catering to your members.

Multi-Tenant Control Streamlines Internal Communication

For your gala event, you'll be calling on various chapters, leaders, and members to help you plan. In this case, to plan the event they will need to access all your critical information. However, multi-tenant control is viable only when you use a single all-in-one event management technology for associations.

Multi-tenant control streamlines intra-association communication by providing different users access to information and sometimes cloud-based remote access. If your association's tech stack includes a range of tools, offering access to each one individually can become cumbersome. When all the information is centralized, multi-tenant control can make planning even more efficient.

By using multi-tenant control for your gala event:

  • The treasurer can quickly pull up the finances for your association's previous large events held around the country.
  • You have an opportunity to divide tasks among event planners within the association and everyone can see the results.
  • You can share, adapt for different regions, and track your standardized marketing materials from one place.

Within large associations, there is almost always a long chain of command and control is spread over various chapters and members. It can be difficult to get everyone on the same page.

Multi-tenant control allows individual users access to different things: financial records, membership CRM, events management tool, marketing materials and results. Many all-in-one tools provide customization options too, so you can determine who gets permission to access what.

Customer Support Becomes Faster and More Useful

Regardless of the features your association management tech comes with, excellent customer support remains paramount. If you spread the tasks out across a range of tools, though, you will have to do email followups with half a dozen representatives rather than just one.

With an all-in-one product, customer support can help you through every corner of your association management rather than just focusing on what could be just one issue you have in a laundry list of problems.

If you're making final touches on your gala, running into an issue with your software can be disastrous—you have salespersons and members all depending on everything going off without a hitch. As a result, you're going to need customer support that replies promptly and, ideally, over a range of mediums.

Email support and online messaging with customer service are becoming increasingly common on major sites. But large associations, for the most part, prefer phone service.

According to Help Scout, speaking directly with a real person not only improves the сustomer support process but can also deliver better answers and actual support.

Having a customer support agent who is available by phone 24/7 is invaluable for your association.

Also, by utilizing a single all-in-one event management technology for associations, you will have to go only through one training. You don't have to go through on-boarding for eight different types of software. This means you can learn how to use your tool faster and get straight into managing your association.

All-in-One Management Tool Does Everything Faster

The option of building a tech stack can help you to make make managing of your association easier. When you choose a variety of tools over an all-in-one piece of software like Glue Up, you decentralize your information and make management harder for yourself.

An all-in-one event management technology will keep everything from your membership CRM to your sales and marketing all in one place. This will let every leader in your association have an easier time accessing crucial data and will keep various aspects of your planning in conversation with each other.

Paired with excellent customer support, your streamlined and faster tech stack will ensure your association runs efficiently.

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