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Blog Feature

By: Aimee Pagano
January 10th, 2024

Data can be a lot of things. It can drive stability. It can weed out ambiguity. At its best, it can lay the foundation for smart decision-making, elevated performance, and growth. 

Associations and nonprofits are no exception to these rules. They rely on data to properly engage members and prospects, create membership programs, optimize content, provide services, and manage many other functions throughout the day-to-day. 

The challenge is ensuring that the data used is reliable. 

Blog Feature

By: Aimee Pagano
January 3rd, 2024

Association leaders have long been recognizing the power of data. They know that data-driven insights allow them to make crucial business decisions.

Whether it helps to inform go-to-market plans, discover new ways to diversify revenue or create entirely new membership models in line with incoming markets, leveraging data through a single source of truth catalyzes business intelligence. 

So when there's data "anarchy" through misaligned objectives and processes, organizations struggle with data activation. Culturally aligning your entire org with a unified data engine just makes sense for smart decisions.     

Blog Feature

By: Aimee Pagano
November 16th, 2023

Bicentennial Man. AI Artificial Intelligence. Ex Machina. iRobot. Meghan. What do these movies all have in common? Yep, you’ve got in. They’re all sci-fi films with artificially intelligent characters. Some were predicting AI before today’s AI architects were even born. Let that sink in. 
 
So were the writers and directors geniuses? Were they clairvoyant? Particularly for earlier movies like Short Circuit? Or were they just early innovators and visionaries without the tech that we have now? My opinion—while they had the big ideas back then, the natural evolution of tech needed to happen in order to get to AI. 
 
And it is here. The magic that is AI is no different than the plots in our sci-fi and fantasy films. It’s inevitable. It’s the writing on the wall. AI tech is moving at an accelerated pace. Sci fi has been normalized in our every day. 

Blog Feature

By: Garra Swayne
October 27th, 2023

As consumers we’re all familiar with retailer activity around Black Friday. Since it’s just around the corner, you may have already noticed targeted ads from major retailers on upcoming promotions and early Black Friday deals. Did you know that around this time, there’s an approximate 28% increase of emails being sent to entice consumers to prepare for deals? That’s a lot of email! 

Blog Feature

By: Aimee Pagano
September 7th, 2023

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of learning about HubSpot’s not shockingly astounding product roll-out at HubSpot’s crown jewel event—INBOUND. 
 
To say they hit it out of the park (and I don’t even like baseball) is an understatement. HubSpot yet again jumped 10 steps forward in the enterprise CRM space. Imagine if a Magic 8 Ball and a Genie Lamp had children. That’s exactly what HubSpot delivered today in terms of product innovation across all of its hubs.
 
But with all this said, the sheer number of new products and improvements is a lot to take in. Particularly for associations and nonprofits whose use cases and business models tend to stand on the fringe of the traditional B2B perimeter. New tools are fun. Shiny trinkets are cool. But do they all apply to associations—even more so, do they apply to your association and/or nonprofit?
 

Blog Feature

By: Aimee Pagano
May 17th, 2023

You buy a mystery jigsaw puzzle with 1000 pieces. About 200 are hidden in the couch. 500 are "somewhere" in the basement. And 300 have been chewed to annihilation by your puppy. 

This is pretty much how it goes when associations run off of disparate data and martech stacks. All clues remain a mystery. All insights into their members, their prospects, and their futures are lost. They have disjointed pictures and unintelligible stories about their audiences.

Consolidating data and finding that single source of truth can be tricky. Luckily Spark has a solid and evolving solution to mapping your data across your entire stack.