Synthesize your national & chapter growth engine for the win

For associations, national and chapter offerings are a common pairing. Giving members and customers access to both the national and regional flavors amps the overall value of the organization. Makes perfect sense.

What's challenging when it comes to national and chapter partnerships—centralizing efforts, data, and communication so that all elements are synthesized for greatness. 

Here's where HubSpot+Spark comes in. Putting the power of national and chapters' arms under a single sign-on umbrella positions orgs to be strategic, productive, and revenue-generating at scale. 

Synthesizing org-wide efforts

Before even getting your extended chapter family under your roof, you first need to get your home in order. By unifying data from various sources (think AMS, CRM, CDP, EMS, LMS, etc.) with HubSpot, organizations can create a single, comprehensive view of each of their members. This holistic perspective catalyzes more custom interactions, makes for informed decision-making, and enhances the member and customer experience. Consider getting your hands on this data: 

Jack Frost is a member of the American Winter Association (AWA). Yes, a weird pick for the summer but it has to be cold somewhere 😉. Here's what we know about Jack:

Title: Chief Temp Controller

Company: Wonderland & Associates

Events Attended: Annual Chill Out Conference (2018, 2021, 2022, 2024)

Sessions Attended: What to Wear, Healing Frost Bite, Avoiding Yellow Snow

Member Lead Score: 85 below

CTAs Downloaded: 100 Ways to Cope through Summer Guide, State of Frigidity Report

Webinars Attended: Soups that Do the Trick, World's Best Sliding Hills

Email Subscriptions: Layering Attire, F&B, Holiday Festivities, Solstice Activities

Page Visits: Annual Chill Out Conference Sessions, Bitter Sweet Blog, Temp Control Weekly 

Chats Engaged: How Do I Re-up my Cold Cert?

SMS Texts Clicked: Member Renewal Reminder 

Service Tickets: Laptop Frozen, Reset Member Password, My Arctic Accreditation isn't listed

So this is all great on paper, right? A lot of this data looks familiar. Some you're already collecting. Some you're thinking about collecting. But the magic isn't just in the data itself. It's the ability to access all of it from one place—under one contact record. List-building, workflow enrollment, report-building, dynamic content, even persona enhancement can happen when you have this diversity of data under one roof. 

HubSpot Hubs—including Marketing, Content, Sales, and Service Hub—do this for you. They become the connective tissue across your collective org activities.

HighRoad Spark takes it even further by connecting your AMS (or your database of truth like a CRM or CDP) into HubSpot for true data consolidation. Diving further into your tech stack, Spark syncs beyond your source of truth into other association org tech like EMS', LMS' and beyond. 

This level of synchronization allows for scaling, efficiency, and increased metrics within your own rev shop. So, just imagine what you could do when you get the rest of your affiliations (AKA Chapters) under your roof. 

Synchronizing national and chapter efforts

When it comes to chapter synchronization, you're really just looking at a well planned and executed Service Level Agreement (SLA). This really boils down to the 4 Cs: 

Consensus on mutual (primary) and independent (sub) goals, strategies, campaigns and, metrics. Not just the foundational planning of this, but year-round dashboards and performance indicators that support—and help you track—activation of your vision. 

Centralization of digital assets such as content, messaging, emails, branding, landing pages, website, and more. Along with technical assets (data) that dictate personas, segmentation strategies, dynamic content, and personalization.

Communication: Standard operating procedures (SOPs) enable clearer, easier, and more consistent discussions around what's happening with your truest asset—your members and customers. This includes dashboard reviews and feedback loop sessions that allow your teams to discuss progress, address challenges, and celebrate successes together.

Compartmentalization: Like any partnership, too many hands in the kitchen can be counterintuitive to what you're trying to accomplish. Establishing a base-level agreement on who has access to what is crucial. Partitioning central and chapter arms avoids redundancy and clarifies healthy working zones. 

All of these elements start with staff at the helm, driving vision, strategy, and expected outcomes. But HubSpot+Spark is the revops engine that fuels everything.

 

Rev automation for national & chapters

Revenue automation is a game-changer for organizations looking to optimize their operations and drive growth. By automating routine tasks such as lead scoring, campaign workflows, reporting outputs, sales efforts, ticket assignments, and internal task notifications, organizations can free up valuable time and resources. This allows teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Let's take a look at how different business functions can benefit from HubSpot+Spark when it comes to individual and connected efforts:

Marcom

Whether marketing, communications, content, or publishing, HubSpot provides functionality that allows you to build your national and chapter floorplan. Once again, division does not mean your teams aren't working together. It simply means you have rooms of your own, with a designated common room that ties everything together. 

Through HubSpot, you have options to partition access to:  

• Brand: Silo brand kits and templates for national as the primary brand and individual chapters as sub-brands. The teams under each of these brands have access to these kits for web/landing page, emails, social, etc. 

• Digital assets: Partitioned campaigns, emails, landing pages, content, etc. based on individual chapter teams. You can even provide open access to national assets (i.e. templates) to establish some uniformity across your national or global family.

• Subscriptions: Assigned or dynamically changed subscription centers depending on audiences, or your national and chapter communications' portfolios. 

• Technical assets: Segmented access to contacts and lists based on your national's or chapter's segmentation strategy. Note that divvying access to contacts does not mean you're splitting contacts into multiple records. HubSpot is a consolidated CRM. This means, there will always be one record for one individual with multiple activities. HubSpot isn't designed to have multiple (duplicate) records for one contact. Humans aren't duplicated (yet)—HubSpot contacts are no different. 

 

Sales & marketing alignment

When it comes to marketing and sales working collaboratively to nurture contacts along the funnel—from anonymous contact, to prospect, to lead, to member, to buying member—it's important that efforts on both sides of the house are lock in step against mutualized goals. We call this 'smarketing'. 

National and chapter fusion, whereby combined efforts are based on the establishment of mutual goals (i.e. membership, event registration, certification, sponsorship/advertising, volunteering, etc.) is no different when it comes to smarketing principles and mechanisms.

Through HubSpot+Spark, you can build these smarketing systems through: 

• Automations: Campaign and operational workflows, comms, tasks, and notifications that pass leads, leads status, efforts, and conversions back-and-forth automatically between national and chapters.

• Lead scoring: Value system mechanisms designed to gauge fit, interest, and buying intent for prospects, customers, and members. You set the point system criteria and weight at the front-end and HubSpot+Spark handles the rest.

• Lifecycle Staging: Underpinned by your lead scoring system, labels are automatically assigned to your audiences so that you have a gauge on where they are in their journey. Once again, you set the staging criteria that moves your contacts from one stage to another based on your lead scoring point system, and HubSpot automates from there.

• Pipeline Staging: Once leads have made their way through the marketing funnel with indicators of interest (high lead scores), they become a sales opportunity. Your sales team then continues nurturing your audiences through calls, meetings, discoveries, proposals to convert them on your definition of success. Keep in mind, the individuals handling activities do not need to be traditional sales members (think sponsorship and advertising sales). They can also be member services teams, event services, chapter leaders, volunteers, etc.

• Reporting & dashboards: Demonstrates campaign effectiveness, audience insights, actionable business intelligence, conversion attribution, and more. Can reflect individualized chapter data, data combined with national, or aggregate data with national and other chapters. 

 

Programs & services

As a true revops platform, HubSpot also allows your teams to service all of your audiences. Depending on your Member- or Chapter-services structure, you have the opportunity to set-up one or multiple ticketing pipelines and automations, chat flows, inboxes, and help desks, just to name a few.

Remember, the benefit of servicing your members under one roof lies in the delivered experience and the unity of data. 

Consider three service centers at the national level for your top programs, and individual chapter service centers managed by your chapter arms. Over time, ticketing themes and patterns would surface at the individual and aggregate level. This level of individualized customer care and business intelligence could play a hand in membership retention, event experiences, certification revenue, program development, etc. The list is endless.

 

Business Intelligence

Most see HubSpot as a rev activator. And yes, it absolutely is. What most organizations don't know is that HubSpot, entirely built from the ground up (meaning no cobbled together apps), is also built for business intelligence and predictive analytics.

HubSpot's unified data system which could look like this...

...provides a 'new' single source of truth. One that's constantly changing, telling, and actionable. Since HubSpot is entirely rooted in AI, which is constantly consuming your centralized data, you now have a platform that can give you live, ongoing business analytics, in the now and the future.

So you've got this fantastic AI-infused business intelligence tool that doesn't just 'tell' you what's happening in your world. It allows you to take action based on the intelligence you're seeing. This improves decision-making and enables more effective planning and execution of strategies.

For instance, you identify a specific member persona dropping over time in renewals. Through insights drawn from HubSpot, you know this decline is directly attributable to some programs (either at the national or chapter level) that have been sunset. You also know that the new replacement programs haven't been marketed well enough against some of the other cash cow programs in your membership portfolio. 

Through HubSpot, you can automatically enroll this group into a workflow that promotes the new programming. Not only can you track the effectiveness and attributable conversions from the campaign. You can test the programs that are working and the ones that just aren't sticking so that you're moving the needle with this particular membership segment. And the insights can be sent directly to your Program Team. 

That's the magic right there. Whether you're taking action on a contact or not, you have the ability to leverage HubSpot for both business intelligence and rev activation.

Real-world application 

It's clear that leveraging HubSpot+Spark to align chapter and national efforts can have transformative impact on growth and retention. Taking it beyond the theoretical, here a few real-world use cases: 

 

Now back to Jack

In the end, centralizing data and leveraging rev automation is essential to enhancing org growth overall. Synthesizing your national efforts with your regional efforts not only creates efficiencies for your domestic or global teams, it creates a more customer- and member-centric experience. This naturally drives growth and fosters long-term loyalty and success. 

So taking it back to Jack. Think of how powerful it would be for Jack to receive an email with the below dashboard every quarter on his member and/or chapter activities. All of this demonstrated value extracted from one place, via one record is easily accomplished through HubSpot+Spark.