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.     

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.

As you, your fellow executives and board members gaze into the future, you may be throwing around or even “test driving” ideas of new models to diversify your revenue streams and change how you monetize your content. This could be due to revenue declines, or just the need to adapt to new market drivers. 

Whatever the reason, you're not alone. Over the last few years, a majority of associations have reported difficulties in membership engagement and growth, and have turned to innovation before degradation. 

Associations, non-profits, and societies tend to find themselves in the perfect storm of resource-deprivation and program decentralization. 

This equates to small marketing teams with lean operating budgets working as in-house agencies to a suite of program managers. The fall-out from this often comes down to inefficacy, lack of focus, and inevitable burnout among team members. 

So what can marketing team leads and managers do to shore up scope with resource reality?

Truth for most associations—you’re sitting on a mountain of valuable data, but it often feels disconnected.

You know a ton about your members—what they like, what they’re good at, what their challenges are, and what they’d like to see more of. But the data you have is disparate across platforms.

So connecting all of this data in a holistic, actionable way is a challenge. You need a bridge to connect your technology platforms so that you, the marketer, can reach out to your members in thoughtful, data-driven ways.

As more and more associations work to become data-driven organizations, they keep running into the same problem: integration. Associations have the data. The problem is getting all of that data into one place.

Data integration is tricky in most circumstances. It can be really tough for associations, as the majority of commercial tools don’t work with Association Management Systems (AMS). And integration isn’t just an IT problem either. Without the right data pipelines in place, you can’t run data-driven marketing campaigns or execute member-focused strategies.

That’s why we here at HighRoad Solutions have been working tirelessly to help associations unify their data. Our go-to tool has been the Plus Connector, a neat piece of software that enables fast communication between an AMS and another data source.