Association Insight International & European Association Insights Winter 2015

Association Insights Association Success Story NETWORK Project Categories Dates Association New CRM System Implementation – Impact on Member Services and Membership Experience Membership, Events 1 August 2013 to 30 November 2014 Society For Experimental Biology Members 2400 members worldwide, 40% in Europe and 60% in the rest of the world, who are biologists at all stages on their career, from PhD students to practicing researchers and academic, to emeritus professors Project team Sabina Baba, Membership Manager (lead), three other members of staff, the conference manager and the office administrator. Objectives The SEB decided that to address the issues we were facing, a new Membership CRM system needed to be implemented. The purpose of this was to: » reduce administration time required for membership through automation » improve membership processes (joining and renewal) » improve the data we hold on our members as well as how we use this » improve the overall customer experience by making our services more user friendly and efficient » reduce barriers for members and non-members alike when joining, renewing, registering for events. Background The Society’s membership processes were very administrative heavy requiring a lot of staff time, and in such a small organisation with only 5 staff members this was problematic. Having to spend a lot of time on manual administration, this left very little time for developing and growing our membership base and existing services. From a customer point of view membership processes such as joining and renewing were not user friendly and required a lot of effort and time on the customer’s part. This placed barriers for joining and renewing and posed a threat in terms of retention of existing members and acquisition of new members. The SEB carried out an audit of the membership processes as well as the processes for registering for our conferences and the following problem areas were identiﬁed. The joining process was not user friendly » To apply for membership you had to ﬁll in a paper application form » It also required a lot of administration as each application had to be manually entered onto the database The database was not allowing non-member proﬁles to be created » The SEB previously could not capture non-members as the database would only allow membership registrations. Non-members attending their meetings would therefore have to create a new registration from scratch each time. We were also not able to market membership or other services to these members or monitor how many of them actually became members or purchased any other services from SEB. Membership Renewal process was administrative heavy and created many barriers for members to renew » Members were not able to change category online (i.e. from a student to an early Career scientist membership) and needed to contact the membership office when no longer eligible for your membership category. We were therefore relying on people’s honesty to let us know when their status changed. www.associationsnetwork.org Winter 2015 | 35

Association Insight International & European Association Insights Winter 2015 | Page 35