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Association Success Story | Association Insights

Front page of ETISwebsite displaying personalised information after members log in

Results

Conclusion

One year after the launch of the new website we can
conclude that it was a resounding success. Members Corner
logins increased 95% and public visits increased 45%.
The new website also received a huge increase in public
information requests due to better page management and
SEO. We have seen a large increase in online collaboration
as our members launched numerous Wiki pages and
surveys. The discussion forum use skyrocketed at as well
as did the number of virtual meetings. This combination
of online activity, virtual meetings along side our already
busy conference calendar has made 2014 the busiest year
ever in ETIS history. We are looking into ways of measuring
this new found activity and knowledge sharing and the
membership management platform provides countless
ways to measure member interaction and knowledge
sharing. The challenge now will be to be able to measure
this activity in a stable and comparable manner now that
the new platform has been launched.

There are many good platforms out there and most of
them do more than you will ever actually need. The key is
taking the time to understand your members’ thoughts,
needs, attitudes as well as the vast competition from ‘free’
resources which are fast becoming the norm, if you want
to keep your members on your platform you have to offer
something they can’t get elsewhere. In our case, that is a
real sense of community and especially ‘trust’ and ‘security’
as we deal with a lot of sensitive information.

Quotes
“If you outsource a mess, you still have a mess…”

What you would do differently
I would double the time it takes to get the buy-in from
our Association staff who use the platform from an
administrative point of view. We underestimated the
resistance to change, ways-of-working, habits, etc… of
our colleagues even if a new system has many promised
benefits.

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