Guest Post: Lisa Boylan, Associations Now
What better time to showcase what volunteers did for a small-staff association than National Volunteer Week? A complex project involving intimidating software was solved by data-savvy members who stepped in to get the job done.
Keeping member data updated is hard enough, but taking on a project with complicated software is an even heavier lift. In the case of one small-staff association, harnessing volunteers’ expertise proved to be an excellent solution.
The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology has a staff of 11 serving 9,000 members. With her team spread thin, Jayne Tegge, SIOP’s member engagement manager, was thrilled when the organization’s membership analytics subcommittee took on the task of creating a member dashboard using Tableau, a sophisticated data visualization platform.
“Because data collection and analysis and making evidence-based decisions are crucial to part of what our members actually do for their jobs, they took the ball and ran with it,” Tegge said.
The new dashboard will be useful for analyzing data and creating insights, giving Tegge a more accurate picture of who is engaged, who is paying their dues, what the retention rate is, and what the different drivers of that retention are. And it will provide segmentation information among members, retirees, associates, fellows, and more. An unexpected additional benefit? It is also useful for SIOP’s members to know more about each other.
