Getting the most out of your AMS

by Gwen Garrison, PhD

Updating and transitioning Association Management System (AMS) software can be daunting, complex, and rewarding. Modern AMS software have many benefits that help staff see members more clearly to create better user experiences and targeted communications that strengthen engagement. To get the most out of these technology transitions, it is worth leadership’s time and energy to think about specific data governance activities to get the most out of their AMS. Our suggestion this week is to focus on your association’s Master Data.

What is Master Data?
According to Hubspot, Master Data is the unique information about your association’s core business entities. To get the most out of your master data, it needs to be accurate, consistent, and uniform so that data from one system can flow to another system and be the source of truth. If an association works to clean up their AMS data, they want those data about their members to flow accurately to events management and marketing campaign systems. Ideally, they want these data to flow in real time and any updates captured in those systems should flow back to the AMS to improve the source system truth.

How can you get started?

There are typically five areas of work in master data management.
 
Identify Master Data Elements
All association should identify their master data elements. Here are some examples:

• Member information including formal and informal names, contact information, organization connection, membership status.
• Product information including type, production date, tags for content focus
• Locations including the physical location for memberships, partners, and vendors.
• Identifying those elements that can and should be used between and among systems is critical.

Data Flow & Use Processes
As the master data identification is underway, we need to capture the current and desired data flows. Unfortunately, many organizations use manual exports and imports so that the data can be transformed in some specific way to meet a specific systems need. This is very labor intensive. By understanding the current data handling, we then can create automations to do the work for us. This allows the best data to be used throughout your organization.
 
Connect your Master Data to Any Data Standards and Create Internal Polices
Once your association has identified your master data elements, seek out any possible data standards to strengthen the use between and among your systems. Among the first that associations use is a USPS postal standard for addresses in the United States. By using data standards, the master data becomes more uniform and consistent thus increasing the quality.

Identify Tools for Maintaining and Sharing Master Data work
Master data is valuable to many internal stakeholders from operations staff to analysts. The list of master data needs to be widely available with updates routinely communicated to key internal stakeholders. Many organizations are leveraging collaboration sites for just such communication work.

Data Governance for Sustainability
One of the greatest benefits to master data work is to data quality. By identifying and developing the processes to maintain health master data, the organization’s data assets increase in value and can be used more widely between and among systems. This decreases employee frustration, improves productivity, and even enhances the user experience especially among external stakeholders such as members and vendors.

Finally, by focusing on the master data associations, the best source of data truth flows from your AMS to other systems.