Six Lessons from #22NTC Giving Your Membership Database Wings to Fly

We were psyched to present at #22NTC along with our fantastic client the International African American Museum and their partner CCAH. We spent a very enjoyable hour talking about how we worked together to find a solution that would help the museum take their membership program to the next level.

If you attended NTC but missed our session, you can still watch the recording for the next couple of months.

Here are six key takeaways from our session.

1. Use a tool that’s built for the task at hand. Workarounds can add hours to your process. This means there’s less time for other things that are just as important, like donor stewardship! IAAM’s team spent a lot of time and effort on workarounds and it led to exhaustion and burn out.
2. When evaluating a new solution, focus on the Must Haves. Don’t get distracted by things that are cool but aren’t central to what you need to get done. Raise HECK helped IAAM choose EveryAction, a solution that fulfilled the most important parts of their membership acquisition program: robust digital marketing features and core membership management.
3. During a migration, leadership is key. If executive leadership understands how important this technology change is, that helps everyone else allocate their time to focus on it.
4. Use your reclaimed time to steward your donors. The end result of a technology change should be efficiencies gained that help you have more time to focus on cultivation, report-backs to donors, and stewardship. This is good practice, because donors and members who are being stewarded are more likely to renew their memberships!
5. Learn from past experience. Build a core team to help you during the migration. Consider all the downstream impacts of this technology change on other departments. Make sure you do a dry run to find gaps in the process. And figure out data maintenance processes before you go live.
6. The International African American Museum is phenomenal. The museum is opening in late 2022 and we should all get charter memberships, join the email list, and make plans to travel to see the museum in person!

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