Do you need some help with your data?
PTR specialise in data strategy and data analytics and have worked with a number of membership organisations to help them achieve a 360 degree view of their business and their members by pulling together data from many disparate applications and data sources and presenting key business metrics in engaging dashboards to facilitate data driven business decisions. We understand the unique challenges that membership organisations face and the critical need for reliable and trustworthy information and answers to key business performance questions.
We offer a comprehensive project based consultancy service to assist you with defining a data strategy and to take you through a complete data strategy journey to turn your raw and distributed data sets into powerful dashboards, but equally offer an ad-hoc consultancy service to assist with any part of your data strategy and business intelligence journey.
Take a read below to find out more about Data Analytics and how it can help you, as well as more about PTR and how we can help you.
What Is Data Analytics?
Data Analytics put simply is the ability to drive business decisions by drawing insights from your most valuable business asset, your Data!
Membership organisations face many challenges in keeping their current members engaged and subscribed, and attracting new members. By implementing a sound data analytics data strategy many of the answers to questions about who your future members are, and what keeps your membership engaged with your services can be found very easily.
Imagine having a single dashboard that presents all of your key business performance metrics in one place giving you a 360 degree view of your business, is totally automated and always up to date, and is accessible from anywhere at any time. All this even though the underlying data is drawn from many different sources. Well, you can have it!
PTR have worked with a number of membership organisations to help them build a solid data strategy and a roadmap that will has taken them to that perfect set of dashboards and data driven business decisions. We specialise in data strategy and data analytics and can work with you on all or part of your data strategy and business intelligence journey, on a daily consultancy rate basis or on a project fee basis.
What are your key challenges?
Your organisation is no doubt offering a wide range of services such as:
- Subscriptions
- Publications
- Networking Events
- Awards
- Training
- Professional Development Schemes
- Forums
- Membership Portals
- Social Media Feeds
Do you know how your members are engaging with your services? Which ones are the most popular? What the demographics for each of your services are?
There are many articles published that highlight the challenges of the digital landscape for membership organisations, and no doubt you will have read some. Your members no longer look solely to static publications through the post or sent via email. Increasingly members will be expecting online content to be available via websites, social media platforms and mobile devices and they will be looking for new content on a day by day basis. This digital demand will have led to membership organisations implementing new content platforms and the important information that can tell you how your membership is engaging with you is now distributed across many disparate systems.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a suite of dashboards that show you at a glance how your organisation is performing. And dashboards that are instantly available on demand, totally automated, refreshed on a schedule, and do not require manual intervention to find the data, tidy the data and manipulate it in tools such as Excel.
Wouldn't it be nice for you to be able to see a 360 degree view of a member on one dashboard?
- What level of membership do they hold?
- How long have they been a member?
- What does their journey through membership levels look like?
- How many publications have they subscribed to or downloaded?
- How many times have they accessed the website and for what purpose?
- How many times have they engaged in events or awards?
- How many and what certifications have they gained and over what time?
- How many times have they registered and attended training events?
- What is their split of website/mobile/tablet access methods?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a 360 degree of your whole membership business on a single dashboard?
- How many members do you have now?
- What is the split of the type of members?
- What is the year on year comparison of membership numbers and types?
- What is the year on year growth rate of membership numbers?
- What is your year to date membership growth and membership count?
- How are your membership counts and growth against plan?
- How many new members have you gained?
- How many members have you lost?
- How many members have you retained?
- How many members have you upgraded to a higher level of membership?
- What is your income and profit margin and how do they compare against plan?
- What are the key demographic splits for our memberships?
- How many events or training sessions have been attended by members and what percentage of the overall membership do they represent?
- What is the most popular media for membership engagement?
- How many forum posts have there been?
I am sure that you can think of many more key performance indicators that would provide you with useful insight to drive future decisions.
So why don't you have it? Because the services you now offer will be hosted by a variety of applications and platforms, some current and using the latest IT technologies, some legacy and completely isolated from other systems. Perhaps different teams look after the various service applications and platforms, perhaps there are security challenges that prevent access to all the data sets. Perhaps you don't have a Business Intelligence team that has skills to integrate all of these different systems and data sets. Perhaps because you have always built your analytics in Excel.
Whatever the reason you don't have it the message is that you can have it!
PTR specialise in delivering data analytics solutions just like this to membership organisations like yours, and our team of data analytics consultants are highly skilled in identifying the many source data sets and finding a way of retrieving data from them, cleansing, shaping and validating them, integrating them and relating them. From there we will build a central business model that defines all of your key business metrics and hierarchies, and then we can work with you to design, build and deliver powerful, engaging and insightful dashboards to your key stakeholders to enable them to get the 360 degree view of your performance from anywhere at anytime.
With many membership organisations still working with legacy systems these are some of the challenges we have seen:
- Achieving accurate and consistent membership retention and engagement statistics
- Inconsistencies and errors due to manual data manipulation and report generation
- Lack of clear visibility of which activities are successful and which are not
- Multiple definitions of the same business metric such as "Lapsed" or "New" members
- Multiple definitions of business perspectives such as Date, Membership Type and Geography
- Long report creation and lead times meaning data is always lagging behind real time
- Separate reports for separate data sets as well defined relationships between different applications are lacking.
This really is only a few of the challenges, but there aren't many data challenges that we haven't seen before and we usually find a way of working with even the most obscure of data sets!
Building A Data Analytics Solution - Where do you start?
Start by contacting PTR and we can take you through your options. We can assess your requirements and put together a per day or project based consultancy proposal to get you to where you need to be. It is vital that you see an early return on investment without committing to an extremely high budget and the best way to do that is to let us work with you to break your requirements down into manageable and affordable stages.
We are a big fan of Proof of Concepts (POC) where we will work with you to choose an initial Business intelligence requirement that can be used to test the water and gain stakeholder confidence. A POC can help you to:
- Prove a chosen data platform architecture as fit for purpose
- Educate and equip your team with the new skills they will need going forward
- Carry out sizing and capacity planning to assess the full cost and budget implications
- Provide a relatively quick set of results to demonstrate the potential Return on Investment and benefits of a strong Data Strategy
Following a successful POC the full data analytics and business intelligence roadmap can be planned. By looking at the long term goals we can pull out the key business processes that need to be brought in to the data analytics solution, and in line with the data strategy can build the roadmap and timeline to start the journey.
It will be a journey, and the direction may from time to time change direction as business priorities change, but with a strong data Strategy and a well thought out roadmap these priority changes can easily be accommodated.
The diagram below shows a typical Azure Data Platform architecture for membership organisations. Most organisations will develop a data strategy and then a roadmap that works towards all or part of this over time. We can work with you to find the right solution and the right path for you.
Whatever your Data Source challenge our Data Analytics Consultancy team are here to help you bring your data together. Call our Sales Director, Keith Doward on 0118 979 4000 or email him at keith.doward@ptr.co.uk for further information.
About PTR
PTR have held Microsoft accreditation since 2005, currently holding Gold Partner Status for Data Platform and Data Analytics. We have been working with clients on Data Strategy, Analytics and Business Intelligence solutions for over 30 years across a wide range of platforms and vendor solutions. We pride ourselves on combining first rate technical skills with an ability to communicate complex ideas, technology, and data effectively, and working with clients to develop a deep understanding of their business processes and data objectives.
Other related documents:
Membership Engagement Analytics Solution