The self-service portal – a vital tool for any membership-based organization
In todays rapidly evolving world, membership-based organizations like Industry Associations, Chambers of Commerce and Professional Institutes are constantly needing to re-define their value proposition to members and other stakeholders. As well many organizations have to deal with disruption as new business models emerge and the pace of change in their ecosystem accelerates.
A lot of progress can be achieved through changes in corporate culture and revisiting of strategy within these organizations. Technology can also play a key role in helping not-for-profit organizations to deal with these forces of change. Membership management solutions can be deployed to help automate many processes including: communications, dues management, targeted marketing, contact management and training and accreditation management to name a few.
However, in today’s world of easy access to technology anytime and anywhere, organizations need to consider moving beyond a one-way “push” flow of information and data to stakeholders. There exists high demand from stakeholders to be able to deal with certain basic process without necessarily having to deal directly with the organization and its staff. Members and others want the convenience of “pull” access to data, invoices and the ability to edit their own contact information to name a few.
In the vast majority of membership/stakeholder management solutions we have deployed at Innovus we integrate a self-service portal as a means of inputting and extracting select information for a CRM platform. This benefits both the organization and the stakeholder. Organizations can get valuable contact and other information such as event registrations automatically. Stakeholders/members can obtain information on membership status, invoices, course matched to their interests and other targeted information when they want it.
In our experience there are a few simple principles that should be followed when developing a self-service portal:
- Make it accessible on any device, especially mobile devices
- Keep it simple for inputting data by end users
- Make sure log-in credentials can be easily managed by the end user
- Give stakeholders the opportunity to set up communications preferences and interest areas so they aren’t besieged with information not relevant to them
- Make sure there is an effective event registration function if that is relevant
By introducing a self-service portal of improving your existing one you have taken one quick step towards improving your value proposition as a membership-based organization.
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