On his Membership Marketing Blog, Tony Rossell has a post about membership dashboards. He provides a link to a chart that shows all kinds of membership information. I noted in the comments section: "…I must take exception to the use of "dashboard" with the example you provide. A dashboard, at a glance, provides instant information […]
I often tell my clients to avoid managing (or programming) to the exception. What I mean is too often when one or two members or customers complain about how we do something, we assume that we should accomodate their complaints and change our processes (or worse yet, reprogram the database to manage it). It's quite
I was trading emails with my colleague (and fellow AMS consultant) George Breeden recently, and he raised an issue that I’ve long felt was missing from essentially every AMS vendor out there. George put it this way: The vendors should be taking proactive steps to maintain and build the relationships, not just in a reactive
Recently I began receiving emails from a political advocacy organization that has views that are, shall we say, completely counter to mine. I suspect one of my "funny" friends may have signed me up. That's all well and good, except that the emails don't provide any opt-out information. There is a link to their "privacy
I’ve ranted in the past about getting your mass emails right. Well it seems that even the big guys have problems when it comes to this stuff. I received an email from Gartner today offering a free report. I clicked through and got to the web page that was offering a pdf download of the
You may recall an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is having his kitchen re-done. Whenever Jerry asks his carpenter what he should do, the carpenter offers all kinds of options and then says "I can do whatever you want me to." Jerry gets so exasparated that he tells the carpenter to do whatever he wants.
As I mention in this post, having an issue tracker is a key tool for managing all the different issues that arise during the implementation and live usage of an association management system. But for some reason, until just recently, most of the AMS providers did not provide any kind of online system for submitting
I received an email from Aptify inviting me to attend an upcoming demonstration. I clicked on the link provided and was taken to a page that read "The resource cannot be found." Needless to say, this does not inspire confidence in their product. It's critically important to check all your links prior to sending a
I’m working with a client who has a custom database application to manage their website and database. It’s actually a pretty slick system. But the problem is that it was designed by web developers who have a great sense of managing web things, but no sense for managing finances. I see this time and time
We're approaching the end of the first decade of the 21st century and it seems some organizations still haven't grasped some simple concepts of data management. I hate to pick on ASAE (OK, I don't hate it, I just don't prefer it), but I received two emails from them within two hours of each other,