Wes's Weekly Wisdom Archives

The longer you take, the longer it will take It may sound like a tautology, but the longer you take to complete a project, the longer it’s going to take to complete it. Put another way, every day you add to the final launch of the project increases the odds that you’ll add even more […]

Data is for action When deciding whether or not to collect a piece of data, there is a simple question that will help you decide: “What action will I take on this data, either immediately or in the long-term?” If you can’t answer that question clearly, then you don’t need to collect that data. (Note: […]

Have you shopped yourself? I’ve always been fascinated by the “secret shopper” concept. (Maybe it’s because I worked retail through high school and college). The concept is simple: Have someone “secretly” shop at your place of business, so you can experience exactly what your customers experience. My sense is that not many associations do this, and […]

To improve adoption, decrease the friction “Before you try to increase your willpower, try to decrease the friction in your environment.” – James Clear I’m a big fan of James Clear (who writes on habits) because so much of data management is about habits. What Clear is saying above is that if you want to change […]

“Is this normal?” ne of the greatest parts about my job is that I get to work with so many different associations, which means I see all kinds of things that most of my clients never see. It also means I have a very deep perspective on how often something does or does not happen with associations […]

Give your staff more freedom, not less I often tell my clients, when it comes to data management, I’m a big liberal; I believe you should give as many staff as possible the ability to edit data within your data management system (with proper training, of course!). The point of a centralized data management system is not just […]

My advice? Stop doing that! There is a classic TV sketch featuring Bob Newhart as a therapist. He helps his patients overcome their issues by using two magic words: “Stop it.” (You can see the clip here: https://youtu.be/4BjKS1-vjPs) The sketch is funny because his advice is incredibly simple but obviously very difficult to apply. Remarkably, this […]

Is a college degree really required? I saw a job listing last week for an entry-level position at an association, seeking a data manager. From the job description, the position was focused on managing member records and doing some light querying, reporting, and data analysis. The association was seeking someone with one to three years of experience. […]

Small actions become big wins I’ve written before about how data accretes, the idea that over time, we accumulate more and more data that becomes increasingly useless over time. While this is a never-ending challenge of data management, another truism is that small wins accumulate over time. In other words, one of the ways to combat […]

Try not to OFFEND your members… I recently received an email from an association where I’ve been a member for nearly 30 years. In that time I’ve provided hundreds if not thousands of hours of volunteer time to them. The first line of the email read: “Wes, have you ever considered volunteering for [association name]?” You […]

How will you use that data? One of the beauties of technology today is how easy it is to collect data. Add a field to your database, set up a survey, collect the data. Couldn’t be easier, right? But there are several trade-offs involved (as there always are!). One of those is that odds are good that […]

Pennywise and pound foolish One definition of the phrase “pennywise and pound foolish” is to “describe something that is done to save a small amount of money now but that will cost a large amount of money in the future.” I think of this a lot when working with my clients, especially when they are […]

How you respond matters Very recently I wrote that I measure customer service by how a given company reacts to a problem. I’m impressed when a company takes ownership of a problem and seeks a mutually agreeable solution, rather than trying to make excuses or shift blame. The same attitude can (and should!) be applied […]

Your one non-renewable resource For any project, the three primary resources are time, money, and people. And with any project (and in life itself) the only resource that is non-renewable is time. You can always find more money and you can always add more people, but you can never recover time spent on a project. (Yes, you can […]

No system is perfect When working with my clients on the selection of a new system (whether it’s an AMS, a CMS, or any other software product) I stress over and over again that they will not find a “perfect” system. (As I like to joke, if a perfect system existed, I would own it […]

Ask your members to update their info One of the greatest data management challenges any association faces is keeping individual contact information up to date. As I like to tell my clients, “Your members don’t care about you until they need something from you.” This means they’re not going to proactively tell you when their contact info […]

Customer vs. staff In a properly designed AMS, when the customer goes online to your website to do business with you (e.g., join, renew, register for an event, buy a product), the website is interacting directly with the AMS. In other words, any data changes being made by the customer are going directly to the database […]

Measuring customer service When I work with clients on AMS selection, one question that often comes up is: “How good is the software company’s customer service?” “Customer service” means different things to different people. For example, here are the customer service complaints I most commonly hear: “They won’t let me talk to a human. All […]

Iterate or innovate? When moving to a new association management system, there is often an implicit question of whether the move is for iteration or innovation. The beauty is, it can be both. Iteration is doing the same things, but better. Innovation is doing new things that create new value. For most of my clients, the focus […]

Who is in control? Speaking with a client once about their database project, the client said something I found rather profound: “I want to feel like I control the database, not that the database is controlling me.” There’s a lot going on in that statement, and there are a lot of elements that affect whether […]