Understanding your members journey: Using CRM and marketing to make it a seamless experience

Editor's Notes

• #3: 2
• #4: 3
• #5: Background to AMBA- going to tell you a story- describe the journey we are on. 2 years ago etc 1M potential members- 1500 actual members- lifelong 1500 New CEO New strategy- cover later New journey Going to describe today
• #6: If you look at our website you will be wondering how on earth I could be up here talking to you about an accessible, usable, user friendly and user centric experience. Our website is far from it, its old, it’s out of date, it’s non responsive, not personalised, in fact we have two separate websites, so user friendly is our experience… it was pretty up to date when we built it 4- 5 years ago… Like many association websites it is built to mirror our internal functions- we each have an area to manage, and never the twain shall meet It is one dimensional giving no user interaction, very little dynamic content, no online chat function it’s pretty functional and dull and hardly groundbreaking. There is no personalisation, and it is not responsive or mobile friendly. So far so bad. However, if you have the patience of a saint and dig down 4 clicks you will find something that I believe is truly groundbreaking. The AMBA Community which is what I’m going to talk to you about today Why is it buried in the bowels of the website? As I mentioned we are on a journey and we are building this new community, transitioning across the majority of the content from the two websites AMBA Guide will be dismantled and subsumed into the website and the main website will be redeveloped to work more closely with the community- Startegic plan- redevelop websiote Responsive design Community integration
• #7: Two years ago we rebranded we wanted to position an AMBA MBA as something of value of longevity, something aspirational. We also wanted to bring together our 4 key stakeholder groups members, schools, Employers and sponsors, as well as preMBAs under the one banner- Be in Brilliant Company We also had a small number of diminishing and aging membership, were not able to attract younger and international members- global schools vs UK focused membership, average student age 35 vs average member age 55+ so we decided to take a radical step to make membership free- Fremium model- free to individuals and look to generate revenue from alternative sources e.g. sponsors. These two decisions were the tipping point- we realised we didn’t have the online platform to do this so we looked at it, and decided that we could either spend a whole lot of time effort and money trying to make the current systems fit for purpose- looked at responsive websites, personalisation, social media etc or we could rip them down and start again… which is what we did.
• #9: Looked around- Online community platform, developed by Zimbra- the Running Bug Why running bug
• #10: So what does our community look like? Bespoke member journey Unique key Lock down- permissions Events groups etc Closed communities (school, position) Public areas email comms ttioget members Seamless user friendly
• #11: Main aims are member acquistion, engagement 90/9/1 Oct 1- June 30 45153 86189 100%
• #12: Oct 1- June 30 01:05 03:06 300%
• #13: Acqusisition We have a number of dashboards showing numbers of members signed up to the community- in real time by hitting refresh, by type of member, by business school, and by month No waiting til the end of the month when all the payments are in
• #14: The major touchpoints for AMBA members are based on their specific access to the community, which in turn will depend on who they are. We use email communication to a) engage with them in the first place- usually via their school We email them welcome email, leading content plus a jobs bulletin Compartitavely fewer members access the AMBA website- SHOW STATS COMPARISON But majority of engagement is via the community We have a content and engagement strategy to ensure that members have a wide range of content in a range of formats from dynamic, timely content- video, tweets, blogs, to mid-level- research, articles, interviews etc through to academic research, toolkits, support materials We track what members are looking at and the system suggests other related content that they may be interested in. Phase 2 will deliver content based on preferences in their profiles as well. Members can bookmark content to their profile pages and build up a repository of content, they can also build networks using the search function via their profiles. Show you what the community looks and feels like SLIDES 12 – 18
• #15: Talk through page Profile- will come back to Your community Join your business school group Join the Programme Directors/ managers group Join the Alumni/ Careers group Communal areas- open to all for networking etc. Career Development Centre
• #16: Careers advisers/ alumni- use our materials in the Career Development Centre Latest hand picked MBA level jobs Personality tests CV builder Training videos/ employer films Employer viewpoints- 8000 MBA employer profiles
• #17: Post event networking- we will have a closed area in the schools groups for delegates who attended this event- we will post all the video, slides etc of the event, you can also connect and network with each other and have follow-on discussions Ref GCDD- we are still editing and posting the highlights, videos and slides and photo galleries etc.
• #18: Post event networking- we will have a closed area in the schools groups for delegates who attended this event- we will post all the video, slides etc of the event, you can also connect and network with each other and have follow-on discussions Ref GCDD- we are still editing and posting the highlights, videos and slides and photo galleries etc.
• #19: Individual profile- networking- make sure you fill in your profile so you can find each other (much easier to recognise a face than a silhouette avatar!) And that way we can make sure you get the right content for you
• #20: We use MicroSoft dynamics as our CRM and the community feeds directly in to it. We use the CRM to set permission levels for access to resources and community areas We use single sign-on to ensure that the member journey maps the member profile Barriers to entry are very low- name, school, email address – so membership is growing rapidly currently just shy of 10,000 The website application form is pages long and requires a lot of information- I gave up counting at 19- plus a payment of £120+ £50 Our aim is to get as many members in to the community- and active We want to encourage our members to complete their profiles: We are developing systems that can limit the amount of content you can see or contacts you can make if your profile is not complete, We are running a virtual careers fair which you can only attend if you have a completed profile- you can import your LinkedIn profile We use survey monkey to gather data- we are looking at upgrading to Dot mailer and using Dot Survey which will feed the results directly back in to the member profile. This data is fed back into the CRM from the website, community and Abintegro- the careers portal The idea is that members get free access and we build up a database of their demographics, areas of interest, areas of expertise etc. we can then monetise this- creating research reports, stats etc. and access for employers and corporate sponsors
• #21: Despite building the community we still have a website, we still have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube most recently Meercat and Periscope We have around 5000 followers on FB, 7500 on LI, 9500 Twitter, few hundred YouTube subscribers- but most content is fed into the community We use these channels to drive interest back to the community- or push content out. I do get asked why we want a community when LinkedIn exists. Frankly I don’t like the idea of a 3rd party owning all my member data and having the ability to do pretty much what they want with it. Also we have full control over the functionality and we are linking multiple stakeholder groups. I was at another conference recently where this question was raised and someone described LI as too ‘shouty’ all about raising an individual profile, whereas the community is more of a … well.. community all the links lead back to content in the community We have a twitter feed within the community and use hashtags to stream particular feeds into particular areas of the community e.g. GCDD- we build a closed area for conference delegates- used it to host preconference content and networking, then during the conference we posted video from previous day, twitter, pics then post event we are editing and posting over a T-Byte of data This will then be used to promote the next conference plus fed out into the wider community after a few weeks Our LI group is fairly active but real discussion is limited- there are lots of people posting links to external content but little or no genuinely new content being produced. Currently LI group is for members and past members/ students etc. We aim to transition all these members over to the community and open up the LI group to draw in preMBAs Twitter- we use Twitter feeds and Twitter walls a lot during conferences and events to push content out live, we are also using Periscope for the first time DISSEMINATING INFO- We have just one Twitter account and use hashtags to target content CONTENT- We also look for interesting posts and discussions going on, esp. in LinkedIn and then either link to them from the community, repost or ask members to repost