Speedy Business Cycles and What it Means for Your Association’s Technology

More and more, we live in a “need it now” society.

• Want a specific bit of information? Google it and get all your answers.
• Want to listen to a song? Download it from iTunes right away.
• Need a book? Buy it from Amazon.com and it ships today (or for faster service, just add it to your Kindle)
• Need something printed? Send a PDF to a printer and they’ll run you 100 digital printed copies and deliver it tomorrow morning.

So let me ask you this — when a new member joins, how long until they get a welcome package or membership card? When a member orders a product from your website, how quickly does it take you to process the order and ship it to them?

What technologies do you have in place to fullfill these member requests and orders? Are you running an integrated eCommerce platform and association management software system? Or are they two systems that don’t talk to each other so you can pull up that member’s information and ship that book right away?

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Guerrieri from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) about how they have used our netFORUM association management software to improve their business operations. Here’s a bit of what he said:

“ One [improvement] that’s really telling is that if we take an order from our customer from our online store, that product is shipped to our customer if it’s in by 2 o’clock that day. And that is all a result of business process improvements that netFORUM enabled.”

“Our member card fulfillment.  netFORUM enabled us to get member cards out the next day so if someone pays their dues today, tomorrow their member card will be shipped to them. That was something that took us a long time because we had to outsource that before and we can do it all internally now …”

Over the course of my career I’ve worked with a number of associations that custom built fulfillment systems or eCommerce portals. Through my work here at Avectra, I see more and more how important it is to have all of these systems talking to each other so that you can serve your members with the same speed as they have come to expect from all the rest of their transactions.

Our advice? Run your eCommerce through the integrated eCommerce functionality that is built into netFORUM. Not only can you track all of the purchases and set prices, but can quickly tie all the purchases to a members’ record. Also, with our recent release of netFORUM Pro you even have detailed inventory tracking and fulfillment capabilities which will help you manage your inventory and account for these costs of goods.

So the next time you are buying a book from Amazon.com ask yourself, can your association attain fulfillment times like this? If not, it might be time to take a look at your processes and technologies.