A couple weeks ago, Maddie and I presented a session called New Rules for Engaging Young Professionals at the DMAW Association Day. It went really well, but enough about us.

I had the pleasure of attending a really great session that day. Wes Trochlil from Effective Database Management and Steve Doran, director of membership and marketing for NACUBO, presented a session called Using Simple Business Intelligence to Cut Costs and Improve Marketing Effectiveness. Their slides are available here, but they didn't convert well to PDF. Still, you can see the Access tables and spreadsheets that I'm about to mention.

Wes started the session by defining business intelligence (BI) and outlining the steps to successful BI. The most important step? Take action based on what you learn. Then it was Steve's turn to demonstrate some very manageable, low-cost ways to create a predictive model for membership renewal and conference attendance based on past engagement. His mantra? If it's not measurable, it's not marketing...it's advertising.

Steve showed off a very cool Excel spreadsheet that helped him lower his cost per attendee from $60+ to under $20. It was the first time I'd seen it done in a way that could actually help drive marketing decisions. His approach was very logical and focused. He even explained how he refuses to invest in business intelligence software until he knows exactly what he plans to measure and how he can use the information. Which saved me from having to rehash this rant.

Here are seven basic steps to repeating Steve's success.

1. Figure out what data you have that indicates measurable engagement. Here's a sampling of what Steve used: books, conferences, webinars, podcasts, subscriptions, award nominations, focus groups, listserv messages, research participation, annual convention, testimonials and surveys.
   
   
2. Assign a value to each engagement category. Attending the annual convention might be worth 5 points, while sending a listserv message might be only 1 point.
   
   
3. Create a simple Access table where each record is an engagement. You might use the following fields: Organization ID, Individual ID, Engagement ID, Engagement, Engagement Category. Engagement would be "Webinar on Widgets" or "Message on ABC Listserv" and engagement category would be "webinar" or "listserv"--these are the categories to which you've assigned point values.
   
   
4. Run a crosstab query to get the count of engagements in each engagement category by Organization ID. If Organization ID is not as important to your association, you might prefer to use Individual ID instead.
   
   
5. Assign a point score to each contact in your database. Multiply the count in each engagement category by the point value you assigned to that category, then add it all up for each contact.
   
   
6. Assign a rating to each contact based on the point score. Based on the point score of each contact, Steve assigned a rating: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Tin, Zero. Now you're only dealing with 5 categories rather than a scoring continuum.
   
   
7. Use the rating to focus your marketing on the people most likely to engage. Steve used these new segments to focus his direct mail efforts on the folks who were most likely to attend or join.

This post is already too long, so I'll leave it here. BI isn't tricky because the process is too hard or the software is too expensive. BI is tricky because you need to design a process that will actually help you make decisions. Wes and Steve showed me how simple and how hard that can be. Thanks to both of you for a great session!

Originally posted @ Association Marketing Springboard