The membership sector faces many challenges such as member engagement, personalisation of services, as well as ensuring business support staff are productive and make use of the technology available.

We are able to align technology to address certain challenges facing a modern membership business, across people, processes and programmes. Through our work on large transformation projects with organisations in the Membership sector we have acquired unique insights into how these fit together to incrementally transform your business and deliver an outstanding experience for both staff and your members.

We have worked with membership organisations facing challenges and blockers in the way of the transformation.

Partnering with these chartered institutions we have leveraged solutions born out of very real challenges and using the PowerPlatform, built bespoke applications that fully integrate into current systems.

Deliver A Personalised Experience To Members

Technology is disrupting multiple sectors, which means that members expect a similar level of service from both their retail, entertainment and membership subscriptions.

Delivering a more personalised and intuitive experience can be a real challenge; with membership churn and the cost of attaining new members increasing, functionality is no longer enough to succeed and customer experience is what frequently determines success and failure.

cloudThing specialise in helping you put your members at the heart of the design process to understand what they really expect from their digital experience.

This can help save development costs, create intuitive experiences, deliver higher levels of customer satisfaction, drive up membership numbers and increase member retention.

Allow members to manage their marketing & privacy preferences; across multiple channels – ensuring compliance with GDPR and DPA.

We recommend you take the following steps to achieve personalisation

• Provide Self Service Options
• Ensure an Interactive Experience
• Provide an Engaging Experience which reacts to user input
• Provide FAQ’s
• Organise Content based on member needs
• E-Learning
• Tailored content to individual based on their understanding of the subject.
• Tailor using location, interests, purchase history, career stage, past behaviours,
• Ensure your CMS integrates with your CRM

To achieve this, we tend to start with the following technologies:

• Dynamics 365
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Power Automate
• User Portals
• Web Front-Ends build on React
• Azure Cognitive Services
• DevOps Support

Apply best practices to attract an increasingly demanding digitally savvy member population.

It's a difficult landscape, with increased competitions and global reach of online membership organisations, it's harder than ever to stand out from the crowd. Often membership organisations have more 'fans' than they do members - and converting those supporters into members can make a huge difference to revenue.

Making sure your data enables a mature, integrated marketing and sales strategy is paramount to driving conversions of fans into new members. Using data to automate the nurturing of leads, sharing the right content and the right time, and empowering salespeople to feel confident they are reaching out at the right time.

With the right tools, you should be looking to do some of the following to increase your Membership Acquisitions:

• Targeted Digital Marketing
• Communicating Benefits with content
• Simplify Joining Process
• Optimising Online Journey
• Low-cost Digital Awareness Campaigns
• Increasing Conversion Rates with Automation
• Offering Additional Resources Based on User Interactions
• Sharing Data with Sales Teams
• Integrated Membership Portals
• Referral Schemes

To achieve this, we tend to start with the following technologies:

• Dynamics Marketing Platform
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Google Analytics & Web Tools Integration
• Microsoft Power Automate
• User Portals
• Azure Cognitive Services
• Power BI
• DevOps Support

Retention in membership comes from delivering value, to simplify it - if your members do not make the most of what you offer, they will not stick around. Membership organisations that make use of data and technology to offer service levels that suit the individuals needs are far more likely to see growth in recurring revenue year on year.

Through the power of the cloud, we can help your organisation unify multiple applications and data sources about your members. You can then use this anonymised data, and personalised data with consent to deliver an optimised, personalised experience.

By responding to user preferences in real time and communicating on their terms, about what's important to the individual user, we can use AI to build a digital journey that improves the overall experience. This data enables your staff to intervene if a member looks like they are not making use of your services, and consistently improve that service to increase the likelihood of upgrading.

With the right tools, you should be looking to do some of the following to increase your Membership Retention:

• Continuously Communicate Your Value Proposition
• Measure Retention Rates
• Understand Attrition
• Automate Renewals
• Upgrade Memberships
• Personalise Experiences
• Improve Communications
• Provide Self Services

To achieve this, we tend to start with the following technologies:

• Dynamics Marketing Platform
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Google Analytics & Web Tools Integration
• Microsoft Power Automate
• User Portals
• Azure Cognitive Services
• Power BI
• DevOps Support

The old saying 'look after your customers, and they'll look after you' can spring to mind when discussing membership organisations subscription revenue. Naturally, subscription revenue is the lifeblood of a membership organisation, knowing and forecasting where and when revenue is coming from enables the organisations to think for the long term, and deliver better experiences over time.

Revenue growth can come from two key areas, increasing member value and by acquiring new ones. Often, an upsell is less expensive than a brand new member, and is more likely to remain for the long term if the member is already seeing the value of their subscription.

Using technology to create a growing pool of members who value highly what the organisation does for them, is achieved by incrementally improving the membership experience, and growing marketing efforts year on year to combat churn. Using AI to calculate and forecast the percentage of members likely to cease membership , can enable your staff to intervene, and make plans around changes to revenue.

With the right tools, you should be looking to do some of the following to increase your Subscription Revenue:

• Personalise Recommendations
• Upgrade Members
• Referral Scheme
• Provide Self Services
• Offering Additional Resources Based on User Interactions
• Offering new services over time

To achieve this, we tend to start with the following technologies:

• Dynamics Marketing Platform
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Google Analytics & Web Tools Integration
• Microsoft Power Automate
• Web Front-Ends build on React
• Azure Cognitive Services
• DevOps Support

Vendor lock-in is a common complaint in the membership sector. Through a combination of buying bespoke products, and legacy systems, it's easy to feel your IT infrastructure is very precariously working. 'Transformation' can feel very far off, when you have a complicated web of point-solutions and business critical apps, not working in tandem, and very difficult or costly to build around.

How do you future-proof something when the future has never been more uncertain? Our political landscape changes seemingly daily, globalisation has increased competition to agonising levels and the potential of what technology can achieve continues to accelerate at an unfathomable rate. If we manage to identify, believe in and deploy a strategy, the chances are it will already be outdated to some degree before it’s even been embedded.

Untangling this interlinked web of services without causing any disruption to your staff may seem almost impossible. In reality, it can be achieved, but you need a detailed plan up front of what is being migrated, where and most importantly why. Without a business outcome to measure the success of a migration in terms of ROI, you may see little benefit from doing so.

This could be a portal with all member information in one place, or could be digitising business processes to reduce manual data entry. By enabling the cloud as a platform, you can firstly migrate your services into the cloud, to enable us to optimise them over time - or often replace them with a responsive, mobile first experience enabled by Dynamics.

Here's what we recommend you get started on:

• Integrate Website & CRM
• Cloud-based Central Data Source
• Remove Dependency on Siloed Applications
• Multi Channel Integration
• Centralise Reporting
• Consolidate Resources
• Standardise Approach
• Membership Specific Customisation
• Leverage pre-built solutions, that you can build upon

Many membership organisations have a 'transformation' strategy, which is focused on new systems and tools, we believe an essential element of making this a success, is placing people and processes above the tech. A membership body that is able to create an environment that’s built to expect ongoing, day-by-day and piece-by-piece transformation. With a clear vision to drive change quickly by establishing forums from a cross-section of your business and empowering them to make real decisions.

Technology that enables an agile framework rooted in research before action, delivering measurable results can make it safe for everyone to fail occasionally, because if we’re going to innovate, we need to be free to experiment.

By lowering the risks of innovation, by lowering the costs involved of trying something new is essential to a real transformation. When your data and tools are working together on one platform, you can quickly A/B test new services to members, run various campaigns concurrently and even spin up new services for members to test. The core message is that sometimes you will uncover a new approach that adds value and improves things for members, sometimes you wont. Being able to try without fear of failure is the objective.

This helps us understand the real processes that are a headache, and the pain points across the organisation which technology can solve. This helps us build experiences in partners with those who will be using it, and get buy-in from the start, not once the product is finished. We see this as a crucial step in your journey to improving your organisation.

We recommend the following to begin your journey to building a new platform:

• Customizable Platform
• High Scalability
• Cutting Edge Tech
• Microsoft Platform
• Minimize TCO
• API Support
• Open Tech Partner
• Transformation in Stages
• Agile Approach
• Continuous Delivery

Many membership organisations see that they need to move beyond relying on subscription revenue as their only source of income. Through digital, membership organisations can offer many new services of value to their network. From targetted events and training, to digital apps and networking there is a lot that is possible - the trick is to always keeping the member at the heart of the offer, not the revenue.

By working with UX designers and business architects, you can develop new processes, services and offers that compliment your organisations culture - without compromising what makes you special to members. Using tech that is non-intrusive, and data that enables you to make the right offer, at the right time, with the right partners makes all the difference, often it's about making what you already have work smarter, than reinventing the wheel to offer something totally new.

We recommend the following to begin your journey to offering new services:

• UX-Led Development
• Customizable Platform
• High Scalability
• Use Your Data

In these uncertain and difficult times, it is clear that 'business continuity' is no longer a term to describe dealing with a short-term disaster, but something that needs to be baked into long-term business plans.

With the right technology, membership organisations can be a guiding example of how to run, manage and connect people working in isolation. You need to be confident in the tech, and that you can quickly react, pivot and communicate any changes to your member base in a way that feels organised, authoritative and confident.

Part of this comes from a commitment to continuous improvement through DevOps principles in tech. Any organisation that accepts their current state as 'good enough' will eventually be caught by competitors or by a changing market landscape. With DevOps support, we do not just fix an application when it goes down, our development team, and operations team are always working to improve the code base, the user experience and the security of the application. We can take an existing legacy application and very quickly begin improving on it, to ensure you see value from a support contract quickly.

Here's what we recommend you get started on:

• DevOps Approach to Support
• Cloud-based Central Data Source
• Remove Dependency on Siloed Applications
• Enable best-of-breed remote working tooling
• Multi Channel Integration
• Centralise Reporting