Working in communications for a membership organisation gives you no shortage of reasons to send an email.

There are members to keep informed, prospective members to nurture, training courses to fill, webinars to promote, resources to share and an annual conference that, despite being annual, somehow seems to require twelve months of communication.

Then there are renewals, lapsed members, regional groups, different professional interests and the event someone has just suggested running next month.

The opportunities to communicate are everywhere. The difficulty is turning all those good ideas into communications you can actually send.

You might want a series of emails that automatically helps someone prepare for an event they’ve booked. You might want to promote a training course only to members with a relevant professional interest. Perhaps you’d like to approach people differently as their renewal gets closer, or follow up with someone who downloaded a particular resource but hasn’t yet become a member.

None of those ideas is particularly complicated from a communications point of view.

Then somebody asks the dangerous question…. Have we actually got the data to do that?

And this is where things can become considerably less straightforward.

Perhaps you have the information, but it’s spread across your membership database, event system, website and several spreadsheets. Perhaps you collect it but nobody is quite sure how reliable it is. Perhaps the data exists but isn’t structured in a way that makes it useful for communication.

Or perhaps you’ve simply never collected it.

Suddenly, that perfectly sensible idea for a more relevant email becomes a small data investigation.

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The problem isn’t coming up with better emails

This is something we’ve noticed with organisations that communicate with lots of different groups.

The communications team can usually think of plenty of ways they’d like to improve what they’re sending. The frustration comes when the data can’t keep up with the ideas.

Take training.

You probably don’t want to promote every training course to every member. If you’re running a specialist course, there will be people for whom it’s extremely relevant and plenty of others who couldn’t care less.

Ideally, you might want to identify members working in a particular area, who’ve expressed an interest in the subject, perhaps attended related training before and haven’t already booked.

That’s a perfectly reasonable audience to describe in English…. but whether your data can describe the same audience is another matter.

The same thing happens with events, resources, membership renewals and almost every other area of member communication.

You know roughly what you’d like to do. The question is whether you know enough about the people you’re communicating with to actually do it.

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This is how the data starts multiplying

One perfectly understandable response is to create another list.

There’s a membership database. Then an events database. Training has its own records. Webinar registrations are somewhere else. Marketing has newsletter subscribers. Someone has a spreadsheet of conference attendees because, apparently, we haven’t suffered enough.

Again, none of this necessarily happened because somebody made a terrible decision.

Organisations evolve. A new activity creates a new requirement. A new system gets introduced. Different departments need to manage different things.

Eventually, though, the communications manager finds themselves sitting across all of it.

And that’s when the cracks begin to show.

You don’t necessarily need all your data to live in one enormous system. But you do need to understand what information you have, where it lives and how it can support the communications you’re trying to send.

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Start with what you want to say

This is why, when we’re looking at this kind of problem, we don’t like starting with the database.

If you start by looking at fields, tables and systems, it’s remarkably easy to spend a lot of time organising data without answering the more important question:

What do we actually want to do with it?

Start with the communication instead.

What emails would you like to be able to send?

Who should receive them?

…and what would you need to know about someone to identify them?

A membership renewal communication might require membership status, renewal date and perhaps engagement information.

A specialist training email might require professional role, subject interest and previous attendance.

An event journey might need booking status, event date and the type of ticket or session someone has selected.

A prospective member journey might depend on which resources they’ve requested, events they’ve attended or subjects they’ve shown an interest in.

Once you start from those questions, the data exercise becomes much more useful.

You’re no longer trying to create the perfect database. You’re working out what information will help you communicate better.

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Do you actually know what you think you know?

At this point is where I’d start auditing the information.

For each useful piece of data, ask whether you have it, where it’s held and whether you can actually use it.

Membership organisations often know an enormous amount about their members, but knowing something somewhere within the organisation and having that information available to the communications team are two quite different things.

You may know someone’s professional specialism because they supplied it when they joined three years ago. But is it still accurate?

You may have a complete history of the training courses they’ve attended. But is that information accessible when you’re deciding who should receive your next training email?

You may know they’ve registered for the annual conference. But does that information get back to the system sending your conference communications, or will they continue receiving “Don’t forget to book” emails for another fortnight?

The latter is rarely the membership experience anyone deliberately designed.

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Sometimes the useful answer is… no

There will also be things you’d genuinely like to know but currently don’t.

That’s not necessarily a data problem. It’s a data opportunity.

If knowing a member’s areas of professional interest would allow you to send significantly more relevant content, perhaps that’s something worth collecting.

You could ask when they join. At renewal. Through a preference centre. When they register for an event. Through a survey or another natural interaction.

But there should be a reason for asking.

One of my favourite questions when talking about data is:

If I could grant you one wish and tell you one thing about your audience that you don’t currently know, what would you want to know?

The follow-up is more important:

Would knowing it change the way you communicate with them?

If the answer is no, you probably don’t need another field in your database.

If the answer is yes, now we have something worth thinking about.

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We saw the same underlying problem with NICE

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence isn’t a membership organisation, but when we worked with their communications team, the underlying challenge was remarkably similar.

NICE had four corporate newsletters managed across separate audiences, alongside another audience supporting events. The structure had developed over time, but subscribers could exist in several places, information was fragmented and communicating across different groups involved unnecessary administration.

As Angela Wallace, Communications Manager at NICE explained:

“Our Mailchimp account was set up inefficiently with multiple separate audience lists for our four key corporate newsletters. This meant we had duplicate subscribers across lists, which was costing us unnecessarily, and made it difficult to get a clear, unified view of our audience.”

We could have treated that purely as a technical consolidation exercise.

But simply putting data together doesn’t magically make it useful.

The important work was understanding how people subscribed, which communications they wanted, how preferences were managed and what the communications team actually needed to be able to do. Only then could the data and systems be structured around those requirements.

The result was something much more useful than fewer audiences.

As Angela explained:

“We can now send targeted, personalised messages to specific segments of our audience based on their interests and engagement, rather than sending the same content to everyone regardless of relevance.”

That’s the parallel I think matters for membership organisations.

NICE happened to use Mailchimp. Another organisation might use a completely different collection of systems. The technology isn’t really the point.

The point is whether the information you hold allows the communications team to identify the right people when they have something useful to say.

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Your data should keep up with your ideas

For the communications manager, I think this is probably the simplest way to judge whether your data is doing what you need it to do.

You shouldn’t have to understand every technical detail of every database your organisation uses. You probably don’t particularly want to either. What you need is enough useful information, organised in a sensible enough way, to make the communications that matter possible.

And there’s an important bit of judgement required there.

In a perfect world, we could probably find a reason to send a slightly different email to every individual member. We could take account of everything we know about them, every event they’ve attended, every resource they’ve downloaded, every interest they’ve expressed and every interaction they’ve ever had with the organisation.

It might be wonderfully relevant.

It would also be completely unmanageable.

Every additional piece of data has a cost. Somebody has to collect it, store it, keep it reasonably accurate and work out how to use it. Every additional segment or communication journey creates something else for the communications team to manage. At some point, the effort involved in creating more relevance starts outweighing the value you’re getting from it.

That’s why the goal isn’t maximum personalisation. It’s manageable relevance.

If knowing whether someone is interested in one of five broad subject areas allows you to make a large proportion of your communications more useful, that’s probably valuable information to have. If creating 37 different interest categories means somebody has to spend half their life maintaining them so that three people receive a marginally different version of an email, perhaps we’ve wandered a little too far down the rabbit hole.

There isn’t a universal answer to where that line sits. It depends on your organisation, your members and the communications you’re trying to send.

But it’s worth remembering that the data is there to make communication easier and more useful. If your attempts to become more relevant are making the communications operation increasingly difficult to manage, something has gone slightly awry.

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Try starting with the emails you wish you could send

If any of this sounds familiar, I wouldn’t start by reviewing every database, spreadsheet and system your organisation owns. That’s quite a good way of disappearing down a rabbit hole and emerging several weeks later knowing an awful lot about your data but still not being entirely sure what to do with it.

I’d start with the communications instead, as this is the outcome you’re working towards.

Think about the emails you’re already sending, but also the ones you’ve talked about sending and never quite managed to get off the ground.

Perhaps you’ve wanted a better series of communications around membership renewal. Maybe you’d like event attendees to receive useful information automatically before and after an event. Perhaps your training emails could be better targeted, or you’ve talked about communicating differently with members based on a handful of genuinely useful interests.

Pick a few of those examples and talk through who you’d ideally like to receive them. Then work out what you’d need to know about someone to identify them.

And at that point, I’d add another question:

Would knowing this make enough difference to justify the effort involved in using it?

That’s quite an important filter.

You may discover that you’ve already got the information you need and it simply needs organising differently. You might find that another part of the organisation already collects it and you just need a practical way of using it. Or you may identify a genuine gap and decide it’s worth starting to collect something new.

Equally, you might decide that an idea which sounded wonderfully sophisticated over coffee on Tuesday morning would require six new data points, three integrations and fourteen versions of an email to make it happen.

In which case, Tuesday morning may have got a little carried away with too much caffeine.

That’s fine too.

The aim isn’t to use every piece of data you have or make every communication as personalised as technically possible. It’s to identify the information that makes a meaningful difference and organise it so the communications team can actually use it without creating an enormous amount of additional work.

You’re starting with something useful that you want to say to a particular group of people and working backwards to understand what would make that possible.

Because relevance is important.

But for most membership organisations, manageable relevance is much more useful.