Four ways for membership organisations to successfully achieve the change they need

Today, the pressure on membership organisations is greater than ever as they face two opposing challenges.

On the one hand, they need to drive growth and income in order to compete. Throughout the past year, the MemberWise network has again highlighted member engagement, attraction and retention as the primary goals facing its membership and association professionals. The CBI’s Memcom report concurred with its survey showing the majority of organisations are targeting growth with larger entities also focused on extending services.

The opposing objective for membership organisations is to aggressively manage their rising cost base driven by inflationary and cost of living increases. All whilst meeting ever growing and diversifying member expectations.

The solution to this “jaws effect” is the efficient leveraging of technology to achieve more with less. But with a staggering 90% of digital transformation projects failing to deliver a measurable return on investment (ref: Forbes 2021), the vast majority of organisations end up wasting money and treading water.

As membership sector technology specialists, Intercloud9 has four pieces of advice that might help your organisation avoid this outcome.

1. Adopt the right focus

Technology projects invariably become focused on the future state of the current business, followed by lengthy analysis on how technology can support it. Rather than highlighting a transformation opportunity, this approach often leads to organisations simply reimplementing their current working processes with a newer or different technologies.

The critical success factor is correctly understanding which processes work, which do not work and by accurately quantifying the inefficiencies and waste that are present. Only by adopting this approach can we identify what needs to change and how. Crucially, this also provides a clear and measurable business case for transformation.

2. Make the right change

Most membership organisations are great at incremental change and so approach larger project with confidence. But as the tiny success rates show, transformational change is exponentially more complex and therefore tackled far less often.

Central to success is the organisation’s team. Effecting lasting and systemic change requires a collaborative, cross-functional approach to equip the team with the tools, skills, and behaviours necessary to become self-sufficient.

Effective change is about developing a culture of empowerment, ownership and accountability.

3. Apply the right resources

In 2021, Forbes and McKinsey listed the lack of the necessary talent as one of the top three reasons for failure in transformation programmes. Nevertheless, the reality for most organisations is that:

• There WILL be gaps in specialist areas
• There WILL be capacity constraints
• There are likely too few people with experience of successful transformational change
• There may be too few people with experience of what GREAT looks like!

No organisation can afford to have the perfect team on standby, waiting for their transformation project to begin. The key to success is identifying and filling resourcing gaps when they’re needed.

4. Ensure the right alignment

The success statistics for transformation make grim reading with 55% of CRM projects and 70% of digital projects failing to deliver.

We know that a project needs to map out in detail how it will achieve its objectives. But each organisation that fails also started out believing it had a robust strategy in place. Translating the “what” into the “how” can be challenging and if not correctly done, will create a disconnect between the goals of the project and of the organisation.

Every project needs to have checks, measures and controls built in, and each involved party must have their own roles and responsibilities. To align the two however, expert overall oversight is critical. Doing this effectively requires detailed understanding and the ability to answer a number of key questions such as: what is typical, where are the pitfalls, what are the key risks, which roles are under-represented, where are the gaps in responsibilities and what is the plan to manage all of this.

Finding somebody with the experience and expertise to conduct this oversight must be a priority for every transformation project.

Where to get help

Intercloud9 is obsessed with helping membership organisations to deliver change successfully. We work only within the membership sector and over the years, our team has supported more than 50 organisations with a total of 38 million members. We also have decades of experience working with leading vendors in the industry.

This gives us unique insight into avoiding pitfalls, ensuring all stakeholders and appropriately engaged, and helping organisations to achieve the outcomes they need.

Our approach is underpinned by a solid focus on change management and designed to ensure clients achieve their objectives. We aim to bridge the gap between organisations, their technology partners and their vision by providing a one stop shop for all things change management. Learn more at www.intercloud9.co.uk.