Best Practices for Linking Your AMS and Community Platform
Providing your members with a community platform is a great way to create more value for your membership, but there are some tips and tricks you should know before you get started
So, you’ve decided to link your AMS to a community platform. Congrats! This is an exciting step for your association and your members. Communities are great for providing more value to your membership. Members can connect with each other based on involvement, demographics, interests, and more. We know that it can be a big project to link your AMS and community platform, but with the right preparation and partners – it becomes a lot easier.
Be Intentional Throughout the Implementation Project
It’s no secret that implementing any new tool for your association is a big project with a lot of moving parts. The key to its success? Working together. During the implementation of a member community platform, three separate groups of people come together: your team, your AMS team, and the community platform’s team. For the best success, consider yourselves as one single team for the duration of the project.
Work together to establish a deadline and process. Scope out the project, build a timeline, and establish how you want a community to function once it’s all said and done. When you know what you want from the integration up-front, it’s easier to get everyone on the same page and create clear expectations from the beginning.
Set the groundwork internally to determine integration requirements. Have conversations with your team to get input on how they imagine your members will use the community. Think ahead – if you know that you’re going to add committees to your association in the future, think about how you would want the community for your committees to function. Then, you can present your vision for the community platform to the teams at your AMS and community platform. They’ll be able to help you decide what fields need to be brought over to build it out.
Ensure That the Data in Your AMS Is Sound
Your AMS is the foundation for all of the data that your association collects. For any integration to be successful, the data in your AMS needs to be sound. The data in your AMS flows into the member community and unlocks the power of it, so it’s critical that it’s up-to-date, accurate, and clean.
When your data is correct and is in the right place, your staff usually won’t have to do anything manually to provide your members with access to the correct communities. Set up your processes and procedures to be automatically updated, so the community is automatically updated as well. Now, when a member joins your association, they can get immediate access to the communities that pertain to their membership and demographic information.
The level of access for your members in the community platform is generally determined by the level of access they’re assigned in the AMS, depending on how your integration works. So, whether or not committee memberships, member statuses, or demographics are accurate in your AMS ensures that your members will be in the correct communities. Also, an AMS with a good duplicate detection feature is key. Make sure your contacts have a single login, because duplicates can prohibit them from accessing the appropriate boards.
Be Thoughtful About the Data You’re Collecting
When you start the internal discussions with your team and AMS provider, make sure you’re talking about what type of personalization strategy you’ll want to create. That way, you’ll be able to collect the proper data and you can ensure you are bringing over the correct fields from your AMS to your community platform tool.
When you know from the start what type of permissions you want, it’s easier to start collecting the information you need from members in order for it to happen. Whether that’s membership type, committee involvement, age, location of residence, or anything else, you’ll want to know from the beginning so you can gather the information beforehand and build out the communities as you want. It also makes the project easier as your AMS provider can help you ensure you have the correct fields in place to know which communities the members should belong to based on their involvement.
Talk to your AMS provider about what is a customization with your community platform integration and what comes standard. At Rhythm, our customers benefit from a productized integration with Higher Logic, which means that anytime we build something new for one customer, all of our customers benefit from it.
Now comes the fun part, sitting back and watching your members get access to the communities. You’ll get to see how they interact with each other, what they talk about, or even how they feel about certain events, member offerings, or your association as a whole.
