Aptify's CEO Blog

If a member is willing to let you automatically renew them by charging a credit card or deducting dues from their bank account – why not do that? As long as you have proper security measures around sensitive data and ensure that you notify the member that they may opt-out before you automatically charge them, this is a great customer service. This improves member satisfaction by reducing the work the member has to do to stay a member. Additionally, those members that auto-renew will not require expensive renewal notices and will pay on time automatically, improving cash flow.

A few thoughts on how to implement auto-renewals for individual member organizations (and for subscriptions):

• Offer this service to all new and existing members and consider selling it one of these ways:
  • Convenience – the member doesn’t have to take any action to stay a member and they are charged exactly on the renewal date
  • Reduced Costs to Association – This is a selling point because the saved funds can be used to do more to deliver member value through programs, content, research, advocacy, and more…
  • Green – sending out thousands of renewal notices each year, in many case 3 or 4 times before stopping is incredibly wasteful and uses up a tremendous amount of paper, ink, and energy.
• Ensure the member is comfortable
  • Make sure your organization is PA-DSS/PCI compliant – this is something your software has to ensure but you have to implement policies internally to ensure appropriate security and controls are in place to achieve compliance. One quick note about this – make sure that any employee that handles credit card or bank data has an extra level of scrutiny applied to their hiring and continued employment – running a recurring background check including a credit report is not unreasonable for these roles.
  • Communicate to the membership that the auto-renewal data is stored securely and in compliance with PCI, etc.
  • Let the member know that each renewal period, they will receive a notice in advance of the actual renewal giving them an option to opt-out of renewal. This is critical – people want control – even if they have every intention of renewing for a long time now, things could change and this is an extra customer service value that also adds a level of comfort.
• Implement Advanced Notification
  • Implement an automated email message that goes to the member 30 days in advance of the renewal to indicate they are about to be automatically renewed. Given them an easy way to opt-out without jumping through hoops! But, ensure that you include a highly personalized report in the email that showcases all of the benefits they have taken advantage of – not generic member benefits, but those things the member actually did – in the past year, but also since they joined. For example, showcase their event attendance, committee involvement, publications purchased, etc. Make sure the report also showcases savings they have benefited from compared to non-member prices, if such a concept is relevant to your business model.
  • Notify members well in advance of a credit card expiring – if a credit card is going to expire in September 2010 and a membership is due to renew in December, don’t wait until December to figure this out. Implement automatic notification to the member telling them their payment method for auto renewal is no longer up to date and give them a secure web link that allows them to update this. Given them a friendly reminder notice automatically every 30 days or so.
  • If someone has auto-renewal turned on but has an invalid payment method and hasn’t responded to multiple emails, queue them up for a live call from a customer service rep to request their payment method details. Make sure that the outbound call is setup so that your customer service rep authenticates their identify to the member. These days, if someone you don’t know calls up asking for a credit card # it is suspicious. So, provide the member a few details that are not sensitive but provides them a sense of confidence that the person calling is valid.
• Other
  • When a member is automatically renewed, make sure you send them a thank you note via their preferred communication method. This is something you can easily automate these days.
  • Up-Sell and Cross-Sell BUT ask permission – many groups want to offer members new things upon renewal. Some are recurring requests such as PAC or Foundation contributions. In other cases, however, the renewal maybe a great time to offer a deal on pre-paying for an upcoming event, publication or other item that has relevance. Use the advanced notification to get the member to OPT-IN for those extra items. Do not ever automatically add new items to their renewal without their approval. In the early notification of auto-renewal show them what you have in mind as suggestions and indicate that they will have to click “Accept” to have these added to their renewal. Otherwise, the default would be to not charge for such items.

Full disclosure: Aptify provides a membership software solution. While our product has great functionality for handing all of these concepts there are many ways of implementing the ideas and achieving the business goals described here.

At times, I like to intentionally oversimplify a complex issue in order to break it down into manageable pieces. Understanding why members choose not to renew is a complex problem that requires deep analysis. There are many reasons why a member may not renew and they vary considerably from one group to another. They also vary based on economic trends, organization type, demographic cycles, among other factors. While there is a high degree of complexity to this problem, there are some simple ways to break it down. One method is to categorize the reasons that people don’t renew into "good" and "bad" reasons or put otherwise, things that are hard to address and things that should be easy to fix.

Here is a great example: several studies have shown over the years that a significant percentage of non-renewals in individual member organizations because the member forgot to renew. A similar category of responses are those who say they intended to renew but the process was cumbersome and they gave up.

The flip side is those members who question the core value of their membership in an organization. Those who are wondering if the content, products and services being delivered are relevant, up-to-date, and still aligned with their professional goals. These issues are often challenging to address. In contrast, when you think about helping a member renew without them having to remember or making it easy to do so – those are situations that should never result in a dropped member.

So, what do we do about it? It is critical that business processes focus on the customer’s ease of use. I am a member of a number of organizations where I plan to continue membership as far out as I can forecast. However, in several cases, the organizations require me to manually renew every year. I would much rather give them my credit card to store(securely) and have them notify me once a year that they are about to renew me, let me opt out, but if I take no action, renew.

Alternatively if I didn’t wish to auto-renew, why not make it easy on the member to renew on the web? Most web sites require a member to login. The problem is this – if I’m a highly engaged member that uses a web site all the time, I probably saved my credentials or know them. BUT, if I’m one of these members on the fringe that doesn’t go to the site much – I probably don’t even know if I have an account. Making me figure out my account login, etc, before I can renew creates a barrier. There are highly secure ways of allowing an individual to renew without forcing a login. The goal – make it easy for the member to renew.

Engage your members, provide relevant and timely content, ensure member value far outstrips dues, and then, make it EASY for them to stay members. I’ll be writing a couple of follow-up entries to this post that focus on what we consider to be best practices for auto-renewal and e-renewal. There are plenty of good ways to do these things, but remember – put the onus on the association, not the member, to stay a member! Stay tuned…

Full disclosure: Aptify provides a membership software solution. While our product has great functionality for handing all of these concepts there are many ways of implementing the ideas and achieving the business goals described here.

I was recently interviewed on a trip to visit customers and partners in the UK. The UK journal NFP Techno asked some great questions that I responded to in the below transcript.

Click here to view the article

One of the individuals I look up to as a great example of leadership is Andy Grove. Grove emigrated to the US from Hungary in the 1950s and helped found Intel Corp. He later rose to the CEO position and was integral in Intel's growth. In his classic business book, Only the Paranoid Survive, he outlines a number of principles for leadership. The ideas I try to uphold in my own role include:

• Seeking opinions at all levels of an organization
• Encouraging (Demanding) vigorous debate at all costs
• Not holding back on decisions due to imperfect or lacking information
• Challenge your opinion continuously and not being afraid to change course mid-stream

In this blog post I’ll focus on the first idea - seeking out opinions at all levels of an organization and I'll be posting a weekly update on this series on the 3 other topics noted above. (Note: This first post in the series was also cross-posted on ASAE's great Acronym blog, which I was very pleased to contribute to as a guest author)

Seeking out and ultimately receiving unfiltered opinions from team members throughout (and beyond) your organization is a tough thing to do well. One of the requirements is to have a continuous focus on openness. Additionally, showcasing examples where input from all levels has been embraced and leveraged to the collective good of the group can help. If people believe their ideas will be ignored, or worse, put them in some form of jeopardy with superiors, your in-box will be pretty empty. Some people need anonymity to submit their thoughts, but many will speak openly if a culture supports dialog. Grove speaks to all of these issues as he outlines the concept in his book. One aspect of approachability at Intel was the fact that Grove and other senior managers had standard cubicles in an open office environment and made sure they were easy to approach. There are other ways to create this environment. For example, the founders of Hewlett-Packard were well known for the idea of “Management by Walking Around” where they frequently dropped in to informally chat with staff at every level of their growing enterprise.

Next week: Encouraging debate at all costs…

I'm excited to be co-presenting with Don Dea, Co-Founder of Fusion Productions, this Friday. We will be speaking on this topic: Integrating Social Media and Association Management Systems. Please join us from 2 PM to 3:15 PM at the ASAE Tech Show in Washington DC.

In my experience, quite a few association executives have a difficult time describing how they would categorize their “best” members. One of the reasons this is a challenge is due to the fact that association/member relationships are incredibly multifaceted. They are therefore much harder to quantify in value than a typical vendor/customer relationship. Since members are so much more than customers, their activities within an organization need to be considered along with more traditional metrics such as years of renewal and financial transactions.

The concept of tracking and acting on the level of member engagement is increasingly becoming a hot topic with executives I speak to. The goal is to define an aggregate score that incorporates data from a variety of activities into a singular measure that can easily be evaluated. Just as examples consider factors such as:

• Meeting attendance
• Earning/Maintaining Certifications
• Committee positions
• On-line forum moderation
• Social networking involvement
• Speaking assignments
• Authoring articles in a journal
• Financial Activities/Impact(Buying Products, Renewing Dues/etc)

Each association is different, so the weightings tied to each activity type need to be different. Additionally, the approach to weightings may change over time based on the strategic plan of the organization and its areas of focus.

Once you have a conceptual framework for defining engagement levels, use the information. For one thing, make sure that whatever system you are using to manage the data displays the engagement score prominently to users. Additionally, leverage this engagement score in your marketing and outreach as well as throughout your service delivery when considering the level of prioritization you afford to each inquiry. As I mentioned in a prior post, you can use this type of information in a predictive analysis effort quite effectively too.

Most importantly, experiment with different models and stay agile so that you find the approach that suits the characteristics of your organization best.

I previously wrote about some of the theory behind using predictive analysis in a member-based organization. This post is intended to take the next step, looking at some specific variables that might be relevant in a membership renewal business case. Here are some quick examples that may prove interesting in a predictive model. The value of these data points may be greater in some organizations than others and in some cases these attributes may have no bearing at all on renewal probability. These are just some common data points that we've seen in some way correlate to renewal probability.

# of Years as a Member

Is there a correlation between the # of years someone is a member and their likelihood to renew. For example, is an individual/organization that has been a member for one year, less likely to renew than a 10 year member? Depending on the organization and the nature of the membership structure, there could be different answers. For your group, do you know the answer?

# of Non-Dues Related Transactions

Members that are active in purchasing books, certifications, or other non-dues items from an organization may be getting more value for their membership, and therefore more likely to renew than others. Is this true for your group?

# of Years of Uninterrupted Attendance at Annual Event

Attendance at Annual Meetings, as well as other events may be a factor in someone’s willingness to renew membership. A committed member that attends annual gatherings, year after year, is more likely to renew, or are they?

# of Committee Assignments

The involvement level of an individual or organization in volunteer activities, such as committee positions, may have a bearing in their overall perception of value from membership. Is this the case for your constituents?

These factors are simply a handful of dozens or hundreds that can be evaluated quite easily with modern predictive analytics tools. Additionally, a key goal of predictive analytics is to find factors in the data that you didn't necessarily think would impact your intended business goal.

Once you have started the process of running these types of analytical tools, you must have an action plan, otherwise there is little value in the analytics. For example, if a predictive model suggests that your most at-risk members are those that have been with the organization between 3 and 7 years and have not attended at least one event in the least 2 years, what do you do? The action element is just as important as the analysis. Remember, no predictive model is perfect, but they get better as you use them more and more. Don't be afraid to act on good, yet imperfect ideas that come from these tools. Make sure you foster an inquisitive culture organizationally and constantly go back to tune the modeling approach.

The Financial Times published a very interesting article today regarding the growing use of "predictive analysis" tools capable of detecting when customers are growing unhappy with a company. With most companies still facing tough conditions despite recent signs of improvement, many managers have shifted their focus from attracting new business toward keeping customers that they already have relationships with. This concept has important implications for member based organizations as well.

Capturing Relevant Data

While the specific tools and technologies used by companies vary widely, no solution can work at all without relevant, timely, and accurate data. Attempts to predict outcomes based on incorrect or partial sets of data can lead to wasted resources and can even backfire. Member based organizations need to ensure that all data relevant to members are stored in a central repository rather than data silos restricted to individual departments. Any attempt to build an analytical framework prior to being satisfied that all relevant data are accurate and timely can be an exercise in futility.

Selecting Criteria to Measure

Once an organization is satisfied that sufficient data has been captured, it is necessary to come up with specific criteria that can help identify members that may be at risk of not renewing their dues in the future. The criteria will be different for each organization but there are some common themes that nearly all organizations can measure. For example, most associations find that members who are engaged with the community in various ways are most likely to renew their dues.

With a comprehensive information system, a manager can identify members who have never engaged with the organization except for paying their dues. A member who never logs into the organization's website, does not attend meetings or conferences, and has not made additional purchases during the year may be at high risk for not renewing in the future. By analyzing past data for non-renewals, such patterns can become apparent and then incorporated into your member retention strategy.

Of course, each organization will need to select additional criteria and this will be an iterative process that can be refined over time.

Taking Action

Action can be taken to engage with such members prior to the renewal cycle assuming that relevant the data capture has taken place and appropriate criteria have been identified. Members who have not participated at all during the year can be contacted through written communications or by phone. Special offers can be targeted to those who may be specifically at risk rather than providing such offers to all members including those who are almost certain to renew anyway. The methods used to reach out to members will vary for each organization, but the idea of spending time to save members is universal. It invariably costs much less to retain a current member than it does to attract a new one.

Many Other Possibilities

Member retention only scratches the surface of what is possible through effective analysis of member behavior. For example, it is possible to track member activity on your website in a way that can reveal the types of content they are looking at and to target products or services specifically to those who may be interested. There are some privacy issues to be aware of when monitoring website usage but it is now quite common for privacy policies to permit this type of data collection.

Of course, the key to all of these exciting possibilities is to have accurate and timely data to begin with. Regardless of the member management system you are using, it is wise to invest the time to ensure the quality and accuracy of your data in a manner that can help with member retention. Type your content here...

As we can see from the statistics in my last blog post, Twitter has the potential to provide useful information for associations seeking to improve member outreach. The rapid growth of Twitter over the past year along with the favorable demographics of the users leveraging the platform should lead to opportunities but only if a productive means of monitoring Twitter traffic can be developed.

If you believe that Twitter has some value for your organization, how can you possibly sift through all of the “tweets” that occur on a 24/7 basis to make sense of the information? Like mining for gold, a strategy must be put in place to avoid wasting significant time on irrelevant tweets that contain little value for your organization.

Monitor Your Followers

Once you have set up your identity on Twitter and informed potential followers that you are now using the platform, individuals will begin to “follow” your Twitter feed. The best way to gain followers is to follow other users yourself. Twitter has a number of search features that will allow you to locate your contacts. Once you have built up a list of users who you are following, Twitter will build a personalized feed of tweets from these individuals which will appear on the main page of twitter.com once you log in. An RSS Feed icon can be used to generate a personalized feed that you can monitor through Microsoft Outlook or any other RSS Feed reader.

Monitor Other Twitter Feeds

If you only monitor the Twitter feeds of individuals who you are explicitly following, the platform would still be interesting but of limited use. The real value of Twitter is revealed when you begin to monitor activity of users who you are not directly following. Twitter has a basic and advanced search tool that will allow you to search for tweets containing keywords that are important to your organization.

For example, let’s say that your association has an interest in monitoring a particular bill that is making its way through Congress. A timely example might be the health care reform bill (HR 3200) in the House of Representatives. By generating a simple search for “HR 3200”, you can monitor all Twitter traffic where individuals refer to the legislation specifically by its official name. An advanced search could filter the large number of tweets based on a more specific interest. Twitter’s search functionality allows for a number of search operators that permit more advanced queries such as "HR 3200" AND "Public Option". This search will return all tweets that refer to the legislation in question and mention the phrase “public option” which is one of the features of the health care reform bill.

What’s even more powerful about Twitter’s search options is that any search can be consumed as a RSS Feed which will allow you to monitor tweets meeting your preferred criteria from within a RSS Feed reader such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Reader, and many others. Using this approach, many search combinations can be used to generate specialized RSS feeds that will automatically notify you when relevant information appears on Twitter. For example, click on this link for a RSS Feed corresponding to the search discussed above. The icons below will appear on any search result. Click on the “Feed for this query” icon to generate the RSS Feed.

Many Possibilities

While the examples outlined above involve searching for information related to legislation, endless possibilities exist for monitoring other keywords including the names of important members or organizations. Associations should definitely create searches for their organization’s full and abbreviated name since tweets can reveal opportunities for better member outreach as well as the potential to reach out to new members.

Of course, in addition to monitoring Twitter using the search options, it is always a good idea to become a participant in discussions as well. By providing tweets with valuable information, more followers will emerge and possibly “re-tweet” your messages to their own networks. Through this network effect, your message can reach a much larger audience and you will attract additional followers.

While nearly all association executives are at least somewhat familiar with Twitter, most associations have yet to embrace this emerging social networking platform as a means of outreach to the constituencies they serve. In many cases, the perception of Twitter is that it is a tool used by teenagers and young adults to transmit messages regarding social plans or to gossip on various topics. While in some cases, these perceptions are accurate, Twitter already has proven to be a smart social networking platform for many forward looking organizations.

Twitter’s Demographics

A few statistics should demonstrate the importance of considering Twitter in your member outreach strategy and will also dispel some of the more common misconceptions regarding the platform:

• According to a recent Nielsen survey, Twitter is by far the fastest growing online member community. Twitter has grown from one million unique visitors in June 2008 to nearly 21 million unique visitors in June 2009. This far exceeds the growth in other social networks during this timeframe and only includes users who access Twitter via the main twitter.com website. Many users leverage applications like Tweet Deck on their computers or mobile phones. Twitter reached a penetration level of 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June 2009.
• Another survey dispels the notion that Twitter is mainly used by teenagers and young adults. It appears that only 16 percent of Twitter.com users were under the age of 25 in June 2009. 64 percent of Twitter users are between the age of 25 to 54 and a surprising 20 percent of Twitter users are over 55.
• It appears that the simplicity of Twitter’s 140 character updates and the lack of more sophisticated social networking features such as posting videos and other content leads younger people seeking a more advanced platform to use Facebook rather than Twitter. By contrast, the relative simplicity of Twitter seems to be attracting older users who may be intimidated by more fully featured social networking platforms.

Ideas for Leveraging Twitter

If teenagers and young adults aren’t using Twitter to plan this weekend’s party, then who is actually using this platform? How can an organization hope to sift through all of the noise in order to find relevant information?

People from all walks of life have taken to using Twitter to broadcast their activities. A surprising number of members of Congress use Twitter to communicate with constituents and to link to relevant content on the web. Business executives such as Jack Welch post personal and business content on a frequent basis. Celebrities, journalists, and ordinary people are interacting in ways that were not possible just a couple of years ago.

All of this is interesting and sounds like it could be great fun, but how is it relevant to associations? The most intriguing aspect of Twitter is the fact that most messages tend to be made on a “spur of the moment” basis and are generally unfiltered. Think of Twitter as the equivalent of an online water cooler where you can listen to the stream of consciousness thoughts of relevant individuals. Here are a few strategies worth considering:

• Monitor Twitter feeds using important keywords that are relevant to the organization. This could involve the association’s name, acronym, or industry specific words and phrases.
• Keep up to date with the Twitter profiles of important members who carry significant influence within their industry or profession.
• Assign staff members to proactively communicate with individuals who are seeking information on the profession or industry. This is a great way to grow membership over time since it builds awareness and involvement within the community.
• Monitor Twitter comments that might be critical of the organization or expose frustration. Similarly, monitor compliments and consider “re-tweeting”, or re-broadcasting, relevant content.
• Establish an organizational profile on Twitter and begin to follow relevant individuals and posting relevant content to your Twitter feed. Over time, your Twitter profile will attract followers. The network effects of Twitter will really take off once your profile has a significant number of followers.

Assuming that you are sold on the concept of using Twitter, how can this strategy be effectively implemented? Surely you do not want to assign staff members to monitor huge streams of Twitter feeds each day hoping for the occasional relevant tweet. In my next blog post, several approaches for productively monitoring Twitter will be discussed. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter by clicking on this link !

The American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), the largest, most influential and most representative of all dermatological associations in the United States, has selected Aptify as its new Association Management System (AMS).

Click here for the full article

Click here to learn about the SEMI implementation of Aptify.

A new article (previously summarized on this blog) has been published in the latest issue of Associations Now magazine. Click here for the article.

If you stay current on your reading these days, you can’t avoid all of the hype behind social media and the reasons you need to implement it right away. Social media is important for many of the reasons being expressed, however hidden beyond the frequently asserted benefits lies a tremendous, and largely untapped asset waiting for you to unlock. Social media provides a rich and up-to-date data source that is maintained at no cost to you by an army of volunteers – your members and prospective members. This data, when harnessed into the core of your operations within your Association Management System (AMS), can be amongst the most significant benefits gained from a social media strategy.

Connecting Social Media and AMS

Social networks enable groups of like-minded individuals to congregate and share knowledge. It is possible to integrate this information with an association’s existing data fairly easily. Integration is highly dependent on the association management system in use since it is necessary to be able to seamlessly push and pull data between the AMS and social network. For example, since the social network platform tracks relationships between members and others, an AMS needs to be able to transfer this information in and out of the database seamlessly. The same principle applies to areas of interests/expertise and other profile data. When the data from a social network is tightly tied into the AMS, many interesting things can happen. A few examples are described below.

Scenario: Managing a Member’s Change in Employers

Traditionally, when a member leaves their organization it has been difficult to track them. Unless the member reconnects with the association and states where they have moved they are hard to contact. However, if a member is an active participant in a social network, the association can track and integrate a member’s career changes into their AMS. In this example, an additional opportunity exists: marketing to the person that replaced the member at their old company. The social network knows about the job change and when this data moves into the AMS, additional workflow can automatically kick in. An association could set up a rule within the AMS that creates a task for a staff member to go to the original company and find out who the replacement is. Once that is done, the replacement contact at the company could be targeted for membership, events, and other offerings. This workflow could also send an automated email congratulating the existing member on their move and ask for help in finding additional people in their new company that would benefit from membership.

Scenario: Supporting Viral Marketing and Referral Campaigns

A social network provides the data needed to launch highly personalized campaigns. If an AMS is tracking the relationships of an individual, you can generate personalized messages that request their support in areas such as: fundraising, membership campaigns, grass-roots, events and more. The idea centers on asking the member to help by requesting people in their network to participate in an activity. For example, in a “member-get-a-member” campaign, an email could be sent requesting a member’s support targeting non-members they know in the industry. The email could show a list of people in their network that are in the industry but are not members. The email could allow them to check boxes next to the names they want to invite and the association web-site would automatically send messages to each prospective member on behalf of the current member. Similar concepts could be applied to grass-roots, fundraising, and many other activities. The common thread is that these campaigns require knowledge of the network of relationships, something that social media provides today!

In Summary

Most of the buzz around social media relates to building communities, new methods to communicate, and reaching diverse segments of a population. All of these benefits are good reasons to consider a social media strategy. The value of the social network to an association goes beyond those concepts when tight integration between the AMS and social network is established. The rich information within a social media platform can directly be leveraged to improve many association business practices right now.

On April 17, I will be speaking on a panel at DigitalNow 2009. I am looking forward to the panel, moderated by Sherry Budziak. Along with 2 other panelists I will be speaking about how New Media can impact membership growth and retention. My focus will be on creating leverage between New Media and database applications to drive a higher quality experience to the member while uncovering new growth opportunities.

Session Details

Friday, April 17, 2009 at 2:00PM-3:30PM

Increasing Membership with New Media

I found this post by Clarke Price, CEO of The Ohio Society of CPAs to be very interesting. It discusses a common problem within the association community related to embracing new social media technologies. Take a look, does this describe your own organization? If so, what are you doing to try to change?

I recently participated in an interview with Wes to discuss the state of the AMS software industry, current economic conditions, social networking and more. Click here to listen to the interview on Wes' blog site.

As systems evolve and new technologies emerge there is an increasing need to exchange data between applications. While generalized standards such as XML and SOAP provide the foundation for easing such integration, they don’t provide a standard format for the data itself. This is because XML and SOAP are generic and applicable to any type of data. On the other hand, in each industry, data and relationships are different so the applicable formats need to be worked out by people within the field. It is therefore critical for industry groups to get together and define data standards that effectively capture the information that needs to move back and forth.

ASAE started just such a process and Aptify is actively supporting the effort. The ASAE Data Standard is a work in progress and has made significant headway towards establishing an initial data standard for associations to share constituent and organization data. The standard structures information about constituents and organizations so that any system that supports it can easily interpret and integrate the data. The greatest benefit of a standard is that all compliant software applications and services will be able to use the standard without any systems integration coding. This promotes an increased level of interoperability between systems and will lead to more functionality and flexibility. We are proud to support the ASAE standards effort and have already completed testing of the data standard within our software. After ratification of the new standard is complete, we plan to quickly introduce support for it in our product.

A growing trend among association clients we work with is the desire to drive social-networking features into their web presence. We currently are supporting this with a variety of our clients through integration with popular social networking web sites as well as functionality that has been directly incorporated into the Aptify e-Business Suite that supports common needs. Social networking has great promise for many member driven organizations as it helps build more momentum around the community of individuals and can leverage relationships between those people in a way that is difficult to replicate in an off-line world.

In some membership organizations, social networking is looked at as being a trend amongst the younger generations of members. However, we are seeing trends where this is greatly picking up across a wide variety of age groups and demographics. We plan to conduct more in-depth research across a wide range of organizations in the community to determine current and future plans for social networking and would like to receive input on how people see this technology being used now and in the future.