3 Ways Your Current Associate Management System Can Scale

You may love your association management system but you might wonder how it will handle a sudden uptick in membership, or how it would perform if you expanded CE offerings. There’s no need for guesswork.

In this post, we’ll look at three ways your association can scale membership without wreaking havoc on human resource workflow (or association management best practices). These are three ways your association management system can meet the challenges of growth.

Warning: Scalability is not a feature of all association management system platforms, especially when it comes to CE.

Your association management system (AMS) is your workhorse, and it is likely that you have invested significant time and money into making it work for your organization. As your program scales, you want to be certain that your AMS can handle a growing demand without requiring you to add expensive new features or hire a web development firm.

Here are three major skillsets that your AMS will need to master to support your organization’s growth.

1. Make Your AMS Data-Savvy

Does your AMS excel with data?

That isn’t a clever pun. If you are relying on traditional methods to handle organization and CE data then you should be aware that spreadsheets have a well-deserved reputation as a reservoir of human error.

Data entry errors have caused billions in losses for some of the world’s largest companies. As your membership expands and your CE program matures, it is essential to have a seamless data management system in play.

Your AMS should give you command over your data.

As your membership grows, so will the influx of critical data.

Your AMS should manage a thousand new members and their data as easily as a few dozen.

With the right LMS, it is possible to integrate enterprise-grade data management features with your AMS, allowing it to scale effortlessly. For example, with the EthosCE platform, all of your data is drawn directly from the LMS and select external sources. There is no need for manual data entry into a spreadsheet or other document. With EthosCE Analytics, a user-friendly data management and analytics suite, your data is securely warehoused and available for instant analysis. Slice your data to view historical and real-time insights on learner behaviors, educational outcomes, program revenues, and more.

The right LMS can take over critical data management functions for your AMS and make your data more secure and easier to access.

2. Transform Your AMS Into a Productivity Engine

Can your AMS easily streamline your workflow?

There is no doubt about it: as your membership grows, so will your workload. There is more data to deal with, more questions to answer, more emails to send. If your organization is not prepared for a sharp uptick in administrative tasks then you may face a flurry of helpdesk requests, disgruntled CE registrants, and even membership cancellations.

If you don’t want your success to become a mixed blessing, with profits evaporating as you pay for add-on features to help your AMS cope with a heavier workload or add staff to deal with a mounting backlog of inquiries, it is wise to think about LMS integration.

An enterprise LMS will remove many of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that multiply exponentially in tandem with membership growth. From welcome emails to payment reminders to order processing to learner assessment feedback, task automation can help you and your staff become more productive by protecting you from workflow interruptions even as administrative demands intensify.

As membership increases, your AMS should lessen your workload.

3. Connect Your AMS to a Powerful Partner

Can your AMS easily accommodate feature LMS integration?

A scalable AMS will work seamlessly with an enterprise LMS to support intelligent growth.

As your organization’s needs become more complex as your membership and program offerings grow, it is important that your AMS allows you to integrate new features from a powerful LMS as needed. An enterprise LMS will enable your AMS to scale easily as your association’s mission expands, helping you to get the most out of your AMS and your LMS educational resources. From CME compliance to OSHA standards, regardless of your organization’s mission, ensuring that your AMS system maintains customer service excellence is essential to your association’s success.

When a successful marketing campaign grants you several hundred new members, or learner feedback leads you to create a roster of new courses targeting a specific group of your members, your AMS should be able to accommodate the new workload without any tweaking.

You cannot afford to try out your AMS platform’s capabilities “live,” when your new members are seeking help during onboarding or a CE course seems to be failing to engage. Your AMS should offer all of the tools that you need to scale from launch, not as an added feature.

With smart LMS integration, your AMS can scale easily, even if it doesn’t have the “native” features required to accommodate big changes in workflow or task categories.

You Don’t Have to Wait for Your AMS to Catch Up with Your Program’s Growth.

EthosCE custom integrations allow you to have the power of a full-featured, agile LMS working seamlessly with your AMS. EthosCE also offers partnership level support from launch through integration and beyond. We help you get the most out of your AMS and stay by your side as your program grows, helping you achieve your vision step by step. Ready to see what your AMS can do? Connect with us for a demo.