I was at the 2018 CDS (Custom Data Solutions) AM.NET (Association Management Software) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for interesting developments and highlights:

• CDS Data Warehouse has been augmented since last year with Engagement score and plans for a member activity stream. Great stuff to tie into online community for member experience continuity.
• Chris Jenkins (CEO of SCACPA) put together a great presentation on Microsoft Power BI (business intelligence) to help visualize and interpret data for insights. Business Intelligence is a big topic this year, touched on by multiple sessions. Particular insights include: who attended events as a non-member, then later became a member, and how long did they remain members? Telling a story with analytics continues to be an important aspect of BI.
• Aura Innovative Technologies has been focusing on AI (artificial intelligence) with “iBot” chat for finding offerings with their eStore solution. They also demoed Amazon Alexa integration to find courses from their store with voice commands. As usual their focus on bleeding edge technology is novel and promising.

I spoke with multiple association representatives about our Social CPE solution. AMS integrated discussion groups and productivity tools, and how to renew brand value to make themselves relevant to members with horizontal competition in offerings.

The new Tax Law changes in 2018 were also a hot topic for associations because of a heavily impacted membership. CPE registrations have received a huge bump due to CPAs hungry for details and guidance.

Times are turbulent and associations are feeling it. Everyone is striving to up their game and find thought leaders who can guide them to make the right choices.

Special thanks to GSCPA for hosting the conference and the association representatives who make the time to learn and improve their organizations!