No matter your association’s size, leveraging technology effectively is essential if you want to remain competitive.
As you’d expect, tech significantly enhances productivity as well as your overall ability to be productive!
IT departments are likely top of mind when thinking about who’s behind the curtains when managing tech tools, but other team members should play pivotal roles as well. Aligning tech initiatives with your broader organizational goals requires a collaborative approach that extends far beyond IT.
In this article, we explore how your association can integrate technology into all aspects of your operations to drive success and growth.
[Related: Essential Elements of True Digital Transformation for the New Year]
The Importance of Aligning Technology With Organizational Goals
Aligning technology with organizational goals means your tech investments and initiatives must support your strategic objectives in multiple capacities:
- Maximizing ROI. Focusing on technologies that directly contribute to your association’s goals allows you to carry out quality work, and in turn, maximize the ROI from those technologies..
- Enhancing efficiency. Well-integrated technology solutions streamline operations, improve communication and increase efficiency for both everyday tasks and long-term projects.
- Driving innovation. Technology opens new avenues for innovation, enabling your organization to offer new products and services that meet members’ expectations and keep them engaged.
- Improving competitiveness. Staying current with technological trends helps your association remain competitive, and perhaps even leaders in your field.
There might be other objectives you deem priority to improve your association, but these are typically the most common goals that organizations seek to achieve right away.
[Related: How To Turn Your Board’s Vision Into Reality]
6 Steps for Aligning Technology With Organizational Goals
Knowing why you should align tech with your goals is a bit clearer than how you should do it. Let’s review six steps to ensure successful alignment.
1. Involve All Departments in Technology Planning
Effective alignment starts with involving key stakeholders from all departments in your technology planning process. This helps you answer central questions:
- What tools should I buy?
- How much should I spend?
- What solutions will make my members’ daily work lives easier?
When your approach is both foundational and collaborative, you ensure your technology strategy eases the pain points of your entire organization, not just the IT department.
For starters, hold regular cross-departmental meetings with representatives from each department. You can then discuss the recurring needs and challenges their departments face from lack of proper tech, IT support or both.
2. Conduct a Technology Needs Assessment
Consider assessing your current technology landscape and identifying gaps for improvement.
To begin, take stock of the current technology tools in your inventory. You can determine what you have and how much you use those solutions across departments. Who knows? Maybe there are certain tools that are duplicates or underutilized!
Taking stock also makes it far easier to see where your technology gaps reside. These gaps might be lack of automation within your system or perhaps integration problems that slow down work.
What technology in your inventory isn’t performing as well as it used to? What do you think will make short- and long-term operations flow better? You’re sure to spot something you need to address.
[Related: Why Your Organization Needs a Learning Management System]
3. Prioritize Technology Investments
Not all technology investments are created equal. Think about the solutions that can help you address tasks efficiently and in a more cost-effective way.
To do this, evaluate their cost, and then compare that cost with your budget and what you feel comfortable spending. Then, take their expected benefits into account.
If you’re an association leader, ask yourself a few questions:
- Do you need to improve your customer member service?
- Do you need to enhance the efficiency of your operations?
- Do you need to drive more sales to increase growth and revenue?
These are just a few ideas to get you brainstorming!
4. Foster a Technology-Forward Culture
Cultivating a culture that embraces technology is crucial for successful alignment.
Encourage your employees to not only adopt (and adapt to) new technologies but also actually use them!
Consider offering training and development opportunities. Ongoing training (such as for AMS/CRM, email marketing and more) is invaluable because you help ensure your employees are equally comfortable and proficient with new technology. Consider offering classes when entirely new technologies are brought into the association, or if a new team member joins who is unfamiliar with using your current technology options.
Additionally, you can promote open lines of communication when it comes to any new tech innovations. Your organization benefits when everyone’s in the know and feels comfortable asking (and answering) questions that arise.
[Related: Building Collaboration Means Saying Goodbye to Silos]
5. Implement Integrated Solutions
Choosing integrated technology is particularly wise these days because most associations use more than one tool to carry out their operations.
With integrated solutions, you connect various aspects of your organization. And in turn, you’re in a better position to make data-driven decisions!
For example, consider adopting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to integrate your core processes. Or you can use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to centralize member data and improve your sales and marketing efforts.
[Related: Understanding the Difference: AMS vs. CRM for Associations]
6. Measure and Adjust
Regularly measuring your technology initiatives’ effectiveness is a must.
You can do this by following metrics such as key performance indicators (KPIs). They measure the true (and ever-evolving) impact of technology on your association’s goals.
Depending on your target KPIs (and whether you’re reaching acceptable values), you can adjust your strategy. Efforts to adapt will help keep your association’s tech solutions aligned with your organizational goals.
What Would a Success Story Look Like?
Consider a hypothetical association that specializes in eco-friendly product awareness.
Perhaps its leader wants to enhance member engagement — a smart mission in terms of environmental awareness! To do this, they may want to implement a CRM system to personalize interactions that will drive a real difference later.
Or perhaps they want to cut day-to-day operational costs so more of their budget can go to environmental campaigns. An integrated ERP, for example, might help them streamline operations and increase efficiency.
Another goal may be to boost membership size. The association can use data analytics tools to identify trends and better attract members to its offerings!
Contact Dennison & Associates To Assist Your Association When Aligning Technology
Aligning technology with organizational goals isn’t just a task for the IT department. It requires a holistic, association-wide effort.
By involving all departments and prioritizing strategic investments that are tailored to your association, you harness technology’s full potential. And you’re likely to achieve those long-term objectives you’ve planned.
If you need help deciding which technology tools align best with your organization, get in touch with us at Dennison & Associates. We’re eager to start discussing your association’s unique needs! And in the meantime, check out our case studies to explore how we’ve helped other organizations.
Featured image via Unsplash
