Why You Need Data Reporting

Data reporting is an invaluable tool for effective membership management in clubs and associations, transforming raw information into actionable insights. By utilising data analytics, organisations can easily track event performance, understand member engagement, and identify trends to make informed decisions. 

Raw lumps of information can be daunting and difficult to sift through in order to find interesting and relevant information. The ability to distil that information down into easily digestible graphs and tables is crucial. It allows us to get a handle on more complex information much, much easier. 

For example, it would take me multiple sentences to convey the exact same information that this chart conveys instantly. 

 

 

 

To further prove this point, and just in case there are any visually impaired people using a screen reader to read this article, I will now attempt to describe what that image shows. 

There are two maps; the first shows the path of a total solar eclipse passing over the United States on April 8th, 2024. The second shows a high search volume on Google, containing the phrase “eyes hurt” from the same week. The highest volume appears to follow the same trajectory over the US as the eclipse did. Implying that people were just staring at the sun with their raw, unprotected peepers and later were confused as to why their eyes hurt.

My point is that data analytics enables us to break down topics and data, regardless of their complexity or simplicity, into more manageable, easily digestible blocks of information by transforming them into graphs, tables, and other visual representations.  

When it comes to running a membership organisation, such as a club or association, data analytics is an incredibly useful and powerful tool for breaking down complex subjects into easy-to-understand insights. Allowing you to quickly grasp what's truly going on within your organisation. With data, you can see at a glance which events performed well, which struggled, and precisely who is (or isn't) engaging with your content and activities.

 

So, today, let's have a look at data reporting, why it is so useful and how it works at Member Jungle. 

Why Data Reporting Is So Useful In Membership Management

Data reporting is all about transforming raw information into easy-to-understand insights, helping you make better, more informed decisions in managing your club or association. Instead of manually sifting through dense, boring data, you get customisable graphs and tables that let you easily see what's happening within your organisation at a glance. 

This means you're able to make data-driven decisions more easily and with less work because you have an intuitive graph right in front of you, showing exactly what is and isn't working.

While I can't speak for every system out there, Member Jungle's data reporting allows you to generate detailed information on a wide range of insights, including:

• Event attendance 
• Event registration 
• Merchandise purchases 
• Total transactions
• App interactions
• App and website logins
• Chat uses
• New members
• Locked accounts
• New members awaiting approval
• Courses completed
• Website engagement
• Location

Plus, with Member Jungle’s custom reports, you can track any other custom field you've set up. For instance, if you run a car club and want to know what percentage of members have more than one car registered with you, there’s no need to manually go through your entire membership list. Just run a custom report and get that information in moments.

This comprehensive understanding allows you to work out exactly who your members are how they are interacting with your organisation, and pinpoint what's popular with your members and what isn't. Knowing this enables you to constantly adapt and improve the member experience, directly leading to increased member sign-ups and retention. It also makes your courses and events more successful and profitable. Ultimately, this clear understanding of past member data and interactions is an invaluable asset for planning and budgeting for all your future initiatives.

With Data reporting, you can track your organisation's performance over time in multiple fields, such as revenue, member satisfaction, member attendance and member engagement. By doing this, you can identify areas where you need to improve and develop. This ongoing information is crucial for continually improving your organisation and ensuring it continues to grow. 

How Custom Data Sets & The Custom Member Report Help Your Club Or Association

Data reporting is all well and good, but being able to customise what data you are collecting and seeing is crucial. What is the point of having beautifully laid out data reports if you have to scroll past a bunch of graphs that aren’t useful to you? This is where custom data sets and custom reports come into play. 

Custom Data Sets

Custom data sets allow you to collect and display information that is uniquely relevant to your organisation, especially details not typically gathered by the average membership system. While the system automatically tracks standard information, such as age, gender, location, and event attendance, custom data sets excel at tracking those other crucial details that matter specifically to you. 

For instance, a car club could use them to collect information on members' registered cars, or a diving club might track certifications, or they could be used with pretty much anything else you need to track. They give you the power to pick and choose exactly what data you want to collect from your members, ensuring you're never gathering irrelevant information. You can even use custom data sets to store information separate from core member data, but still connected to a specific member. This is perfect if you need to track external items, such as licenses, qualifications, or registered cars, while always knowing precisely who they belong to.

Below is an example of a custom data form set up to collect the important information that a dog club needs. 

 

 

Using a custom form like this, the club can gather all the necessary information on both the dog and its owner and keep it organised. With a fully customisable system like this, your organisation can set all the information you need tailored to your specific needs. This also comes with an advanced reporting feature that can be incredibly useful. This means that you can customise what fields are shown to you in your data reports and search via specific information. 

Do you want to know how many German Shepherds are in your dog club? Or which cars are up for registration renewal this month? Then you can do that with the advanced data reporting module. For more information on how this works, have a look at Advanced Reporting on Datasets.  

 

Custom Member Report

Member Jungle's Custom Member Report feature is a powerful tool designed to give your club or association deep, tailored insights into your membership data. Available in select packages or as an add-on, it allows you to easily generate custom reports on any field that you collect from your members. 

You can filter reports by specific membership levels, various membership fields (like status or renewal date), demographic fields (such as age, gender, or location), and even custom fields you've added through forms. You also have full control over which fields are displayed on your report dashboard, ensuring you see only the most relevant data.

 

 

Once you've run a custom report on a specific data range, you can either send an email directly to everyone in the report or export it as a shareable CSV file. This means Member Jungle's custom reports can do two really important things for your organisation.

First, if you need to reach out to specific subgroups of your membership (members whose membership has lapsed, those living in a particular region, or people who haven’t logged into the website or app in the last three months), you can run a custom report and then send a bulk email directly to everyone who falls into that category. This makes it incredibly easy to get in touch with any segment of your membership.

Second, if one of your committee members wants to know the gender breakdown of your membership, their geographic location, what percentage are using the app, what percentage have logged into the website in the past three months, or pretty much anything else, you can simply run a custom report and then send them a CSV file. They can then look through the data at their leisure. This makes it a super useful tool for providing quick, tailored insights to anyone who needs them.

For more information on how custom reports work, please check out Member Custom Report.

Track Your Members’ Engagement With Your Organisation 

We briefly touched on it above, but one of the best benefits of data reporting is the ability to track member engagement. Keeping track of how your members, both collectively and individually, engage with your organisation and events can provide invaluable insights into what works best for you.   

You can easily compare the engagement levels of all your members, seeing who your most active participants are and who aren’t getting involved. This is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of how your members are interacting with your club or association.

Below is an example of how this engagement tracker looks.

 

 

As you can see, it's very easy to identify your most active members.

If we clicked on the most engaged member above, who is Sally Flinstone. We can take a deep dive into how she is engaging with the club. 

 

 

This provides a detailed breakdown of Sally’s interactions with the organisation across various areas. We can see she has spent a lot of time on the website and app and has been to 100% of the events but hasn’t completed any courses. Imagine the insights you could gain on your members by using this.

This allows you to track how the member is engaging with all of the following:

• Events
• Merchandise purchases 
• Total transactions
• App interactions
• App and website logins
• Chat uses
• Courses completed
• Website engagement

You can also sort this page by a particular year or the entire length of a member's membership. Most importantly, you can customise your engagement tracker to work better for your organisation. By heading into the engagement settings, you can change the weighting of each of the above areas. Increasing or decreasing the weighting of an area will adjust how much influence it has over the total engagement percentage. 

For example, if event attendance is crucial to you, you can increase its weighting in the settings. This means the number of events a member attends will have a greater impact on their overall engagement score. Conversely, if you don't run courses and they aren't important to you, you can decrease their weighting or turn them off completely. Doing all this allows you to get a more accurate representation of how engaged your members truly are.

Putting Data Reporting Into Practice 

With data reporting, you can gain true insight into your members. Discover what they love and what they don’t. See how they interact with your organisation as a whole and as individuals. Doing this allows you to adapt your club or association to give them more of what they love. Focus more on the popular events and improve the less popular stuff. This is the sort of constant improvement that will keep your members happy and continuing to renew their memberships.

Knowing which events and courses aren’t appealing to members doesn’t mean you have to cancel them. It means that you know you need to improve them. With member data reporting, you can see which members took part in those events and courses. You know the ones that go every month and the ones that went once and have never gone again. Talk to both of those groups. See if you can find out what it is they did and did not like about the event.

With data reporting, you know which members are interacting the least with your club. Try reaching out to them, and find out why they aren’t going to as many events as others. Maybe it’s a question of distance. They might jump at the chance to join an event or course if an online option was available.  

The point is, with data reporting, the information and power are in your hands. You get to choose what you do with it. My recommendation is to check your data reports on a semi-regular basis to ensure you are staying on top of what’s going on in your organisation and make changes as needed.  

Now, if all this talk of data collecting and reporting is making you a little worried about all the information the system holds, that’s completely fair enough. I 100% get that, so maybe have a look at How Does Member Jungle Protect Your Data? on our website. Hopefully, it will help put your mind at ease. 

How To Find Out More About Data Reporting

I hope that’s given you some helpful insight into what data reporting is and how to use it to help improve your club or association. 

If you want to know more specifics about how to use custom data reporting with your organisation, have a look at the Custom Datasets page of our website or check out Advanced Reporting on Datasets.