The board asks for a digital strategy. Six weeks later a proposal comes back. It has a discovery phase, a sitemap, wireframes, a content migration plan and a launch date. It is a good proposal. It is also a website redesign, and somewhere between the request and the response the word strategy stopped meaning anything.
Nobody in that room did anything wrong. This happens because digital strategy has no agreed definition in this sector, so it defaults to whichever piece of digital work the organization already knows how to buy. Ask five association executives what it means and you will get the website, a mobile app, a redesign, and analytics. Those are deliverables. A list of deliverables is a project plan.
Here is the definition we work from. This post sets out what we mean by the term, the six areas it actually covers, and how to tell whether your organization has a strategy or a purchasing history. The posts that follow take each area in turn.
A Definition That Can Be Tested
Digital strategy is the set of decisions about how your systems serve your strategic plan. Not which systems you own. How they serve the plan.
The test is one sentence per system. Take any system your organization runs and name the strategic goal it serves. Not its function, its goal. Your AMS does not exist to store member records. It exists to serve whatever your plan says about retention, or growth, or member value. If you cannot make that sentence for a system, you are maintaining it rather than using it, and maintenance is where most association technology budget goes.
Run the test honestly and the result is usually uncomfortable. Most organizations pass that test for two or three systems and fail it for the rest. That is normal and it is fixable. What is not fixable by a redesign is the gap itself, because the gap is not on the website.
The Six Areas
When we scope digital strategy work for an association, these are the six areas we look at. They are not equally mature at any organization we have worked with, and the weakest one is usually the one nobody has been asked about.
- Member data and your AMS. Whether the data you already collect is being used to make decisions. Most associations hold years of behavioral data about renewal timing, event attendance, content consumption and engagement decline, and read almost none of it. The integration work is usually done. The reading is not.
- Measurement. Whether you can tell what is working. This is the weakest area in almost every organization we assess, and it is the one that makes every other decision guesswork. If your reporting is a monthly traffic number, you do not have measurement, you have a number.
- Discovery. Whether people can find you, including in the places that now answer questions without sending anyone to a website. Search has changed underneath this sector faster than most communications plans have been rewritten.
- Member experience. Whether joining, renewing and registering are things a member can complete without calling your office. These three flows carry most of your revenue and they are usually the least examined pages you own.
- Revenue beyond dues. Whether your digital properties support the non-dues income your plan assumes. Job boards, sponsorship, education, events. Most strategic plans commit to non-dues growth and most digital plans do not mention it.
- The platform underneath. Whether the thing everything else runs on is stable, secure, maintainable and owned by somebody. This is the area associations think of first and the only one on the list that is purely infrastructure.
The Strategy Lives in the Seams
Each of those six can be done well in isolation and still leave you without a strategy. That is the part the redesign framing misses entirely.
Here is the failure we see most often. A membership team can run a strong renewal campaign. A communications team can publish good content. A web team can keep the platform patched. If the renewal campaign does not know which members stopped opening emails, and the content team cannot see which resources members actually use, and nobody is watching whether the join flow broke after the last AMS update, then all three are working and none of them is compounding.
Stated plainly. The value is not in any one system. It is in whether a signal in one place changes a decision in another. A member who has not logged in for eight months is a retention problem, and your AMS knows it, and your email platform does not, and your renewal campaign treats them exactly like everyone else. That is a seam, and seams are where strategy actually lives.
Five Questions That Tell You Where You Stand
These are the questions we open with, and they are worth answering internally before anyone brings in an agency:
- What does your digital work do for the strategic plan, in one sentence? If the answer names systems rather than outcomes, you have an inventory.
- Who owns your member data? Not who administers it. Who is accountable for whether the data in it is any good.
- What did you learn from your analytics last quarter that changed something? If nobody can answer without pulling three reports and reconciling them by hand, that is your measurement answer.
- When did someone last complete your join flow as an outsider? Most organizations have never tested it. A surprising number are broken in ways staff cannot see because staff are always logged in.
- Which two of your systems would notice if the other one was wrong? If a change in one produces no change in the other, they are not integrated. They are adjacent.
Where Most Organizations Actually Are
We are not going to pretend the answer is usually good. In our experience the common position is a set of systems that were each bought for a sound reason, integrated well enough to pass data, and never revisited as a whole. Nobody owns the whole. Everybody owns a piece.
That is not a failure of competence. It is what happens when technology gets purchased department by department over a decade, which is how every association we have worked with got its stack. The work is not replacing any of it. The work is deciding what it is collectively for, and then making the seams carry weight.
What This Series Covers
Each of the six areas gets its own post, and each one answers the same two questions: what good looks like, and how to tell where you are.
- Member data and your AMS. The data you already have and are not reading.
- Measurement. What to measure when traffic is not the point.
- Discovery. Being findable when search stopped sending traffic.
- Member experience. Join, renew, register, and why those three pages decide your year.
- Revenue beyond dues. What your plan assumes and your website does not support.
- The platform underneath. The part you already worry about, in proportion.
Where This Goes From Here
If any of the five questions above produced an uncomfortable pause, that is the useful outcome of reading this, and it does not require hiring anybody to act on. Answer them internally first. The organizations that get value out of an outside partner are the ones who show up already knowing which of the six areas is weakest.
When you do want help, the shape of it matters. Digital strategy work does not finish, because the systems keep changing and the plan gets rewritten every three years. That is why we do this as an ongoing partnership rather than a project with a launch date, and why our partnership plans include the strategy work rather than billing it as a separate engagement each time the question comes up. If you want to see how that is structured, the plans are on our site. If you would rather start with the five questions and a conversation about the answers, that works too, and it costs nothing.