BLOG: You Outsource IT. Why Not Data?

Membership organisations are becoming increasingly ambitious about what they want from their data.

Better management reporting, Power BI dashboards, member engagement analysis, automated reporting, improved segmentation, better data quality and, increasingly, preparing their data for AI.

In many cases, organisations already have a good idea of what they want to achieve. The challenge is often much more practical: who is actually going to deliver it?

The data skills gap

Not every membership organisation needs, or can justify, a dedicated internal data team. But that doesn't mean their data requirements aren't becoming increasingly sophisticated.

A Head of Membership might want to better understand retention and member engagement. Marketing may need more sophisticated segmentation. The CEO might want a clearer view of organisational performance, while Finance wants to reduce the amount of manual work involved in producing monthly reports.

The questions are there. The data is often there too.

What's missing is frequently the specialist capability or internal capacity to turn those requirements into something useful.

It's a gap we're seeing increasingly often in our conversations with membership organisations.

One person can't necessarily do everything

The obvious solution might be to recruit a data analyst, and for some organisations that's absolutely the right approach.

But consider the range of skills modern data requirements can involve. Building a Power BI dashboard requires a different skillset from investigating data quality, integrating information from multiple systems or analysing patterns in member behaviour. Then there's data modelling, CRM expertise, automation, KPI development and the ability to translate a relatively broad business question into something that can actually be measured.

Finding all of that expertise in one person isn't easy.

Building an entire internal data team is even harder to justify for many small and medium-sized membership organisations.

So perhaps there's another model.

We've already solved this problem with IT

Think about how many membership organisations manage their IT.

Most don't employ every technical skill they might need internally. Maintaining expertise across infrastructure, cybersecurity, Microsoft 365, networking and technical support would be expensive and unnecessary for many organisations.

Instead, they outsource some or all of that capability to a specialist IT provider.

The organisation doesn't need to know how to solve every technical problem itself. It simply needs access to people who do.

So why should data be any different?

As data becomes increasingly important to membership organisations, we believe there's a growing case for treating data expertise in much the same way.

You don't necessarily need to employ every specialist skill internally. You need reliable access to those skills when you need them.

Introducing Data Team as a Service

That's the thinking behind a new service we've introduced at Memberlytics: Data Team as a Service.

The concept is deliberately simple. We become an extension of your team, providing ongoing access to specialist data, analytics and reporting expertise.

Rather than commissioning a separate consultancy project every time a new requirement arises, you have access to people who already understand your organisation, your systems, your data and what you're trying to achieve.

Think of it as having your own data team, without having to build one.

What does an outsourced data team actually do?

One of the reasons we've developed this service is that many of the data requirements organisations encounter aren't necessarily large enough to justify standalone consultancy projects.

You might need a new Power BI dashboard one month, then discover that two membership reports are producing different numbers. A few weeks later the Board might request a new KPI, while the membership team wants to understand whether event attendance has any relationship with renewal.

Elsewhere, somebody might be spending several hours every month manually producing a spreadsheet that could be automated, or marketing might want to create a new member segment but can't easily extract the information they need.

These aren't necessarily major transformation projects.

But somebody still needs the skills and capacity to deliver them.

That's the gap an outsourced data team can fill.

We're the data experts, so you don't have to be

There's another important principle behind the service: your internal teams shouldn't have to become data specialists.

Your membership team should be able to concentrate on membership. Your marketing team should be able to concentrate on marketing. And your senior leaders should be able to ask business questions without needing to understand data models, APIs, Power Query or DAX.

That's our job.

Our role is to take the complexity sitting underneath the data and turn it into something useful for the organisation.

You tell us what you're trying to understand or achieve. We help work out how your data can get you there.

Data expertise is important. Membership expertise is too.

There are plenty of data consultancies, Power BI developers and freelance data analysts available.

But membership organisations have particular data requirements.

The relationship between an organisation and its members can involve subscriptions, renewals, membership grades, events, CPD, learning, volunteering, communities, content, benefits and relationships between individuals and organisations. Those interactions might also take place across numerous systems.

Understanding that context matters.

It means that when someone asks us to help understand retention or measure member engagement, we're not starting from scratch trying to understand what a membership organisation does.

That's why Data Team as a Service isn't simply about providing outsourced technical resource. It's about combining data expertise with membership sector expertise.

From one-off projects to continuous improvement

Traditional consultancy will always have an important role, particularly where an organisation is undertaking a significant piece of work such as a CRM migration, data audit or implementation of a new reporting environment.

The challenge is that an organisation's data requirements don't stop when the project finishes.

Strategies evolve, systems change and new reporting requirements emerge. Leadership starts asking different questions, new services are introduced and the way members interact with the organisation changes.

In fact, something interesting often happens once an organisation starts getting better access to its data: people start asking more questions.

That's exactly what you want.

Instead of producing the same report every month, people start asking why something has changed. They want to understand what's driving a trend, compare different groups of members or investigate whether an activity is actually delivering the expected outcome.

An ongoing data partnership gives organisations the capacity to answer those questions and continually improve how they use their data, rather than allowing them to sit on a wish list until somebody internally has the time or expertise to investigate them.

Outsourcing shouldn't mean creating dependency

There's an important distinction here.

Outsourcing your data capability shouldn't mean handing over control of your data or creating a black box that only an external supplier understands.

We believe organisations should understand their own data and reporting environment.

Our aim is therefore to work alongside internal teams, share knowledge and help improve data confidence and capability across the organisation.

For an organisation that already has someone developing their data skills internally, we can provide additional expertise and capacity around them. For an organisation with no dedicated resource, we can provide that capability directly.

And if an organisation eventually reaches the point where building an internal data team makes sense, that's a positive outcome too.

Do you need a data analyst, or access to data expertise?

It's a distinction worth considering.

As membership organisations become more data-driven, their need for specialist expertise across reporting, analytics, data quality, automation, member engagement, CRM data and AI readiness is only likely to increase.

But that doesn't necessarily mean every organisation needs to build an internal data team.

For many, the real requirement is simply access to the right expertise, when they need it.

That's why we've launched Memberlytics Data Team as a Service: ongoing access to data, analytics and reporting expertise specifically for membership organisations.

Your data team. Without having to build one.

Because we're the data experts, so you don't have to be.

Find out more

If your organisation knows what it wants to achieve with data but doesn't have the internal capacity or specialist skills to deliver it, find out more about our Data Team as a Service, or get in touch for an informal conversation about what an outsourced data team could look like for your organisation.