First, it would help to define
business intelligence, or BI. BI is data analytics and the technologies and
strategies used to collect it and apply it. BI can provide past, present, and
predictive views of business operations. BI is connected to everything, from
member engagement scoring to marketing, helping organizations work smarter and
more efficiently. BI technologies can handle large amounts of structured and
sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new
strategic business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy
interpretation of these big data. But how can it help specifically? If you
think about your organization as a web of sources connected by data, you can
understand how business intelligence is supposed to work. It connects
everything so that you can accurately understand your entire organization and
how improving each element will improve the whole.
For example, collecting data about
your members to perform member engagement scoring will also provide data on how
to improve your marketing campaigns which will in turn continue to encourage
engagement which helps with member retention. Once you start to let data guide
your decisions, every aspect of the organization will also be improved. Collect
data from your email marketing campaigns to discover what most interests your
members by looking into what they click and click through to further explore.
Is a certain demographic more interested in courses and certifications than
another? Strategize your marketing around that by continuing to market more
diverse options to the most interested, and your most popular offerings to your
least interested. This may also reveal to you that you aren’t providing certain
courses that your members are looking for and that you should start offering
it.
Another important aspect of BI is
its predictive abilities. Using data gathered about past events, for example,
you can make an educated prediction about how your future events will do for
things like registration, attendance, and satisfaction. BI may also help you
predict your future member retention rates and whether or not your organization
will continue to grow. It can help you plan now for any future possibilities,
so you feel more prepared going forward. This can be especially important right
now with the world feeling very uncertain. We may not know when we’ll be able
to have an in-person event again, but at least we can prepare for and predict
the success of our virtual events.
BI is also meant to be as
digestible and understandable as possible to increase the amount of people who
can use it to its full potential. Data analysts play a very important role in
an organization to ensure that the data is read and used properaly, but one can
only have so many data specialists. Sometimes, everyone from the most junior
marketing coordinator to the most senior executive needs to be able to use that
data effectively, and they don’t always have the background or training to
easily interpret raw data. Utilizing BI technologies like data analytics
platforms can democratize data so that everyone can read it and understand it
enough that it improves their performance. If you choose to, you can even send
data reports that are legible to your members so they can see the data you’ve
been collecting as member facing data analytics, or you can send reports to
your board without also having to send a data specialist to explain the report
to them. Using BI, you can take out the middleman, increasing efficiency and
saving money.
One of the best things about BI is
it can help you strategize long term goals and priorities at the broadest level
to pricing of individual products and services. It can be tempting to see these
as very separate topics for strategizing, but how can you make your long-term
goals without knowing the pricing of your products and how can you decide on
your pricing if you don’t have a goal in mind. These things need to go
together, and BI allows you to make these plans concurrently so that everyone
in your organization is on the same page. BI can even make some of these
decisions for you. If you know your goals, a good business intelligence
technology can help to suggest pricing and scheduling to make those goals
happen. It doesn’t negate the need for human intervention, but it allows your
people to dream and have lofty goals without being bogged down by the minutiae
of it all.
BI is undeniably helpful for
recognizing and visualizing how your organization operates, both as smaller
parts and as the large whole. Being aware of the minute data of each element of
the organization is good, but when you combine all the elements together and
compare data across the entire org, you will find that understanding your
business environment, your members, and even your own staff will become easier
and more productive.