This month's article is authored by Dynamic Benchmarking's Heather Tarpley, Business Development Specialist. Heather's background in Association Business Development gives her a unique perspective on what online benchmarking can do to help associations work with their supplier members to find tangible benefits with the organization. You can connect with Heather on LinkedIn to tap into her knowledge and experience.
Creating a benchmarking study, especially your first one, can look like a daunting task. As you begin to look at what data you want to collect, you should consider, first and foremost, what will your members find most valuable? What key performance indicators do you measure to give the most accurate, and meaningful, peer-to-peer comparisons? As a CFO, I tend to place a high value on financial and operational data. To me, they are the truest indicators of the health of an organization, are easy to quantify, and one of the most accurate ways to compare one’s performance against that of your peers. Basic financial statements are used worldwide as a means of assessing the value, performance and growth of businesses making them a great starting point for developing a successful benchmarking study.
Compensation and benefit surveys have long been offered by professional associations as valuable benchmarking tools. Traditionally, these studies have been conducted by sending forms to members to complete, tabulating data once a sufficient amount had been received, and then distributing reports of the aggregated data to members several weeks to months after the start of the process. While the data gleaned through this traditional process was certainly valuable, it was anything but fresh and certainly not malleable to an individual’s unique demographics.
Developing your first benchmarking study can be daunting, but the end result is a benefit you can’t afford to ignore. Benchmarking yields invaluable data about your members and delivers meaningful information to your members for better business decision making. But with so many possible directions to go and so many different metrics to measure, where do you begin?