Why Your Social Club Needs Data Reporting

Data reporting can sound like an over-complicated and dense subject, but it is quite simple. In this article, I will tell you everything you need to know about data reporting in a way that makes sense. So bear with me, I promise it will be worth it, and nowhere near as boring as you might expect.

In this article you are going to learn the following:

• What Is Data Reporting?
• Benefits Of Using Data Reporting
• Custom Data
• Member Data
• Engagement Trackers

 

What Is Data Reporting?

The all-important question is, what is data reporting? The answer is surprisingly simple. Data reporting is the collection and analysis of information to generate insights that help you make better and more informed choices in the running of your club. Okay, so that wasn’t as simple as it could be. Basically, data reporting is an automatic way to see all the information about how your members interact with your club in a simple and easy-to-understand way.  

It is a lot like a system that puts together a puzzle. The pieces are all the information about your club and your members collected from a range of different sources. The finished puzzle is a simple-to-understand image showing you what you need to know about your club and your members.

The point of all this is to provide you with accurate and relevant information that is easy to look through and understand. Which in turn empowers you to make the best possible decisions in the running of your club.

Think of data reporting as a translator between raw data and you. It helps put data into context, identify patterns, and draw conclusions.

Benefits Of Using Data Reporting

There are several benefits to using data reporting in the running of your club. Using data reporting you can gain a lot of insight into how your members interact with your club. 

You can get insight into all of the following: 

• Event attendance 
• Merchandise sales  
• Member numbers
• Course completion
• Website visits 
• Total revenue  
• Age of members
• Gender of members
• Their membership level
• The geographic location of members

Using data reporting you can understand what is popular with your members and what isn’t. Knowing this can help improve the member experience, by constantly being able to adapt to what is and isn’t working for your members. This can increase member signup and retention, not to mention make your courses and events more successful and profitable. This understanding of past member data and interactions can assist in planning and budgeting for future events.

The following is an example of how your data reporting can be displayed clearly on your Member Jungle-made website.

 

With Data reporting, you can track your club'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 your club needs to improve and develop. This ongoing information is key to being able to continually improve your club. Ensuring your members are always happy and that your club is always growing. It may seem a little overdramatic but the truth is that in any club just like any business you must evolve or die.

Your Social Club And Custom Data

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 data graph you have no use for? 

This is where custom datasets and collections come into play. 

What are custom datasets? Well, they are a way for you to collect and display only the information that is relevant to you. They allow you to pick and choose what data you want to collect from your members. Meaning that you will never need to collect information that is not relevant to you. You can also use custom datasets to collect information that is separate from your member data but can still be connected to a specific member. This means that if you were to run a classic car club you can use custom datasets to collect information about members’ classic cars and tie it to that member. This means that when you can see your members' details and with a click of a button you can also see what cars they have registered with your club. This of course would work for any club where members need to register something with you, dogs, cars, planes and licences. 

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 information they need on both the dog and its owner and keep that information together. With a fully customisable system like this, your club can custom-set all the information you need, no matter your 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.  

Engagement Tracker

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 as a whole and members as individuals engage with your club and events can provide incredible insights into what works best for your club.   

You can look at the engagement of all members and see how they compare to one another. In doing this you can see who your most and least active members are. Again this is a great way to gain insight into how your members are interacting with your club. 

Below is an example of how this engagement tracker looks. 

 

 

As you can see, it is very easy to see who your most active members are.

So 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. 

 

 

As you can see, we can now see a detailed breakdown of Sally’s interactions with the club over several different 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 length of their entire membership. Most importantly, you can customise your engagement tracker to work better for your club. By going to the engagement settings you can change the weighting of each of the above areas. Increasing or decreasing the weighting of an area will change how much influence that area has over the total engagement percentage. Let’s say that event attendance is very important to your club, then you can go into settings and increase the weighting of event attendance. Meaning that how many events a member attends will have a greater sway over their engagement score. By the same token, if you don’t run courses and they aren’t important to you, you can turn down the weighting of them or turn them off all together. Doing all this allows you to get a more accurate representation of how engaged your members are. 

Putting Data Reporting Into Practice 

With data reporting, you can gain true insight into your members. Discover what they love and what they do not. See how they interact with your club as a whole and as individuals. Doing this allows you to adapt your club 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. 

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

The entire purpose of data reporting is to get as much easy-to-consume information as you can so you can make the best decisions possible. After this article, you should hopefully have a much better understanding of what data reporting is and why it is great for your club. 

However, continuing your research into data reporting should be your top priority. I'll attach some great links below, follow them or go for a Google. It doesn't matter, as long as you keep researching and improving your club. 

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

If all this has you a little worried about how tech-savvy you are maybe have a look at How much computer experience do I need to manage Member Jungle?