Business Intelligence Proves Its Value at The Appraisal Institute

WebFOCUS Fortifies Member Relationships and Boosts Revenue for Non-Profit Organization

The Appraisal Institute is a $20 million global membership association comprising more than 25,000 real estate appraisers who are experienced in residential and commercial property valuation. The Chicago, Illinois-based organization, with 91 chapters in the U.S., helps transform the practice of worldwide property economics by creating global standards and methodologies, offering its members an array of education and advocacy programs, and serving as the world’s largest publisher of real estate appraisal literature.

Member recruitment and retention is vital for The Appraisal Institute. The organization, founded in 1932, currently has close to 25 percent of the appraiser market, but the impact of the economy on the real estate industry has made the acquisition and retention of members more difficult. To optimize revenue levels, the firm needs to retain and upgrade its membership base, and leverage the kind of new up-sell and cross-sell opportunities that are so important to non-profit firms.

When first introduced to Information Builders, The Appraisal Institute was in the midst of an initiative to modernize its aging customer relationship management (CRM) environment. The goal was to use the information in its membership database system more strategically to enhance member interactions.

“Once our membership database evaluation process started, we discovered that it wasn’t the only outdated technology in our environment,” said Hope Atuel, director of Marketing and Member Resources for The Appraisal Institute. “More importantly, simply enhancing our database system was not going to give us everything we needed. Our leadership had a vision of building stronger and more profitable relationships with our members by giving them the ability to interact more easily with key information relative to their designation status.”

Rather than just replace the proprietary membership database, known as AIMS, the organization decided to enhance it with the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform from Information Builders. WebFOCUS was chosen to support two critical reporting and analysis applications: a member-facing BI environment that allows thousands of novice members to track their progress through the association’s designation/certification path (a process that requires extensive training over the course of several years), and an internal application that helps individual chapters report back to headquarters about their achievements in critical areas such as finance and operations.

Today, WebFOCUS not only helps The Appraisal Institute to boost internal productivity, it also supports a far more important goal – strengthening the organization’s relationship with its members. By delivering vital information quickly, the firm adds value to each membership, resulting in substantial increases to revenue and retention.

Delivering Superior Member Support

The first environment to be built with WebFOCUS was the Associate Status Dashboard, designed to assist the organization with helping more associate members upgrade to designated distinction – a process that involves extensive education and can often take more than seven years to complete. Reports now allow tens of thousands of members to review their requirements and goals, and track their status towards achieving them.

“What’s so crucial about this dashboard is that requirements for designation are rather dynamic,” Atuel said. “The courses needed for designation for someone that became a member several years ago may be very different than those mandated for new members.

“With the new dashboard, each member seeking to achieve designation can keep on top of their own requirements, and see which ones they have fulfilled and which ones are still outstanding. In the past, the only way for them to get that information would be to call our support desk, and one of our staff members would have to research it and get back to them. Now, they can retrieve and review that information themselves, at any time.”

Making it easier for members to reach designation status also increases membership revenue for The Appraisal Institute, since there are fees associated with each required course, and dues for designated memberships are higher than those charged for associate memberships.

WebFOCUS is also used to enhance reporting for the organization’s 91 chapters. Each chapter provides the national headquarters with periodic reports that highlight its ability to meet 10 pre-defined criteria, mostly related to finances, operations, and IRS filings. Collecting, compiling, and formatting the data for those reports – and then submitting them to the main office – was a tedious manual process that often took two full-time staff members at each chapter several months to complete.

But the generation of reports is now fully automated and dramatically accelerated with WebFOCUS. Staff members can quickly and easily create their reports, and upload them to a secure area of the organization’s website.

“Our 91 chapters were established to help us connect with our members at a grassroots level and deliver education locally,” Atuel stated. “These reports help to make sure they are operating according to standards and guidelines. It also saves our headquarters staff a tremendous amount of time, since the chapters won’t have to call us as deadlines approach, to make sure we received the reports, or that they are correct.”

Broadening BI’s Reach

The Appraisal Institute has also purchased WebFOCUS InfoAssist, an intuitive ad hoc reporting solution that empowers non-technical users to easily generate their own reports using drop-down menus to select parameters. The organization will be installing InfoAssist and rolling it out to one user in every department.

Another project in the works involves creating and distributing invoices for membership dues – a time-consuming manual activity. WebFOCUS ReportCaster will be used to generate and distribute those invoices, as well as reminders to those members whose payments are late.

“From an efficiency perspective, the benefits of WebFOCUS are substantial,” Atuel concludes. “We will end up saving a tremendous amount of time – we estimate it will be the equivalent of three full-time employees who will be freed up to focus on servicing our members in other ways.

“But more importantly, superior member relations is at the heart of our success. When we can leverage new ways to communicate with and support our member community, we will continue to thrive.”