Making the case to your board: what a connected platform is worth to a chamber

If you’ve taken a technology proposal to your board, you’ll know the conversation moves quickly from what the system does to what the chamber gets back for the money. A new chamber of commerce CRM and membership platform is one of the bigger investments most chambers make, so it’s the right question to ask. Corin Crane, Chief Executive of Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber Group, described the scrutiny his team faced before choosing ReadyMembership this year:

The useful thing for anyone building a similar case is that the return tends to show up in places a board already understands. Here’s where two chambers that have made the move have seen it, and how to put your own numbers against each one.

Retention, priced in pounds

Staffordshire Chambers of Commerce worked out what each point of retention was worth before it set a target, which turned a soft goal into a figure the board could hold the team to. Sixteen months after going live on ReadyMembership, retention has risen from 82% to 87% and membership has grown from 1,000 to 1,100 businesses. Each percentage point is worth about £40,000 a year to the chamber.

Cash in the bank sooner

When invoices are raised and chased by hand, money comes in slowly and someone on the team spends a good part of their week following it up. Automating invoicing and payments through Stripe, GoCardless and Xero has brings down this time significantly. For a board, that’s an improvement to cash flow that doesn’t depend on winning a single new member, which makes it one of the easier lines in a business case to defend.

Staff time back for selling and service

Staffordshire found its time savings somewhere less obvious. Once engagement scoring gave the team around 20 indicators to work from instead of three, it became clear that only around 10% of members were genuinely inactive, rather than the half the team had assumed. Focusing outreach on those members, instead of calling everyone at renewal, freed around 20% of the membership team’s time. In both cases the value to the board isn’t the hours themselves but what the team does with them: more time spent talking to members and selling the chamber’s commercial products.

Building your own chamber of commerce CRM business case

The strongest business cases use the chamber’s own numbers rather than a supplier’s, so it’s worth gathering a baseline before you start talking to anyone:

• Your current retention rate, and what one percentage point is worth in membership income
• Average debtor days, and how much staff time goes on raising and chasing invoices
• Roughly how many hours a week the team spends on manual bookings, data entry and list management
• The number of separate systems you pay for, and what they cost each year
• Commercial products, such as training or events, that you could sell more of with better-targeted marketing

Every chamber is a different shape and size, and the case for a team of ten will look different from the case for a team of two hundred. Most of these figures already sit somewhere in your finance or membership reports. Pulling them together early also gives you something to measure against a year after launch.