CASE STUDY:
American Association for Justice
The American Association for Justice provides trial attorneys with information and professional support.
The mission of the American Association for Justice is to promote a fair and effective justice system—and to support the work of attorneys in their efforts to ensure that any person who is injured by the misconduct or negligence of others can obtain justice in America’s courtrooms.
The Problem
AAJ has tens of thousands of members across 12 different member types, and they needed to find a way to aggregate and use their vast amount of member data to increase the value of their services and products. They needed a way to step back and see the big picture of the whole of their organization in order to grow their membership and increase revenue.
The Solution
Using Nucleus, AAJ identified baseline data for benchmarking and set goals to increase membership and revenue generation.
AAJ tracked growth over time in both categories to guide their business decisions.
For revenue generation, AAJ reviewed program and product sales data to reveal member behavior clusters. They challenged existing assumptions about new member vs. more tenured member behavior and let data analytics provide insights into how they might bundle products and services in new ways.
Pathway to success
Lacy Packard, MPM – Director, Information Technology at AAJ, provides an overview of the data analytics challenge and solution:
AAJ was launching a new website and had introduced a range of new programs within the last five years, so new benchmarks and goals needed to be identified and set.
AAJ focused on how and why different member groups were growing or shrinking. The hypothesis was that the regional manager program was having a positive effect on growing these different member groups. Nucleus allowed AAJ to see all of the data in one place and then effortlessly overlay different demographics and behaviors, effectively browsing for insights. Revenue streams and trends were examined by any and all member demographics in the search for the unexpected and segmented down to specific activities to discern preferences. New marketing and email programs were initiated, and the results of these are easily monitored. With Nucleus, it’s been easy to identify and expand those programs that are proving to drive membership growth.
Perhaps the most important step in AAJ’s process was challenging assumptions about member behavior. One example of a long-held assumption related to member tenure was that first-year members were not buying certain packages, such as their “Membership and Litigation” package.
When AAJ reviewed the data, it revealed that while the longest-tenured members did indeed buy this package most often, first-year members were tied for second place. AAJ also found that 20% of first-year members and first-time event attendees were not receiving email marketing from the association, so email was clearly not the only thing bringing people in.
AAJ used this data to increase their email marketing towards those particular groups as well as change their marketing methods to increase their reach.
Life with Nucleus
Immediate impact: the insights generated using Nucleus led to AAJ exceeding their membership goals in the first 2 quarters after launch (actual screenshot at right). In addition, they found that Nucleus dashboards saved staff from spending time running reports, freeing them to focus fully on ongoing marketing and membership improvements – the fun part of their job!
“AAJ found new revenue channels when we stepped back and let the data lead.”
– Lacy Packard, Director of Information Technology
