Here are five factors to focus on to get the most out of your membership data. Also: How one news organization tackled its digital bugs and upgrades with a hackathon.

Most membership-based organisations have a treasure trove of data at their fingertips. But figuring out which data points to analyze to gain the most helpful insights about your members can be tricky.

According to the MemberSuite blog, analyzing these five trends delivers the most impactful insights: demographic data, renewal trends, recruitment information, event data, and the average length of membership.

Demographic data can tell you all sorts of information, including the location of your members and which generation they belong to. “This information can help your team determine a variety of things from the best place to host an event to the best way to communicate with your members,” writes Graciella Jason-Daubon.

You can probably spout your renewal rate off the top of your head. But do you know the similarities among your renewing members, like which channels they renew through or if they’re in similar programs? “If your association is able to pinpoint commonalities between folks that choose to renew, you can continue and improve those practices,” says Jason-Daubon.

The Dallas Morning News had a problem: Over the years, its website built up a cache of bugs to resolve and upgrades to address. It needed new advertising units, author pages, and navigation, among other fixes.

Instead of addressing each problem one by one over months, the News attacked all of these problems in one fell swoop by holding a two-week hackathon, according to Poynter. Internal and external developers holed up in meeting rooms around the office to fix each issue in a sustained sprint.

Does your organisation’s website have a host of issues your team has been meaning to address? A hackathon may be something you should consider.

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now.