How to build a connected digital experience for your members

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It’s always been about the users. But it’s now harder than ever to keep them in sight.

In the 22 years Cantarus has been in business, we’ve seen one thing common in our most successful clients: They understand the needs of their members and users, and they richly fulfil those needs. 

That is a deceptively simple statement. It’s one thing knowing you need to do this, and an increasingly difficult task to achieve it. The channels through which audiences interact, the teams they interact with and the tech on both sides of the equation are jumbled, siloed and disconnected. It’s no surprise the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing – it’s almost inevitable.

The job of meeting members and clients on their terms, understanding what they need (as well as what they want) and providing it are getting more and more complicated, fragmented and costly. More often than not, the systems and techniques set up for one wave of innovation perch perilously on top of previous solutions, like a Jenga tower of technology, with the latest hot thing piled on top of yesterday’s news.

New technology has always had this effect; the typewriter and the telephone are good examples. But the pace and complexity of change has gathered pace. Many technologies, like the humble phone, are still entirely relevant and heavily used. But existing, well-trodden paths to information and interaction have been joined by websites, internet forums, video, e-publication, social media, artificial intelligence and more – all growing and changing at record pace. That makes it hard to keep track of conversations and content across platforms, and even harder to make and maintain connections between organisations and the people they serve.

From the perspective of a user, this means a more disjointed experience. Your post on the organisation’s forum isn’t linked to that call you made, the conversation you had at the conference or the article you read in the eBook version of the monthly journal. You might have already watched the seminar you’re being invited to as a video months before.

It’s no surprise that 48% of organisations surveyed in the iMIS 2025 Membership Performance Benchmarking Report noted stagnating or declining member engagement. As channels have fragmented, so has interaction with organisations and fellow members. It’s reflected in the numbers: 47% of organisations in the same report linked non-renewal of membership to a lack of engagement. And when you don’t get the benefit of interacting with your membership organisation or fellow members, you don’t see the value – again, 43% of non-renewals are tied to a lack of perceived value.

At the other end of things – within these member organisations – the tech is both increasingly complex and increasingly challenged. It’s not surprising they don’t and can’t keep up with the constant proliferation of channels, technologies and user needs.

Frankly: it’s a mess, one we and our clients have wrestled with for decades. Those that have come out on top in this fight have done so because they expended great effort – and often substantial budget – on connecting all of these interactions together. As any organisation grows, information inevitably becomes siloed – even more so when rapid technological and media change is the norm. Returning from this state to one where there’s an interoperable ecosystem is tricky but achievable. One hand knows what the other is doing, automation transforms productivity, and member experiences offer real meaning and value. That brand new digital experience is further reinforced with face-to-face meetings, live events and interaction on social media.

We’ve always worked to solve this problem with our clients, and more often than not, it’s been in partnership with a very specific internal team and external supplier working on one area: Customer Relationship Management (CRM). When digital experiences synchronise with this estate, everything meshes perfectly, and the outcomes are invariably excellent. This approach ensures information and communications flow frictionlessly – from organisation to audience, and, just as importantly, between the silos that become almost inevitable when any organisation reaches a certain size. If the whole ecosystem doesn’t work together in this way, it’s hard to make progress, and that turns into poor audience engagement and falling membership satisfaction.

Put simply: Good CRM is vital to good digital experiences that – like the ones we provide for our clients – are frictionless and offer personalised value to the user. CRM data breaks down silos, connects different experiences and improves engagement. 

That brings us to the acquisition we made on the 14th April: FlexRM. We’ve been very happy to partner with Steven, Dean and the team at FlexRM for a while now, and have been deeply impressed by the membership management product they’ve built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. They see the silo challenge the same way we do and also happen to be wonderful people to work with. In addition to their core product, the FlexRM team also offers exactly the customised and integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 services many of our clients look for. 

Of course, our acquisition doesn’t mean we’ll stop working with our other key CRM partners. We’ll continue to work with incumbent suppliers and partner where another solution offers the best fit for the client. But it does mean that, if your organisation needs cutting-edge digital experiences and CRM combined together from the beginning – or richly integrated later – you now have a new way to do that. 

We’re doing this for the long term, by the way. Both Cantarus and FlexRM are run by their founders, and growth is funded from income, not outside investment. The only pressure on us is that which we set ourselves over two decades ago: to grow our business by doing the best we can for our clients.