Segmenting a venue’s members from its own records

The question

The venue sells membership to individuals and to companies, and its account managers, membership services, sales, operations and marketing teams all serve those members.

The brief set one condition above the rest: every member had to be placed in a segment, accurately, from data the venue already held, so any team could look a member up.

Our approach

We worked the problem from both directions, starting with what members need. A member survey came first, and its answers alone grouped members by their needs and motivations.

Then we started again from the venue’s side, with its data team, using only fields held for every member, such as membership type, event attendance and use of the venue’s services. We compared several ways of rebuilding the segments from those fields, and judged each by how closely it reproduced the needs-based segments.

We kept the tool simple on purpose, for account managers, operations staff and sales executives who would need to use it quickly. Until a new member’s activity is on record, a short question lets them place themselves.

What the team came away with

The venue had a needs-based segmentation, a tool that places every member from its own data, and a report for the wider business.

A closing workshop took the segments into the teams that serve members, and the work was built so senior management could refer to the data when making business decisions.