Feature Focus

Policymaking: Why Trade Associations Need Real-Time Public Sentiment Data

No matter your organization, the right data can make the difference between good and bad decisions. For trade associations, these decisions can have a major impact on membership, organizational growth, and overall impact. To make the most of your insights, it’s critical to ensure that collecting and learning from sentiment data is one of your trade association’s strategic research priorities. To unpack this, let’s start by defining our terms. What is a trade association? A trade association is an organization designed to support corporate members or their targeted communities drawn from profit or non-profit entities in a specific industry, economic category, profession, or market segment. The US economy reflects 42,756 trade/professional associations with over 125,132 members representing hard assets of $61 billion. On average, membership fee revenues per trade association is nearly $900,000 annually. The typical trade association attracts and engages members and active customer groups who are voluntarily willing and ready to fund/support the trade association’s activities. This covers: Lobbying their interests to regulators and government bodies. Onboarding recruits and bolstering employee skills with workshops, conferences, and education. Networking stakeholders with entities that can accelerate participants’ standing in the socio-economy. Publishing third-party research and data references to create awareness of new opportunities. Promoting brands and value propositions in directories, SM channels, and other industry references. Conducting surveys and online polling to generate data accumulation in hotspot areas. Here’s a more detailed breakdown: What is sentiment data? It refers to cognitive signals and emotionally driven feelings/motivations expressed in text, video, […]