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In this episode of 5 Minutes with Andy, Virtual, Inc. CEO Andy Freed explores how data is reshaping organizational strategy—and how leaders can use it to improve decision-making, drive engagement, and uncover opportunities they might otherwise miss.

Andy shares:

• Why data is now just as essential to organizational success as people, process, and technology.
• How everyday data points—like member logins and renewal delays—can reveal deeper issues (and how to act on them).
• Why AI is making it easier than ever to turn raw data into real insight.

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Hello and welcome to Five Minutes with Andy. My name is Andy Freed. I'm the CEO of Virtual, Incorporated. For the last 25 years, we've been helping membership organizations that are forming, growing and changing as they seek to make their mark on the world. A few years ago, I saw a movie called Moneyball. Now, I love that movie. And not just because I think I look just like Brad Pitt, right?

But I love that movie because more than anything, that movie talked about and showed the power of data. And the whole premise of Moneyball was that the Oakland A's were able to put together a winning ball club by thinking about data in a way that nobody else was. Thinking about players in a different way, thinking about how they would understand how players perform different ways, and ultimately what they were trying to get to.

And the Moneyball way was something which was revolutionary for baseball at the time. But really, that idea of the power of data is something that every organization should be thinking about today. For years we've talked about in technology, kind of the big trinity of technology being people, process and technology.

Well, more and more, it's now people, process, technology and data because more data is available to us than ever has been before. Whether it's the tracking data that's available to you because of people coming to your website, whether it's the data that you're able to analyze because you understand what employees are doing. Any kind of data that's now available to you is data that you should be using for strategic purpose.

Let me give you a few examples. Years ago, when I was running membership for an organization, a piece of data that I always wanted was to understand, are members engaged or not? I ran a report about this, but the report was a little bit cumbersome to do of just understanding what members haven't been to our website, because they haven't logged on in the last three months, they haven't called the headquarters for anything, and they haven't been to one of our educational programs in the last three months. That told me that they were disengaged, and I wanted to pick up the phone and call them and just see what was going on. More often than not, when I made that call, I discovered that something was going on, I could fix it, and I could save the membership.

Understanding that was key for our member retention and key for our strategy. When I was doing that work years ago, some of it required some manual work. Now that's the kind of data you can get from AI every day. And that's the kind of data that should be very, very easy for you to understand who's engaged, who's not.

Other data? Sometimes members are telling you something by how fast they renew. People have different habits. There are some organizations that renew right away when they get the invoice. Others take their time. Well, why wait until an invoice is old if you know that somebody who usually responds right away when they get something is taking a few days? Maybe something's up, maybe they're upset. Maybe they just didn't get it. But that kind of data is the kind of data you can use to drive decisions and understand how you can improve retention and your organization and understand where you're trying to go.

The ability to analyze all of this. It used to take lots of people. It used to take a lot of things and kind of a lot of manual intervention. More and more that can be done by AI.

I'll give you one last example that I remember. Another thing that happens from time to time from organizations is you're trying to influence something in public policy. You're thinking about who were the right people to go to a meeting. Well, imagine if instead of guessing and trying to think about who knows who, you really had data on, who knows who. You have Facebook that tells you that. You've got contribution databases that tell you who's contributed to them.

The trick is all of those databases are separate. Again, AI is your friend in making all of these things come together. And now you're not just guessing. You're using data to make sure that your organization is making better decisions and having better strategy.

So it turns out, data is not just for Brad Pitt when he's trying to build a better ball club.

Data is for every organization that's looking to become a champion and looking at if they can get better every day.

Thanks for spending five minutes with me today to learn about this. Hope that you've enjoyed it. If you have, make sure you click like and subscribe and keep joining us for Five Minutes with Andy. Thanks so much.