Main Responsibilities of a Membership Experience Manager at University of Michigan

That's a great question. My main responsibility is Communications. I work in a marketing and Communications Department, handling both internal and external communications.

This falls into three categories. First are internal communications for our staff. We are a center at the University of Michigan with about 120 staff in various job types. I need to communicate with technical people, data people, and the general university population, including students.

We are also in many ways a tech company. I need to speak the language of the tech world, using terms like "agile" and "minimum viable products." I also talk to the data team about things like R and data.

Then we have our midpoint communications. We work with about 800 member institutions, whose people are considered volunteers for a nonprofit. I manage communications for a team of about 1500 people. These are two-way communications.

Finally, we have our completely external audience. Anyone in the world looking for data for a project should know that ICPSR is a resource for them. ICPSR is the name of our archive where the data is housed.

Beyond that, I do a lot of membership management. This is similar to sales and a revenue operations role. We manage about four million dollars in membership a year. My job is to ensure our members are receiving the value they signed up for and excellent customer service. I also help new members with onboarding to ensure they get access to everything they need.

I also do a lot of interdepartmental work. My role interfaces with different parts of the university, so I work directly with Development, which is the same as fundraising. I also collaborate closely with academic departments. My goal is to ensure we have a workable communication plan and that everyone meets their goals for each academic year.

Finally, I have a lot of external work. For example, I lead our director's advisory committee on community and diversity, called D&I. This is an interdepartmental group focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion across our center. We ensure that hundreds of people working for the Institute for Social Research are focused on DEI efforts.

I also work with external audiences. For instance, we do "Love Data Week," an international celebration of data with a reach of about five million people. It's a significant undertaking, and I ensure it runs smoothly, so no one knows it was managed by just a few people behind the scenes. These are just a few of my main responsibilities.