ACHP Improved Efficiency and Member Engagement with Community

The Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) leverages Higher Logic Thrive to drive internal efficiencies, save staff time, and create a user-friendly member experience. Their community drastically improved one of their biggest member benefits – member queries – and opened additional opportunities to reduce staff burden. And their upgrade to Higher Logic Thrive Platform made their member experience even better, improving navigation and increasing community activity, posts, and replies. The new community has drawn a 27% increase in first-time logins.

Like many nonprofits, the Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) has a big mission and a relatively small staff. Their membership department of about 1.5 full-time employees is responsible for managing 26 member companies, each with their own personalized member hubs, as well as most of their member communications. So, one of their main goals in seeking out a member experience platform was to improve efficiency and save staff time.

“My initial selling point for having a Higher Logic community was how it could help us streamline one of the big services that we provide to our members, which is our member queries,” said Toni Fanelli, ACHP’s Associate Director of Operations and Governance. “Historically a member could email us asking us to query the membership on a certain topic, then we had to package and blast that request to the rest of our members and track responses from 25+ different member organizations to create and publish a report on that query topic. Now, with Higher Logic Thrive, member queries take place in a discussion forum and it’s a 24/7 piece. Members can visit the community at their leisure and ask questions and their colleagues can respond. That was our initial goal with the community, and it’s opened up a ton of other opportunities from there.”

In addition to saving staff time, ACHP’s community, ACHP Connect, drives deeper connections between their members (and thus, with the organization). In upgrading their community to Higher Logic Thrive Platform, ACHP saw an opportunity to keep improving a powerful member benefit.

“One of the biggest reasons we upgraded to Higher Logic Thrive was usability for our members, and it brought quite a level of that. The new design and features reduced the number of clicks for our members, making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for,” said Molly Edelman Hauber, ACHP’s Manager of Membership. “The member profile is no longer buried under several clicks – it’s a box right on the homepage. The profile not only updates their profile information, but their subscriptions to ACHP newsletters.”

“I’m also a big fan of the quicklinks widget, which helps us highlight specific resources and links for our members on the homepage. Using security groups, we can even set up personalized quicklinks for different member subgroups, which I’m really excited about. Quicklinks makes it really easy for members to find things, and they’re really easy for me to update.”

The ability to personalize is a key component for ACHP. They run several different communities through Higher Logic Thrive, including an internal staff community, customized member-hubs for each of their member companies, and a new “Corporate Alliance Program (CAP) Corner” for their sponsors and vendors. They use Higher Logic Thrive to set up different landing pages for each of those groups.

Going forward, ACHP plans to keep exploring ways to use Higher Logic Thrive to save time and maximize impact, including trying out new ways to engage sponsors and vendors on the community to bring in more non-dues revenue.

The Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) is the only national organization promoting the unique, payer-provider aligned model in health care. ACHP’s nonprofit, community-based member health companies collaborate with their provider partners to deliver higher-quality coverage and care to tens of millions of Americans. ACHP also shares the evidence-based reforms and case studies developed by member health companies with policymakers, industry influencers and health journalists to help improve the future of the American health care system. They work with 26 member companies from across the country and provide each with a unique member-hub community personalized for their specific needs.