The Fabricators & Manufacturers Association (FMA), a nonprofit that supports the metal forming and fabricating industries, faced a common but deeply entrenched problem: complex, manual data workflows that sapped team time and created inconsistencies across departments. Despite having multiple tools in place, the team was bogged down by inefficient processes and siloed systems.
One striking example: preparing an issue close for a publication used to take the FMA team two full weeks of manual effort. After implementing Omeda, that same process now takes less than 30 minutes. This transformation helped unlock hundreds of hours in monthly time savings across departments.
Instead of layering on more technology, FMA chose a different path: simplifying. With a renewed focus on clarity, alignment, and adopting an integrated audience data platform, FMA radically streamlined its operations. Now it saves hundreds of hours per month across its media, membership, and events teams.
FMA’s audience team was managing multiple brands, a large membership database, and several internal pillars, including media, membership, foundation, and events. But their tools weren’t integrated, their workflows were highly manual, and their data processes were both inconsistent and time-consuming.
Key pain points:
“We were doing a ton of manual work—coding data line-by-line, pulling mismatched reports, uploading files between platforms. We would get a bunch of errors because the AMS didn’t know how to read the data… It wouldn’t tell us where we were erroring out. So it would take us 20 efforts just to upload the same files of 20 to 50,000 records. It wasn’t just inefficient—it was exhausting,”
April Hanrahan, Director of Audience Development, FMA
Rather than continuing to struggle with disconnected systems, FMA stepped back and asked: If we were starting from scratch, how would we build this better?
That shift in mindset led to eight core areas of change, from internal alignment and data clarity to adopting a centralized platform for segmentation, reporting, and fulfillment. Omeda, a unified audience data platform, became the cornerstone of this new strategy.
By implementing Omeda and revisiting their internal processes, FMA reimagined how data moved across teams, tools, and workflows.
Key highlights:
FMA’s effort to simplify and streamline its audience operations produced measurable, high-impact outcomes.
| Outcomes | How They Got There |
|---|---|
| Hundreds of hours saved per month across audience operations | Centralized audience data in Omeda to unify segmentation, fulfillment, and reporting across all brands |
| Issue close prep time reduced from two weeks to under 30 minutes, saving more than 100 hours per cycle across four publications | Automated key workflows that previously required manual list-building and coding |
| Faster list imports and audience uploads, including seamless telemarketing file processing via Jira | Integrated critical platforms to eliminate rework and reduce upload errors |
| Streamlined reporting, eliminating the need for Excel cross-referencing and manual validation | Rebuilt reporting frameworks to deliver real-time visibility without relying on disconnected spreadsheets |
| Increased team productivity and reduced stress, allowing staff to focus on strategy, engagement, and innovation | Enabled cross-functional collaboration that ensured sustainable, scalable adoption |
| Improved trust in audience data and better cross-functional visibility | Focused on continuous improvement by starting small and expanding over time |
“We’re not so stressed. We’re not so, like, ‘Oh my gosh, in two weeks we have this issue close. We’ve got to get this done.’ Now, we have so much time where we can focus on cooler things to try to accomplish rather than doing an issue close.”
“This wasn’t about chasing shiny objects. We didn’t need new platforms. We needed smarter processes and a better foundation.”
“We’re trying to work smarter, not harder. It’s incredible the amount of time we’ve saved.”
The team is now building on its momentum and exploring:
“Right now we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do. There’s a lot of opportunity coming up.”
