Episode summary

Nobody sat down and decided to build a twenty year member history. It happened one interaction at a time. Event registrations, session attendance, course completions, committee service, volunteer hours, dues payments, emails, website activity, certifications. Jeff Spring says that pile is one of the most valuable assets a membership organization owns, and that most organizations have a hard time doing anything with it.

Jeff has spent his career in the association space, first as an authorized solution provider in Seattle and then at ASI, where he works out of the ASI Center for Technical Excellence in Austin. He sits between clients, partners, consultants, ASI management and the development teams, which means he sees what customers ask for and what actually gets built. James Harrison, who has spent fifteen years on the partner side working with iMIS, interviews him.

In this episode

• AI expectations are arriving ahead of readiness. Organizations want to implement AI without having settled what problem they are solving. Jeff traces part of that back to Amazon, because everyone wants an Amazon shopping experience without Amazon’s budget for one.
• You have been collecting member data by accident for twenty years. ASI still has customers who have been on iMIS for two decades, and iMIS customer number one is still running. Every interaction left a record. Almost nobody chose to collect any of it.
• Start with a question a person can answer and act on. Which education programs show up in the history of members who renew every year? Then compare that against the people who lapsed, and see what the difference is.
• The exercise Jeff likes best. Pull three years of non-renewals, look at their engagement patterns for the 24 months before they left, and find the similarities.
• Make the staff guess first. One organization defines the question, has the team write down their answers, then goes into the data to see how close they were. Most people who work at a membership organization believe they know their members. It is a useful thing to test.
• Give it an hour and a name. One person, one hour a week, and the hour has a title: look at the data. That is the whole intervention.
• Nobody needs an analyst in their title. Jeff’s read on where reporting is heading. When anyone on staff can ask in plain English and get an answer they can move on, the analysis stops being a quarterly dashboard nobody opens and starts showing up on the member record.
• None of it survives bad data. His line: AI can confidently give you spectacularly wrong answers much faster than any person can. Keep a human in the loop to sanity check, and remember you are on the hook for whatever it produces.
• Change management really is the whole job. Twenty five years in, the thing that has not changed. It has to be intentional and it has to be budgeted, and projects that skip it struggle.
• Small organizations are not simpler. They still run conferences, renewals, committees and training. They just have to do all of it with less.
• How to actually get a feature built. enhancements.imis.com feeds straight into ASI’s product planning tool, and the monthly sprint reviews are open to customers and partners. Bring a use case, not a feature name

Hosts & Guests

James Harrison- Host

Director of Client Success at Bursting Silver and a return guest from Ep 3. Fifteen years working with iMIS on the partner side, starting as a developer building iParts. James runs the interview.

Jeff Spring – Guest

Jeff started out as an authorized solution provider in Seattle and spent years on the partner side before moving to ASI, where he works from the ASI Center for Technical Excellence in Austin, Texas. He sits between clients, partners, consultants, ASI management and the development teams, and is a regular voice on where iMIS EMS is going.

Resources

• enhancements.imis.com — ASI’s enhancement forum. Submissions feed directly into the product planning tool, get reviewed by a product manager, and are matched against the existing backlog: https://enhancements.imis.com
• [email protected] — email the product team to be added to the monthly sprint reviews, or to send any question about the product. The address reaches the whole team.
• Monthly iMIS sprint reviews — open to customers and partners. Developers demo work in progress and comments in the room sometimes turn into changes in the next sprint. Attendance runs 120 to 150 people. Every review is recorded and posted to a sprint review notes page.
• iMIS Fusion — ASI’s data warehouse product, built on Microsoft Fabric, reported through Power BI with Copilot as a plain English reporting engine.
• Ep 3 — Change Management for Non-Profits: The Work Behind the Work — the change management episode James plugs on air: https://www.burstingsilver.com/podcast/ep3

About Bursting Silver

Bursting Silver is a fully remote consultancy specializing in modern CRM, iMIS, and AI solutions for membership organizations across North America. We’re a 3-time Great Place to Work Certified company that helps associations, unions, and regulatory bodies modernize legacy systems, improve data quality, and deliver better experiences for staff, members, and registrants.

Our unique ability is finding the simplicity in the complex.

Learn more about Bursting Silver

The Modern Membership Org Podcast

Full Transcript

Jeff Spring (00:00): Don’t go in search of a system to settle a decision that hasn’t been made. A lot of times people get frustrated with a system, whatever the system is, and it’s mostly a matter of training. It’s a matter of processes.

If you’re gonna go through the whole process of a technology change, or any big technology project, make sure you understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. I think that’s probably the most important thing.

Riley Miller (00:52): What’s going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome back to the Modern Membership Org podcast. My name’s Riley here with Bursting Silver. We did take a little hiatus last week from ASAE’s crazy, but we’re back here with a powerhouse episode now. We have two fonts of knowledge in the association space coming at you. One’s a return guest with James Harrison, who is leading a conversation with a new guest on the call, Jeff Spring with ASI.

He’s been in the association community for more than 25 years. He started cutting his teeth as an authorized solution provider out in Seattle and spent many years on that side until he moved over to work with ASI at their ASI Center for Technical Excellence in Austin, Texas, where he now works between clients, partners, consultants, ASI management, and the development teams. He’s got his hands in many pies and he’s quite vocal in the space for the future of the iMIS EMS system and everything involved in the development there.

So really excited to hand it over to James as he leads the conversation with Jeff and they’ll get into the roots. These guys have been working together, for James as we heard before, 15 years in the industry where he’s worked closely alongside Jeff as well. So very interesting conversation. Excited for you to listen to it. And without further ado, I’ll toss it those guys’ way.

James Harrison (02:10): Excellent. Thanks, Riley. Jeff, really, really good to have you here. I know we did a few roadshows together there earlier this year, Chicago, New York, and we talked about this and now it’s reality. Now you’re here. So that’s great to see you.

Jeff Spring (02:23): It’s great to be here. Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it. It’s always good to hang out with you.

James Harrison (02:28): Thanks. And I do have to add, one of my favorite parts about the roadshow was your AI tools that you use to create the itinerary for your motorcycle trip. So I think it was Gemini. I used to ride a motorcycle, so that’s why I liked it. Biased.

Jeff Spring (02:38): Yeah, we’ll save that for another time, but that was a lot of fun.

James Harrison (02:50): Sounds good. All right, let’s jump in. Definitely have a couple of great questions for you. And first, just back to what Riley was saying there. You’ve had a good number of years, I think seventeen, working first as a partner, and then you started working with ASI, who are the owners of iMIS, for almost that amount of time. So maybe can you share with me a little bit of how that transition happened from partner to vendor?

Jeff Spring (03:14): Yeah, sure. So about sixteen years ago now, seventeen years ago now, I had spent my whole life in Seattle and I kinda felt like I was ready for a change of pace, a change of scenery. And I had always liked Austin. We’d come here for conferences and training and that kind of stuff and hang out, and the sort of vibe between Seattle and Austin is very similar. Culture is fairly similar, weather’s a lot nicer, a little more laid back.

There was a lot happening in Seattle with Amazon coming up and Microsoft and all the technology happening there, which was great, but it really kind of changed the city a lot and kind of made me think that maybe I wanted to try something else. So there was a spot for a product manager open here in Austin with ASI and it felt like a good fit, and so came on down. And back in those days, you had to actually go into the office. So along with the new job came a new home in Austin. So it’s been great ever since. I loved it.

James Harrison (04:14): Excellent. Yeah, definitely nicer weather for sure. I’ve been to Seattle, I’ve been there twice actually, and it rained only the one time, so I got a little bit of nice weather.

Jeff Spring (04:24): There’s really no more beautiful place in the world on a nice, you know, maybe September day. But yeah, I was just ready for a change. So it’s good to mix things up every once in a while.

James Harrison (04:35): Yeah, Austin’s beautiful. Absolutely. So having been on both sides, and now myself, I’m on the partner side, what do you wish that people like myself and partners understood about how ASI’s product decisions get made and how they actually get made in the process?

Jeff Spring (04:53): Yeah. Well, I think coming from the partner community, I still have a lot of friends in the partner community who are working with iMIS all day and we work with you guys all the time. And I think that that really is part of what makes the community so strong, is that if things come up we can just talk about it. It’s not, we’re all on the same side and working to give the customers the best things.

So I feel like we have pretty good communication between us and the partners, and if there’s ever any questions that you have, you’re welcome to come to us. I think for the most part partners understand, or if they don’t, I would like them to understand, that our backlog of work to do is pretty much infinite. Our capacity to do the work is definitely not infinite.

So we really have to make hard decisions about what we’re gonna prioritize and what we’re gonna put time into. iMIS is a really big system, and a lot of partners focus on a single vertical market so that they have customers that need the same things and work with the same things. And so if you’re working with one particular market, it may be obvious that that market needs something. And that may not necessarily be the case across all of iMIS customers.

So we have to take all that input and all that feedback from different partners, different customers in all types of different markets, and kind of boil that down to what are the things that are gonna provide the most value to the most of our customers. We also need to make sure that we’re going in directions that support our own corporate goals. We’ve been moving iMIS to a SaaS product now. That’s going great. We’ve got most of our customers by far now using our iMIS Cloud product. And when we started that move, if we would have just kind of hung back and listened to what everybody wanted, we wouldn’t be nearly as far as we are now.

So we’ve got to kind of balance those out. Where we want to go, what it’s gonna take to get there, and what are the things that we need to give our customers and you guys so that you can all be successful.

James Harrison (07:01): That makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. And I remember going to some of those early Innovations conferences back in the day when I started, and I was only a developer back then, and there were sessions with the developers that were working on the product and you could ask some questions and you got back and forth. And it’s always felt like that. And that’s really, I think, made things as it is with the partner network, as strong as they are, and that connection’s always been there.

Looking back at your years now that you have had sort of a perspective on both sides. So again, I’ve only seen the partner perspective, but you’ve certainly also maybe doubled me almost in years too. I’m at fifteen and my gosh. Wow, I’m impressed.

Jeff Spring (07:41): Thanks for telling everybody I’m old. I appreciate that, James.

James Harrison (07:44): We can edit that out, right? No, but really what I’d love to ask about is, having had that experience and that number of years, what have you seen that are challenges maybe that associations are only dealing with recently and didn’t exist, let’s say ten years ago or more?

Jeff Spring (08:03): Well, the obvious one is AI. Everybody wants to rush and get into AI. And I know you guys are doing great work with AI and some of your products that are helping to leverage that.

I think one of the things that we see and hear from clients, organizations that are looking at AI, is that the AI expectations are sometimes coming before the readiness. So they want to jump in, they want to implement AI. Maybe they don’t even quite know what problems they’re wanting to solve, but we have to have AI because that’s what everybody’s doing. And so obviously that’s a new one.

I think the expectations of a lot of membership organizations are set by some of the dominant market leaders. Amazon, for example. Everybody thinks that they should be able to have an Amazon-like shopping experience. But how much does Amazon spend on their shopping experience? It’s a lot.

So balancing those expectations with what’s realistic to roll out for an organization your size, whatever your size might be, I think that’s something that we’re seeing a lot of.

Generational changes also. I think a lot of younger professionals are less likely to kind of follow established paths, and one of those being joining their industry associations. Younger professionals get their information a lot differently than say you and I do. And they may not be rushing to join your organizations, but that’s also really, really key to making sure that your organization stays healthy and stays vibrant and is able to keep growing.

James Harrison (09:47): Absolutely. I can relate to that a lot. And there was, the only way to get the information fifteen years ago was to go to the conference or the association meetings. You didn’t have the internet like you do today to just quickly go and find it. So you’re absolutely right about that.

Jeff Spring (10:01): Yeah, and the other thing I think that we need to make sure that everybody understands is that there’s still no substitute for sitting down together and just having a conversation and talking. We work with you guys all the time, but when we were hanging out in New York and in Chicago at the roadshows, you can have a different level of exchange and you can kind of just sit back and relax and you don’t have to follow a meeting agenda. You just talk about whatever’s on your mind. And I think that’s really important. That’s hard to get from anywhere other than an organization that’s geared up towards that.

James Harrison (10:35): Absolutely agree. And actually, funny enough, I’m in the office today and this is the one day of the week that I come in. And we’re all used to working from home and, you know what? It really is that connection you have with people when you see them in person. That makes a huge difference.

So those are some of the things that sort of have changed recently. Certainly AI is a huge one, and I liked what you’re saying. Just don’t throw technology at it just because it’s the latest thing. But now, looking back over the same period, what has stayed the same? So for example, with associations, what problems and challenges have they been sort of facing that hasn’t changed over that time period?

Jeff Spring (11:16): Yeah, some of the things that I’ve seen and that I’ve noticed over the many years is that change management really is the whole job. You’ve got to keep your organization moving forward with technology, you’ve got to be rolling out new programs to bring people in to catch interest. And all of those things are changes. And usually it’s just kind of assumed that that will work, that that will happen. And that’s not usually the case. It’s got to be something that’s very intentional. It probably needs to be budgeted for. You really need to plan that into your project. If you don’t have that planned into your project, your project is gonna struggle.

Some of the other things that I’ve seen over the years that haven’t changed are that every organization is unique. They all have unique things. Sometimes they’ve just been doing something because that’s the way it started twenty five years ago when the membership manager was four or five people ago, and they taught the next person who taught the next person who taught the next person. And that just became the way that we do things here. And that’s also something that I think people need to watch out for and be aware of and learn to get by, because the world has moved on a lot in that time.

Another thing that I see is that small organizations aren’t necessarily simpler or easier than larger organizations. They just have to do more with less. The smaller organizations still need to run conferences, they still need to handle their renewals, they still need to run committees, they still need to run training, they still need to do all of those things. So they’ve got to be very, very careful about how they use their resources to do those things.

Jeff Spring (13:03): What are some of the things that you’ve seen over the years?

James Harrison (13:06): Honestly, going back to when I first started with the training that I did with iMIS, it was okay, Keith said, hey, so Keith, my boss at the time, Visual Antidote, said, hey, we’ve got to sign you up. It’s coming up in three weeks for the course on how to build iParts. And it was literally, you’ve got to get that course then or it doesn’t come back for another year.

Jeff Spring (13:27): Yeah, right. It’s not like that anymore, is it?

James Harrison (13:31): No, absolutely not. And it’s funny, what you were saying about how you’ve got these older sort of decisions that were pushed, kept, the tradition almost has been kept within an organization. And I’ve done a lot of implementations. I’ve worked with clients who’ve been on iMIS for 10, 15 plus years. And what’s interesting is you ask them why are you doing something a certain way?

And I don’t know if I got this, somebody sharing a joke with me or a comedian I saw, but I love the adage where you’ve got the story about how to cook a roast beef. And you’ve got the tradition of cutting off both ends, and we just learned how to do that and that’s the right way to do it, some passed down from my grandparents. And then you just find out the pans were much smaller back in the day. That’s it.

Jeff Spring (14:09): Right. Grandma didn’t have a pan big enough for the whole roast beef. But that’s how it happens, and if the ends aren’t cut off, we can’t put it on the table. Yeah, there’s a lot of that.

James Harrison (14:20): Yes, exactly. And once you start to poke and you ask about, okay, well but why, and you get a little bit further, then you realize that it is really just a decision that people have been repeating, and then they look at things again.

And I think the connection part for me definitely is the one part that stays the same. And I think also too, they’ve been collecting a lot of data over the years and there’s more data that they can collect. And I remember you and I chatted a little while back actually about that specifically, and I think what you’d mentioned is that organizations that have been on iMIS and other systems for ten, fifteen, twenty years, they’ve got a lot that they’ve been collecting. And I think that what you’d said is that some of them might not know what to do with all that data. Can you expand on that a little bit, what you meant there?

Jeff Spring (15:05): Yeah, of course. We have customers that have been using iMIS for as long as you and I have been working with iMIS. So we have customers that have been using it for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years plus. In fact, iMIS customer number one is still using iMIS. So they’ve got thirty plus years of data, or of experience with it.

And that data, I think, for most organizations is really one of their most valuable assets. But you’ve got to know what to do with it. So you’ve got years and years of things like event registration, session attendance, course completions, committee service, volunteer hours, dues payments, emails, website activity, certifications. The list goes on and on and on, all those things that you have.

You don’t usually make a conscious decision to collect that. It just happens with each interaction between an organization and the member. And you end up with that really rich history of how the member fits with the organization, how they interact with the organization, how they contribute to or benefit from the mission of that organization.

So yeah, I think that’s probably one of the most important things that an organization can do, is to start making some sense of all of that data. And a lot of organizations have a hard time with that.

James Harrison (16:21): Yeah, is that right? And they don’t know almost what to do with it. But hey, maybe it’s good that they have it, because they have it to kind of look through. I think about, I have family up north who recently cleaned their basement out and it was a bit of an exercise of, I don’t want to let that go, and I didn’t know I had that, I could use that, right? So there’s these little finds. You’ve got that data, you can find these nuggets. Now there’s these tools, of course, that can help you kind of put relations together of that data that you didn’t have before, you didn’t know about before.

And I know at the roadshows you’re presenting, for example, data warehousing, I’m really excited about, and the features that it can, or almost the connections that it can unearth and show and daylight. And if you’ve got 15 years of data, you can do a lot more with that tool than somebody who’s just got a year’s worth of data or so forth. But someone listening right now wanted to get something useful out of the data they already have. Where would you tell them to start, for example?

Jeff Spring (17:15): I think some of the best places to start, like anything else, is to just start. It’s always that first step is always the hardest. And then once you get a little bit of momentum, you figure out what works, what doesn’t, what’s helpful, what’s not, then you can adjust based on those.

But I think a good place to start is to start with some questions that are specific enough that a person can answer those questions, act on that answer, and see some progress, see something happening. So something like, which education programs show up in the history of members who renew every year? For 10 year members, 15 year members, what kinds of things are they doing? And then maybe compare that with people who are not sticking around, people who have dropped, who’ve let their memberships lapse, and see what the difference is there, and see if you can get the people who aren’t doing the things that make a member stick around, see if you can get those weaved in. It’s a real tangible benefit to something that really starts with the data and examining the data.

Kind of a fun exercise to do is to pull three years of non-renewals and then take a look at their engagement patterns for say the 24 months before they left, and see what you can see for similarities.

You mentioned our data warehouse tool, which we’re calling iMIS Fusion. That’s something that I’m really excited about. We’re using Power BI, which has Copilot as a plain English reporting engine tool. So you can ask Power BI for all the data that you have available in your warehouse. So you can get those kind of things once you start collecting that data. So the tools are really coming along and those are really helpful. But I think it’s really important to start with something that’s tangible, something that you can walk away with, with something that’s actionable.

I was talking to somebody a while ago about how they’re kind of rolling into learning about their data. And they made the staff guess about the answers. They’d define a question and say, okay, we’re gonna look at which education programs show up in the history of our renewing members? And the staff would write their answers down and guess, and then they dive into the data to find out how close they were.

Most people who work with a membership organization, they really feel like they know their people because they talk to them every day, they see them at conferences, they feel like they have their fingers on the pulse. So it’s kind of an eye-opener to see where the data backs that up and where the data says something different. How well do you know?

James Harrison (19:42): That’s a fun game to play actually with your staff, to really get them involved too. I like that.

Jeff Spring (19:49): Another thing that I think is helpful is to give it an hour and a name. Just have one person, give them an hour a week, and give it the title of, look at the data.

James Harrison (19:58): Yeah. But I think actually what you’re referring to there, and I like the new name by the way, for data warehousing there, iMIS Fusion. And I think that was referring to, so first of all I’ve seen a demo of it and I loved how you can just write in plain English what data you’re looking for, and it’ll use AI to then turn that into a report and so forth.

And so where do you, in general, just because you’ve worked closely with that, where do you see that heading? So that combination of data that the clients didn’t know was as useful as it could be, and maybe is now with these new tools that are coming along. So what do you think’s kinda coming up and what’s possible soon?

Jeff Spring (20:37): Well, I think there are a couple of levels. First of all, the day you start using those tools, we’re using Microsoft Fabric as the back end, which is a specific data warehouse platform. You put all your data in there, and especially with iMIS and with the activity history that you have, you have a lot of depth to your data and you can really get in that. And using tools like Power BI with the Copilot report writer, this is a place where I think AI is really poised to step in and do a lot of good for us.

It’s good at doing things like examining huge sets of data, finding correlations, and you know, which events lead to renewals, what’s the participation profile of a 10-year member, how can we nudge more people into doing those things that cause people to stick around.

As those tool sets evolve, you don’t necessarily need a specialist anymore. You don’t get better analysis from somebody who has an analyst in their title, because the tools start making those connections for you. When anybody on the staff can ask a question in plain English and get an answer that they can act on, that they can move forward with, that’s going to be really huge.

I think that’s going to really help organizations to focus, people in organizations to focus on where we want to go with this. That also makes it much more accessible. All of that information becomes part of your daily workflow. You don’t have a quarterly dashboard that nobody goes to. You can see right on the member record what the health of this particular person is. Is this person somebody, are they doing the things that will cause them to stick around, or are they starting to drift? Have we not heard from them for a while? Are they not getting involved in the organization?

I know that’s something that you guys have been doing some work with too.

James Harrison (22:22): Absolutely. Yeah, we’re very excited about AI. And I like how you’re mentioning there how it really kind of makes everyone an expert, or more of an expert than they were before. And it’s almost like you had to spend a lot of money or time to get that report up to date. Now you can just quickly do it and you know it’s accurate and you’re just gonna see a lot more information that’s daylighted.

We’re very interested in AI features that we can use to look at members’ data to get segmentation out of that. So you can make a lot of connections you didn’t know you had, and even personalizing those connections and outreaches and communication to them.

Jeff Spring (22:56): Yeah, the work that you guys are doing there is great. One final word on this, I think it’s worth mentioning, that none of this can fix bad data. So AI can confidently give you spectacularly wrong answers much faster than any person can, if the data’s inconsistent or the data’s a mess.

So it’s really important to keep the humans involved there to review what the AI says, give it a little fact check, a little sanity check. Dive in a little bit deeper if something looks kind of off. I know just in my own daily AI use, I get some horribly wrong answers, when I say, no, that doesn’t sound right. Yes, Jeff, you’re right, thanks for pointing that out. And then it goes on. But somebody’s gotta check that stuff.

James Harrison (23:33): I agree. And actually, in our workplace here we’ve made it so we’re all very active in AI, but we made it very clear and important that anything that it produces, that’s what you’ve written or what you said. So you have to back it up and double check it.

Jeff Spring (23:51): You’re on the hook for it.

James Harrison (23:54): And actually I find that these tools, it’s an exciting time, because you have the ability to, and I’ve really been keeping an eye on the news and so forth lately, and notice that even the way that it’s been talked about, it’s moving away from AI is going to replace people, to now AI is going to enhance people. So every staff member you have becomes a superhero and can do a lot more, essentially.

And that means also too, maybe they were tied down in manual things or processes that were onerous. Now they can reach out to members more and connect with members more. And it just gives them more time and ability. And we found that with our company as well. We’ve really implemented AI across the company now, and actually still hired new staff, new grads recently. And so that’s exciting. And I think that’s the same I’ve seen with other associations and our clients. And that’s the right direction, I think, with AI. It’s an exciting time that we’re in right now.

Jeff Spring (24:44): Yeah. AI can do a lot of analysis. It can do a lot of really smart things, but one of the most important things that associations do is connect people, and AI doesn’t do that well. So a conversation like this, or a beer after the conference, is infinitely more valuable, and that’s a better place for people to be spending their time.

James Harrison (25:05): Agree with you on that. Absolutely. More in person time, or even in a meeting like this rather than emails, texting. And I think ultimately that connection, all of our clients really, they’re trying to connect all their members. And if anyone else wants to come in the office on Wednesdays, okay, that’s our day, guys.

A couple of things to kind of circle back. I really do like having the connection that we have with ASI and iMIS, and having sort of a little bit of an insight into how things work in the background, and we share a lot of information. But I’d love to just dive a little bit further into that, because there’s still a little bit under the hood that I don’t know about and I’m sure some of the listeners are going to be curious about.

And so for example, maybe they do want to give some feedback and they do have some maybe new features that they want to tell you about. Where does that go, and then what happens to it in the background after you receive that feedback?

Jeff Spring (25:57): Yeah, this is, I’d love to talk about that. We have at enhancements.imis.com, enhancements.imis.com, we have an enhancement forum, and that feeds directly into our product planning tool. So when somebody submits an idea there, one of the product management team goes through and reviews those, matches it up with the item if there’s already something in the backlog for it, makes notes of whatever the comments are so that we can build a history, we can build the insights of what we’re hearing from our customers or our partners about a particular feature and why it’s valuable.

It’s really helpful for us if we can get use cases for these things. Don’t just say I want Google Wallet. Tell me why. Tell me what, are you hearing from your customers that they’d be more likely to check out, that that’s a friction point that causes them to bail out of a transaction? That kind of stuff. We really want to hear why things are important. That helps us a lot. And we do review all that feedback and we use it when we’re doing our planning for future development work.

James Harrison (27:05): That’s excellent. And that makes a lot of sense, that you need that context, and not just they’re just asking for a shiny new thing. No, there’s really actually a problem that it’s solving and that’s why they’re requesting that. I like that a lot.

Jeff Spring (27:16): Right. And on the flip side of that, if people are interested, we have monthly sprint reviews and we love to have customers and partners involved in those too. The developers are showing whatever it is that they’ve been working on. So it’s work that’s still oftentimes in progress and you’re welcome to make comments, or just watch and kind of get an idea for what’s gonna be in your next iMIS upgrade.

So if you’re interested in that, you can send an email to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to add you to that list. That email goes to the whole product team. So you can always send any questions to [email protected] and we’ll get back to those.

James Harrison (27:55): That’s excellent. And I’ve been on a number of those. I’ve joined those sprints and actually I do recommend, if anyone can join them, just to see what’s going on behind. You get a preview. But one thing I did notice is that there’s a number of comments that will happen throughout, and that feedback is actually taken in and you’ll see it in a future sprint. We did actually make that change based on that feedback.

Jeff Spring (28:15): Yeah, it’s not too uncommon, for especially if it’s just a little tweak here or there, for the developer to go right back to their desk and just do it. Because we really appreciate that feedback and we’re making the product for the people that are gonna use it. We’re not making it for ourselves. So we wanna do what we can to make sure that we deliver something that’s gonna be a good fit.

James Harrison (28:36): And having that feedback. And actually I’ve noticed that the numbers of attendees have really grown in the last couple of years. When I’ve jumped in on the odd ones, wow, hold on, there’s a lot of people here. And that’s great to see.

Jeff Spring (28:47): Yeah. I think we have a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty people at most of them.

James Harrison (28:54): That’s a lot. And they do get to see kind of what’s coming down the pipe too. So they’re exciting that way as well. And I think they’re also posted up on the website too. Is that right? The past sprints, can they see them?

Jeff Spring (29:05): Yeah, there is. We have a sprint review notes page that has, we record each review and then post it up there for people in different time zones or people who just can’t make one. So yeah, we can maybe get the URL out for that.

James Harrison (29:21): That’s great. Absolutely. We can share that after.

Well, that’s great. And so let’s go back to somebody who’s trying to make a decision. Maybe they’re attending these sprint reviews, maybe they’re involved in the community. But really, if you’re kind of to say okay, one thing or one piece of advice that you give any association leader that’s got a big technology decision that they’ve got to make in front of them, maybe it’s changing platforms or maybe it’s just a big change to their existing platform. What’s one piece of advice you give that person?

Jeff Spring (29:49): Only one? Top five. All right. I’ll go for top five.

James Harrison (29:50): You can give your top five, actually. I’m good with that.

Jeff Spring (29:55): First of all, don’t go in search of a system to settle a decision that hasn’t been made. A lot of times people get frustrated with a system, whatever the system is, and it’s mostly a matter of training, it’s a matter of processes. The people don’t necessarily know how to use the system. They’re trying to do something in a way that the system isn’t designed to do it.

If you’re gonna go through the whole process of a technology change, or any big technology project, make sure you understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. I think that’s probably the most important thing.

Another thing that I think, if you’re looking especially for a technology change, for a platform change, everybody always wants to talk to references of somebody who just went live. How was your experience? And you can get some good information out of that. But I think it’s also important, maybe more important, to talk to references who have been live for a couple of years. So they’ve had time to settle, they’ve had time for the system to settle into just their daily processes. I think that also can be invaluable.

Right after an implementation, everybody’s gonna be a little bit on edge. Everybody’s trying to find their way around and a little bit uncomfortable. Two years in, they’ve had time to discover things with the system. They’ve had time to figure out how something can improve a process and make their work easier. So I think that’s important too.

At the end of the day, also, any big technology project is really about people. The system doesn’t matter if the people aren’t bought into it, if they’re not part of the process, or they don’t understand the goals of the changes.

So it’s important to make sure that you have the people involved and your people understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re making the changes, why you’re bringing in a new initiative, why you’re replacing software, why you’re implementing software, any of those kind of things. No one ever regrets going slower on the people side, and everyone regrets going faster on the technology side, right? You’ve gotta balance those things out. You’ve got to give the people time to catch up and learn and buy in and be part of that process.

James Harrison (32:03): Absolutely, I’m with you 100% on that. And that’s a great plug for me to talk about my podcast that I did a few weeks back on change management. So if you’re looking for another episode to watch, definitely check that one out.

And no, honestly, I think change management is key and it’s actually something that gets ignored. And I’m really glad you brought that up. And that was a great way to phrase it there. Don’t rush into to one and not the other. And it’s easy to rush into the new technology for sure.

Jeff, I’ve really enjoyed our chat today. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else that you wanted to share before you go and feed your friend there in the background? I heard him. Anything else you want to highlight before we jump off?

Jeff Spring (32:41): I don’t know. Shoot, I should have some words of wisdom and I think I ran out.

James Harrison (32:46): You’ve already shared a lot, yes.

Jeff Spring (32:50): This has been great. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s always great to talk about the things that we’re seeing, the trends that we’ve seen come and go over the years, and where we are now and where we’re going.

I think it all boils down to your people. Your people are your most valuable. Your people and your data are your most valuable assets for two very different reasons. You’ve gotta make sure that the people are on board with where you’re going, and that’ll really go a long way towards getting you where you wanna be.

James Harrison (33:21): Absolutely, absolutely agree. It always comes down to the people. A hundred percent.

And I love your poster in the background, by the way. I have to note that. And I do know what that device is. It used to hold music. It’s a cassette tape. We’ll have that as a quiz at the end. Thanks again, Jeff. Hey, I really enjoyed it. Take care. Talk to you soon.

Jeff Spring (33:34): There you go. Perfect. All right. Thanks, James. It’s been great.

Riley Miller (33:39): All right, that is a wrap. You’re listening to the Modern Membership Org podcast. My name’s Riley, your secondary host for today’s episode. Big thanks to Jeff and James for jumping on and running with that show. Plenty of insights there. If you want to catch any of those details, those are in the show notes, including the links that Jeff was referencing there today.

If you enjoyed this podcast and want to listen to more, we come out every Tuesday, and you can subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or even on YouTube. All of those again available in our show notes. And if you want to go above and beyond, give us a little rating while you’re at it. Amazing. It just helps us reach more industry leaders and partners on a lot of the topics that we’re talking about today.

If you have suggestions for future podcast episodes, feel free to reach out. Info at burstingsilver.com. And I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks.