Episode summary

Almost every membership organization is smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside. Michele Morgan has watched that up close for three decades, first from inside a trade association, then from the seat she has held for 23 years running the independent user group for everyone else in the same position.

Michele is Executive Director of the iMIS Users Group. She got there the long way. Early 90s, working at the National Kitchen and Bath Association, she sat on the team that picked iMIS out of three packages on the table. She went to a user conference, liked what she found, and volunteered because the organization looked like it could use the help. A few years later she left an 11 year job and became one of the first employees of what was then NiUG International. Back in 1996 it had 50 to 75 company members. It now has more than 600.

The through line in this conversation is what a very small team can do when it stops trying to do everything itself. Michele is direct about her own operation. Two whole people, and volunteers who she says are everything. She is equally direct about the misconception that costs iUG the most, which is that people assume it is part of ASI. It is not. That separation is the product. Users say things to iUG that they will not say to the company that builds the software, and iUG carries those things back.

She closes on Emergence, the merged iUG annual conference and ASI iNNOVATIONS event being hosted in Arlington in early November, and on why she thinks in-person events matter now more than ever. It’s when people connect and share ideas that gives us opportunities to innovate in our own workspaces and organizations the most.

In this episode

• The feedback loop is real and it has moved things. iUG has taken user frustration back to ASI for years. Michele credits that back and forth for the sprint reviews, demos, and product conversations that exist now.
• “Our staff may only be two whole people.” Said in passing, in the middle of a point about how understaffed associations are generally. It is the most quietly startling line in the episode, and everything else about how iUG runs follows from it.
• Volunteers are the operating model, not a nice-to-have. Michele’s read on why solution providers and consultants give their time: if a user gets the most out of the product, they stay, and the volunteer’s business is better for it. Aligned incentives rather than pure goodwill.
• iUG is not solely a technology organization. Michele wants this on the record. The conference programs for events people, membership people, and customer service, not only for the person who administers the database. Anybody touching that data has something to learn there.
• The closing argument for showing up in person is about innovation, not networking. Michele’s fear is not that people miss a conference. It is that the idea they would have overheard never gets thought at all.

Hosts & Guests

Riley Miller – Host

Host of The Modern Membership Org and part of the Client Success team at Bursting Silver, where he helps associations, unions, and regulatory bodies modernize the systems behind their missions. Riley runs the interview on this one.

Michele Morgan, DES,CMP – Guest

Michele Morgan is Executive Director of the iMIS Users Group, the independent association supporting and educating the global iMIS community. She has spent more than 30 years in the association world and more than 22 of them with iUG, first as a volunteer and now leading its education, membership, events, and partnerships. She was introduced to iMIS in the mid-1990s at the National Kitchen and Bath Association, where she was part of the team that selected it.

Resources

• Emergence 2026 — the merged iUG annual conference and ASI iNNOVATIONS event, Arlington, early November: 
• Early early bird promo code: emergence26eeb
• iMIS Users Group
• iUG Community Impact Award — formerly the John Howarth Memorial Award, renamed to recognize more than one person. The first Community Impact Award will be presented at Emergence 2026.
• iMind — iUG’s iMIS help bot, which Michele says BSI helped develop. Confirm the exact styling of the name before this goes on the page.
• Free monthly member webinars and the Higher Logic community — both included in iUG membership at no extra charge.
• Michele directly — reach her through LinkedIn or by email to the organization. Add her preferred address once she confirms it.
• Come on the show — [email protected], or Riley directly at [email protected]

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

Michele Morgan (00:00): There is a lot of power in getting together with like bodies. Every organization is different. Every organization underutilizes their AMS or EMS. So just keep in mind that you’re going to learn so much, but it’s going to be something that repopulates in your brain for use in a future challenge or task within the organization.

And it’s not just surrounding iMIS. It could be association management-wide conversations that happen at these events.

Riley Miller (01:05): What’s going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome back to another episode of The Modern Membership Org podcast. Today we are diving into the wonderful world of communities.

Most membership organizations are all too familiar with running on a small team, smaller than their members could ever guess. A few people carrying an association or a union or a regulatory body that answers to thousands of members.

My guest today runs the room where those people compare notes, talk about ways to help service their members more effectively in their own communities and organizations, and runs one of the leanest teams of the lot. Michele Morgan is the Executive Director and Meetings Professional of the iMIS Users Group, and I’m super excited to have her on board.

We’ve had Ellen talk wondrous words about the benefits and the life-changing experiences she’s had at the iMIS Users Group community, and I’m really excited to hear from the top now. Michele, welcome to the show.

Michele Morgan (02:04): Thank you. I appreciate that, Riley. Thanks for the opportunity.

Riley Miller (02:09): And I appreciate you making the time too. I know that you are currently just in the middle of the storm getting ready for the fall Emergence conference. For those that are unfamiliar with Emergence and the iMIS Users Group, if you’d be comfortable just giving us a quick Coles Notes on what that’s all about.

Michele Morgan (02:31): So Emergence is a newly formed merged conference. We took the iUG annual conference that we always have every year, for as long as I’ve been here, and merged it together with the ASI iNNOVATIONS conference. And now we have an even larger conference, if you can believe that, because ours was pretty large in terms of sessions and networking opportunities. But now it’s even more so.

So we have merged the conference together, and we’re looking forward to the opportunity of working with them to have one main event where all of the users come together.

Riley Miller (03:22): I think that’s a really exciting opportunity too. My first iUG annual conference was last fall and I had an amazing time. I think the conversation was always feeling like you had to pick between the two, or which one you wanted to go to. So I’m really interested to see how that’s going to look this fall and excited to see it come together. I know you have been cooking up some pretty special things.

Michele Morgan (03:44): Yeah, and that’s where I’m looking forward to not having to have users choose what they go to, either they go to ours or they go to ASI’s. So having it together, it’s going to be an interesting dynamic to see. Is it better for everyone around to do it this way and continue down that path, and get the feedback later on and see what we can do to change it, or add more to it, whatever the case may be.

Riley Miller (04:17): Absolutely. And I’m sure we’ll talk about Emergence more, but maybe focusing back on yourself, if you could highlight just what brought you to your position as Executive Director of a major community group.

Michele Morgan (04:30): It’s a somewhat interesting story. I was with a trade association back in, I shouldn’t say dates because I’m just going to age myself, but back in the early 90s I became involved with iMIS because my former association, I worked for the National Kitchen and Bath Association.

We brought in a new association management system. At the time I knew nothing about iMIS, but that was one of the packages that we were presented out of three. So I was part of that initial team of deciding whether or not we wanted to go with iMIS or one of the other packages that was put in front of us. And we ended up choosing iMIS in the end. So that is where my career in and with iMIS started.

Then for years I worked at NKBA and held several different positions. And with my involvement with iMIS, I went to one of my first ever iMIS conferences and got involved, and I really enjoyed it. Learned a lot, met great people, and I decided I want to be involved. I want to volunteer for this organization. They seem like they could use some help.

So I volunteered for the organization, and lo and behold, a few years later I left my job of 11 years and just dove straight in and started being the association manager for what was then NiUG. We’ve had very variable rounds of company name, and there’s a whole story behind that. But I was able to become one of the first employees of NiUG International, and from there moved on as their Executive Director and hired our first employees.

So it’s kind of an interesting way to somehow come around to how I got involved with this organization. It started as just something I did within my position at my old job, and then it just kind of enveloped into what I am today. And this is going on to year 23 at this point of leading the organization. It’s been a great, great journey so far.

Riley Miller (07:14): That’s exciting too. As the community is growing, there’s a greater need for the supports and things that I’ve heard Ellen speak to as well, and what I’ve seen firsthand. The community portion of it is something where we’re always learning, we’re always sharing, we’re always growing, and it’s like you found an opportunity to become a conduit for that, channeling those conversations.

I’m just a really big fan of conferences as well. That’s my favorite thing. So maybe I am a little bit biased, but I think it’s an exciting thing to watch grow.

For those that are looking at just iUG in its history and beyond, what are some of the things that maybe get muddied or get wrong or get confused along the way of what the organization actually represents?

Michele Morgan (08:13): I would say the biggest misconception is that people think that we are ASI, which is the developer of the iMIS product. We are a completely separate organization. We do not have any of the ASI employees as part of our organization, with the exception of partnering or volunteering. So I think that’s the largest misconception.

And we are able to work very closely with them, but just getting across the fact that we are two completely separate organizations. Some people pronounce it one way, some people pronounce it the other, so just know that those two work together. Some people think that we are them and they are us. So we’re just trying to get the word out every day that we are separate from them, and that we are a c4 organization working as a nonprofit just like all of our members. Well, they’re not all c4s, but we’re all working together as far as association-wise.

Riley Miller (09:27): Right. Part of the community means walking the walk, talking the talk. So being a c4 then, or being independent from the product owner, what benefits or opportunities or unique situations do you get out of being able to be separate, being independent from ASI?

Michele Morgan (09:51): We can be a lot more transparent with the iMIS users, and they feel a lot more comfortable coming to us and maybe venting frustrations, or talking about the product in ways that they may not be able to talk to the developers in that manner. And I’m not saying that in any kind of derogatory sense. It’s just they feel more on the same level with us than they would if they were to talk to an ASI employee.

Riley Miller (10:23): I know we had Jeff Spring on too, and they’ve really been pushing the product standups and offering a conduit for that feedback, and an outlet for letting the greater iMIS network know when new features are being rolled out.

But it’s a different conversation, I think, that you would have in those rooms than you would at the iUG conference with your peers, talking about things that you wish they did better or what you actually thought about the new update. So I think it’s a great outlet.

Michele Morgan (11:01): Yeah, and quite honestly, to our credit and to our users’ credit, we have always asked them for their feedback. We’ve always gone back to ASI and presented them with that information. And I’d like to think that we played a very big part in the changes that have happened within ASI over the years.

So the fact that they have more conversations and sprint reviews and demos, and talking about the product and where it’s going, I think a lot more communication has happened since we have gone back and forth with them and said, these companies are upset because of the way that things are coming about. Let’s nip this in the bud. We all want iMIS users. What can we do to make them happier and to be more transparent about the product?

Riley Miller (12:00): So for the community showing up or helping steer the product for the better, do you have some examples of when the community came out and showed up for another member, in a moment that happened outside of the conference programming, just in terms of supporting and progressing the community itself?

Michele Morgan (12:21): Ellen is a good representative of what can happen, obviously. She came into the community brand new. She went to her first iMIS user conference not long after she was hired. She learned so much. She was able to develop her career very quickly being part of the organization, and has now since gone to a solution provider company, Bursting Silver.

So it can do wonders for your career, and to move an organization further along. I don’t know that there’s really any one story that I can give you. I can tell you that nothing makes me happier than to hear feedback from the users in the community. If we finish a webinar and they send us a thank you note and they’re super happy that they finally got that one answer they’ve been dying to get, or seeing how it’s changed them and the way that they do things in iMIS, and has built their confidence. So getting those one-off emails is always a wonderful thing.

Riley Miller (13:35): Ellen was talking about it as well. There are plenty of one-off experiences that she has with other community members, talking about their favorite moments. So it’s nice to have those takeaways. But none of this would have happened without the volunteers that help really run the engine.

I know that iUG runs lean and is very volunteer powered itself. So what has that taught you about getting a lot out of very few people that a membership team can borrow for their own operation?

Michele Morgan (14:11): Well, I have to say that, and I know everyone’s going to say this, their organization has amazing volunteers, but we truly do have amazing volunteers. They are very giving of their time. They know, especially our solution providers and our authorized iMIS consultants, they know that in the end, if a user loves the product, they’re going to stay. If they get the most out of the product and it furthers their mission more and more every day, then they’re going to be happier. So their volunteering for the organization only helps with that aspect of their business.

And let’s face it, if iMIS wasn’t as great as it is and as popular and used by so many, there would be no use for an iMIS Users Group. So I’m thrilled to death that we are the success that we have been.

Back when we started, back in, gosh, 96, before I was even involved with them, it was an organization that had maybe 50 to 75 members, company members. And now we have over 600 company members and upwards of five to seven thousand individuals that partake in what we offer from day to day. So it has really grown a lot, and I credit the volunteers that help us every day to have made that happen.

Riley Miller (15:46): I know that iUG offers the Community Impact Award as well. For those listening, would you be able to explain what that is and who would get that?

Michele Morgan (15:58): Absolutely. So the iUG Community Impact Award is for someone that has placed a lot of effort into the community and helping us build the community. So are they helping other users? Are they moving the organization forward? Are they teaching iMIS more to those involved in their organization?

In general, being a community, sharing information and knowledge and helping one another, is kind of what it’s centered around.

We used to have the John Howarth Memorial Award, and we struggled and wondered, do we change the name of that to be more inclusive? Because there is more than just one person that has made this organization what it is. And we wanted to be able to include a lot of those past leaders that built this organization from the ground up. So that’s why we ended up changing the name of the award to the iUG Community Impact Award.

And the first iUG Community Impact Award will honor somebody at the 2026 Emergence conference in less than two months. So we’re excited about that.

Riley Miller (17:30): That’s exciting. And good little segue here then. I know we kind of glazed on it at the beginning, but iNNOVATIONS and the iUG annual conference are merging, coming into one marquee event happening here at the beginning of November.

We talked about a little bit of the excitement for bringing it together and offering something that members don’t have to choose between. Maybe you could walk me and the listeners through how that conversation came to be, and why Emergence specifically.

Michele Morgan (18:07): I think just the fact that both of us were reaching out to all the users and basically saying, hey, you can go to our conference. And we’re saying, hey, you can go to our conference. Rather than competing for those educational dollars, we thought, why are we not trying to combine this into one? So that’s why we ended up doing that, for the most part.

It’s combining it into one to help the users to be able to say, okay, I’m going to attend this one conference. I don’t have to choose between both of them. And B, it’s able to cut expenses. They don’t have to go to two conferences, not that they had to go to two conferences to begin with, but they don’t have to go to two conferences. The solution providers don’t have to be out of their office for two weeks instead of one.

It just becomes more economical, and just one large conference bringing more people together just seemed like the common sense thing to do.

Riley Miller (19:15): Absolutely. So for those that are attending then, what’s the goal for members coming this year to walk away from Arlington with? When they finish their last day at Emergence and they go home, what’s the torch that you’re hoping they carry back to their organizations?

Michele Morgan (19:35): I’m hoping that they are leaving there full of information that they’ve received from other users and solution providers, and being able to bring it back to their organization and show fellow staff how to use the product better, how to be more streamlined in what they’re doing, more efficient in what they’re doing, and just overall make the organization run smoother so that they can accomplish all the things that they need to accomplish.

Because let’s face it, I think that associations in general never have enough staff. Our staff may only be two whole people. But thank God we do have those volunteers to lean on. But other organizations are always understaffed as well. So especially nowadays, things have just changed dramatically, and we hope that they’re able to take away ideas and innovation, and just discover more ways of doing one thing.

Riley Miller (20:42): Get inspired, leverage your network, reach out for help. Plenty of ways to skin a cat, as I say. And I’m sure if you’ve run into a problem, somebody else has run into the same one. Comparing notes is a big one.

Michele Morgan (20:52): Yes. And even if you do, the person that gets up in front of you and starts speaking may not be talking about anything you think applies. It could be a certification program that they may be utilizing. But in the end, that certification program is going to have things within it, and they’re setting things up to work with it, that are going to be widely used across the board.

So you could say, but that was certification. Well, you can use those same ideas, you just need to twist them a bit regarding membership or events.

And going back to that misconception of iMIS, I think the one thing I do want to also mention is that a lot of people think that we are just a technology company, and we’re not a technology organization. We are about educating your entire staff that uses the iMIS product.

So we don’t only have tech ideas or tech options at our conference as far as breakout sessions and general sessions. We have things that are for the events people, the membership people, customer service. However they’re touching that database, there’s always going to be something that they can learn at the conference each time.

And even with the free webinars that we provide to them every single month as a member, we don’t charge our members for all the webinars that we give, but we’re constantly trying to provide them and educate them with as much information as they could possibly take away. And it may just be a little snippet, but later on they’re going to realize that they can use that little snippet in various ways within the organization.

Riley Miller (22:45): It’s more tools for the kit. It’s funny, and I’m happy that you mentioned there are different streams just outside of technology. Me being an AiSP, I usually think in terms of the solution and the answer, the response, how the system does it. But there are plenty more pieces of that pie to consider in terms of processes, team management, resources for figuring out where you want to go.

And not to lean on other episodes too much, but I know Al once said that new technology doesn’t necessarily always help with your system. Sometimes it exposes problems that you never knew you had. And those problems are things that you work with your team and your community in order to solve. It’s not always the system or the solution that’s the part of the puzzle that will fix all that.

So I think that it’s very important to know that there are other streams to look at for info to bring back to your team, your staff. If you’re going as a proxy to bring back notes for the rest of your team, or you have the budget to even send somebody else out, divide and conquer. Those are always good opportunities to be able to build up at least a list of tools and techniques on ways to try and improve your own internal processes.

Riley Miller (24:01): So in terms of sending teams out and such, this is a unique opportunity in recording this. Before the conference we have some early early bird promo codes that we can put out for the registration. I feel like I have a nice little incentive now for our listeners that are listening along. If people wanted to jump on registering now, what would they look to do?

Michele Morgan (24:29): So they would need to just go to emergence.imis.com. That is the web address for the actual conference.

I think what might be a little bit confusing for people this year, we’ve always done our own registration, ASI has always done their own. So now we’ve merged it and we’ve tried to streamline things. Obviously first time around always has its little bumps and quick turns.

But we want people to know that you may be used to registering for the iMIS Users Group through our website. But when you go to emergence.imis.com, that is the ASI site. So they need to use their ASI login and password when they register. And then at checkout they can use that lovely promo code that we shared with you in order to save money.

Riley Miller (25:24): Awesome. And that’s going to be in the show notes. emergence26eeb, which I think stands for early early bird.

Michele Morgan (25:30): Early early bird. Not just early bird. Early early bird.

Riley Miller (25:37): A quick way to run through half an hour here, and thank you so much for your time. I have one last question to kind of roll over and maybe even summarize our thoughts here. If a member leader at any organization type takes one thing away from this conversation, in terms of community or the ideas that come along with that, what should that one idea be?

Michele Morgan (26:00): That there is a lot of power in getting together with like bodies. All these people that are using the product and they’re doing it in various ways, every organization is different. Every organization underutilizes their AMS or EMS.

So just keep in mind that you’re going to learn so much, but it could be something that you hear and you move on. But it’s going to be something that repopulates in your brain for use in a future challenge or task within the organization.

And it’s not just surrounding iMIS. It could be association management-wide conversations that happen at these events. In-person events are super important. I have always said, and my concern with everything that has gone on in the past with the pandemic and things like that, is that people aren’t wanting to be in person with one another as much. And my biggest fear is that you are going to lose the innovative thoughts generating within your organization, because you’re not hearing what is able to be done, what others are doing, and just feeding off of one another to make things better within an organization.

So that is the one takeaway that I will say that a community brings. It’s just helping you to be more innovative and try things you would have never tried before, because you can’t break it. You can only scar it a little, and then have one of your new network peers be able to help you figure out what you’re trying to accomplish.

Riley Miller (27:57): It’s really hard to move fast and innovate if you’re working in an echo chamber.

Michele Morgan (28:02): For sure.

Riley Miller (28:05): Well, Michele, thank you so much for your time. Are there any other closing thoughts that you’d like to leave the listeners with today?

Michele Morgan (28:11): No, just if you are not an iMIS Users Group member, please feel free to reach out to me. I think that Riley has my LinkedIn. You could always send me a LinkedIn message or send me a direct email to the organization, and we’ll be happy to help you and explain what we’re all about and show you all the other benefits.

It’s not just Emergence. We have, like I mentioned, free webinars for our members, which saves a ton of training dollars in the end. We have iMind, which is our supercharged bot for iMIS help, which BSI has helped us to develop. Higher Logic community, so that you can ask your iMIS questions or association questions and get feedback.

So we have a lot to offer organizations, and it may have a membership fee associated with it. But I promise you this, you will make that money back in a heartbeat, because what you’re going to learn is going to far outweigh the amount of money that you may have to pay in membership.

Riley Miller (29:20): Fantastic. Truer words. Well, Michele, I’ll let you get back to it. You’ve got a conference to plan and plenty of time.

Michele Morgan (29:26): Yes. Never a dull moment.

Riley Miller (29:30): Right on. Well, thank you so much. Have a good day.

Michele Morgan (29:32): Thank you, you too.

Riley Miller (29:33): And that is a wrap. Thank you so much, Michele Morgan, for jumping on this episode of The Modern Membership Org podcast.

Once again, my name’s Riley with Bursting Silver, and we’ve been releasing biweekly now. If you enjoy this format, please let us know. If there are any other topics you’d like us to cover, obviously reach out. We’re at burstingsilver.com, or myself, [email protected].

For everything we mentioned, including that promo code for the Emergence conference, that is going to be in the show notes. And if you wanted to check out the iMIS Users Group website, that’ll be down there too. Until next time, have a fantastic day.